Emphasis on Early-Career Researchers Posted on January 20, 2009 NIH is making changes that will help support junior researchers, states Dr. William A. Vega.

NIMH, for example, and I think NIDA has the same thing, are emphasizing junior investigators right now. I mean, they are really stratifying the funding process so about a third of applications that are coming in will go through junior investigators to keep the pipelines alive. Otherwise the senior people would eat the whole pie.

So I think that that's a very good thing, and I do think there's going to be a big shift to make it perhaps more feasible for junior people to get funded in the future with the coming of the 12-page proposal. They're going to move away from the 25, single-spaced page proposal to the 12-page, single-spaced proposal. Well that cuts the job in half. Of course exactly what the strategies will be for successful funding under those circumstances, nobody knows yet. But within another year and a half those are going to be the new reality.

And it's being done specifically to speed up the whole process all the way around while writing the proposals and reviewing the proposals. And presumably to move ahead work that's more exciting. And we all would like that because we all feel like we have exciting ideas, but we all feel that the NIH, and I think that they would agree with us to a great extent, the NIH review process tends to reward very conservative work. Work that moves ahead, as we say, one variable at a time with no real risk, with no real dynamic ideas being introduced because they can't pass muster in the review process.

So to overcome that there may be an opportunity because young people do tend to have good ideas, exciting ideas, and newer ideas, and that's what we need to see introduced into science. And if this process rewards that, then I think they're going to have a better time of it.