This 45-second animation vividly illustrates the funding crisis that young scientists face as they work to launch their research careers: For the last three decades, large NIH grants have increasingly been awarded to older investigators.
“The average age of first-time, R01-funded investigators who have PhDs remains 42, even after seven years of policies at NIH to increase the numbers of new and early-stage investigators,” said Robin Barr, director of the NIH’s Division of Extramural Activities, in a recent editorial on the NIH website.
But there is hope on the horizon, as the NIH rolls out a series of funding mechanisms that aim to give new investigators a leg up. I recently wrote about one such program, the KL2 mentored career development award, and an inspirational Stanford physician-researcher, Rita Hamad, MD, MPH, who is taking full advantage of it.
Hamad is interested in studying the cause-and-effect relationships between poverty and health. The KL2 program helps Hamad’s research through salary support, mentoring, pilot grants and tuition subsidies. In just two years, she has produced actionable data that can be used by policymakers and by health-care providers to improve the overall health of populations, including a study exploring the impact of the earned-income tax credit on child health in the United States. It will be published this fall in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Previously:NIH funding mechanism "totally broken," says Stanford researcher, NIH director on scaring young scientists with budget cuts: "If they go away, they won't come back" and Sequestration hits the NIH – fewer new grants, smaller budgets
Animation by the NIH
