NIH Names 10 Recipients of Director's Early Independence Awards

The National Institutes of Health has named 10 recipients of the Director's Early Independence Awards through a program that "effectively allows awardees to leapfrog over the traditional post-doctoral training period," the agency says in a statement. NIH plans to collectively grant the 10 awardees $19.3 million over five years, "to accelerate the entry of outstanding junior investigators into independent researcher positions." Among the recipients are Harvard University's John Calarco, for his work "investigating the role of alternative splicing regulatory networks in nervous system development and function," and Jeffrey Kidd at the Stanford University School of Medicine, whose research focus is on "characterizing the global architecture of genomic diversity." The complete list of awardees can be found here.