Pre-Bac to Senior Scientists

At the National Institutes of Health Office of Extramural Research's Extramural Nexus blog, Director Sally Rockey discusses the agency's "wide variety of funding mechanisms which span the full gamut of the biomedical research career." From the pre-bac T34 Institutional Training Grant mechanism to the K05 Senior Scientist Awards, NIH's career development awards support investigators at nearly every career stage. Pointing to data on trends in career development grants issued between 1998 and 2010, Rockey says that "the number of career development awards and the amount of funding increased steadily until 2008." As this graph shows, that number has since been on the decline. Rockey adds that NIH's newly formed Biomedical Workforce Task Force faces the "tough task ahead" of determining "whether these [funding] levels are appropriate as we head into the future."