Establish new career paths
In the years since the expansion of federal support for fundamental research after World War II, the remarkable success of that commitment has facilitated a dramatic evolution in the scope and practices of research and training. That evolution warrants an NIH-academia shared effort to create and fund two new career paths for PhDs in biomedical research. The need for one of these new career paths arises from a transition in recent decades of the role of the principal investigator from executing experiments proposed in a single R01 grant and guiding one or perhaps a pair of students, to managing a team of trainees, as well as multiple collaborations with other investigators, each with distinct backgrounds and expertise. These management responsibilities are time-consuming, but speed the pace of discovery. The rationale for the second new career path reflects the fact that today’s research typically involves highly sophisticated technology that cannot be accommodated in individual labs, and instead must be provided in shared technology facilities that efficiently serve large programs or whole institutions. The complex instrumentation must be overseen by dedicated scientist-technologists who develop the technology and often create new capabilities for it, while collaborating with and mentoring colleagues and trainees who seek to exploit the technology to advance their research. Given these realities, we recommend that NIH create funding mechanisms to partially offset salary for two new academic career tracks, Scientific Director and [Research Technology] Director (where the specific technology would be named, e.g., Cryo-Electron Microscopy Director, Mass Spectrometry Director, etc.).
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