Francis Collins: Changes at the NIH

• Gene Russo

Nature

493,

443-444

(2013)

doi:10.1038/nj7432-443a

Published online

16 January 2013

This article was originally published in the journal Nature

Subject terms:

• Careers
• Government
• Policy

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For years, the US National Institutes of Health has struggled with promoting non-academic career tracks for biomedical scientists, gauging the supply of PhD holders and demand for research jobs, enticing under-represented minorities into science and establishing funding avenues for early-career researchers. Hoping to bring some evidence-based clarity to these issues, NIH director Francis Collins asked two working groups of the NIH Advisory Committee to study the issues and make recommendations. They released their recommendations in two reports in June; Collins responded in December. The NIH has decided to take measures that include raising its postdoc stipend, increasing the number of grants that encourage early-career independence and offering 25 institutional grants, each worth about US$250,000, to support training programmes that prepare students for a broad range of research-related careers, including non-academic paths.

What did you learn from the advisory reports?

The working groups put in a lot of effort collecting data to figure out what career paths PhDs were ultimately heading down. Only about 23% of US-trained biomedical PhD holders were in academic tenure or tenure-track positions in 2008, they found. Many end up in research-related positions, in industry, government, teaching, science policy, science journalism and other science-related professions. Training programmes have tended to view those tracks as secondary and have even sent messages that they are second-rate. So we need to retool to expose trainees to multiple pathways, rather than simply producing clones of their principal investigators.

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