To attract, empower, and sustain a world class workforce
Recommendation 4 Ensure a high-quality training and mentoring experience for all graduate students Shift funding for graduate students progressively to training grants, which set high standards for mentoring and performance. Seek to make training grant support broadly available to students at institutions receiving NIH research funds.
Recommendation 5 Establish new career paths
Establish new career paths for PhD- or MD-trained scientists to strengthen expertise and mentoring in individual laboratories, research programs, and institutional facilities. As research has become increasingly collaborative and advanced technologies ever more essential, a critical need for new career experts has emerged.
Recommendation 6 Optimize funding opportunities for all career phases
Tune funding opportunity and award periods to specific career stages: scientists at the outset of their careers should be funded at elevated rates to permit efficient launch of their research programs; mid-career and established scientists who have been exception - ally successful should have options to apply for longer term support. These changes will also markedly reduce administrative demands on researchers, reviewers, universities, and the NIH. Recommendation 7 Establish a career incubator in the Intramural Research Program Identify, recruit, equip, and support a cohort of extraordinary PhDs with little or no postdoc experience to launch and manage bold and exciting independent projects for up to seven years in non-tenure track positions, after which they depart for extramural institutions. The NIH IRP, the largest biomedical research facility in the world, is an outstanding environment in which to foster early independence and jumpstart exciting contributions to science.
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