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Women Among the Awardees

Women were well represented among this year's recipients of the National Institutes of Health's Director's Awards, writes ScienceInsider.

The NIH awarded these 89 awards, which are part of NIH's High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, last week with funding totaling $282 million, as GenomeWeb has reported. The program aims to support creative researchers who propose risky projects, it adds.

As ScienceInsider reports, half of this year's 10 Pioneer Awards went to women and five of the 11 Early Independence Awards, which allow junior scientists to skip postdoctoral training and set their own research programs up, went to women. It notes that, in past years, men were more likely to receive those awards. For the New Innovator and Transformative Research awards, ScienceInsider says that the gender breakdown of the winners largely reflected that of the applicant pool, with 33 percent of 58 New Innovator Awards and 22 percent of 18 Transformative Research awards going to women

NIH's Renate Myles tells ScienceInsider that nothing changed with the review process, though she adds that NIH is looking into ways to ensure the application process is fair.