Mike Lauer, prior head of the Office of Extramural Research at the NIH, has been quoted in a recent Nature news bit by Max Kozlov on the Fiscal Year 2025 grant funding picture. Kozlov writes, in part, about the way that Multi-Year Funding has decreased the number of new grant awards, thereby letting success rates […]| DrugMonkey
I had a thought about graduate school fellowships and added it to the prior past about the NSF GRFP limitations to first year graduate students. [ETA 09/29/2025: I forgot to mention something important about NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. These are not merely beneficent government handouts for some lucky nerds. These are requests, made by the […]| DrugMonkey
I was recently pondering the relative funding rates for amended (aka revised) NIH grant proposals, something I haven’t thought about much in years. It used to be quite a theme around here. I …| DrugMonkey
Chatter on the socials today indicates that the NIH’s Director of the Center for Scientific Review is stepping down. [UPDATE 08/08/2025: NIH Director statement on Byrnes’ retirement.] N…| DrugMonkey
Following up on yesterday’s whinesplaining about the relative difficulty of getting a NIH grant across pertinent career eras, I had some more thoughts on generational expectations and gasligh…| DrugMonkey
There’s a parable about a coyote and a rabbit that ends with the coyote being criticized by a bystander after observing his fruitless chase. The coyote observed, “I was only running for…| DrugMonkey
Among the 187 US institutions described as a R1 for 2025, Howard University has been included for the first time. This is the first Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to achieve this high level of research activity and this is a very welcome bit of news. For those not familiar, the Carnegie rankings are […]| Drugmonkey
Try to account for this when reading up on the constant chaos imposed by the new Administration on the NIH. What I mean by this is not that nobody knows how anything works. It is more that the vast majority of us, from Scientific Review and Program Officers at the NIH, to intramural NIH researchers, […]| Drugmonkey
The concept of “working below credential” is one I have recently picked up from physicians. The medical industry has a business-like focus and it is, I surmise, quite reasonable to talk about how much a physician gets paid per hour of work, how much other employees get paid per hour of work and how to […]| Drugmonkey
[Update: The Chronicle is reporting as of 2/10/2025 that F31-diversity applications have been re-instated to the study sections for review. If true, this is excellent news.] One of the primary NIH training fellowships is the Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award for graduate students, aka, the F31. It is requested with individual […]| Drugmonkey
NIH has issued NOT-OD-25-132 Supporting Fairness and Originality in NIH Research Applications which informs us that NIH will only accept six new, renewal, resubmission, or revision applications fro…| DrugMonkey
I ran across a clip of the current Director of the NIH and the prior Acting Director (and current Principal Deputy Director of the NIH) expressing great concern about scientists in training. As per…| DrugMonkey
