NIH want to train Early Career Reviewers
July 22, 2011
This is fantastic.
…CSR is piloting a new program that we call the early career reviewer, where we will take complete novice reviewers, people who have not reviewed for NIH before, very early in their career, probably new investigators.
More thoughts on the matter from Your Humble Narrator and Prof-Like Substance.
The New York Times had a piece up Sunday that was entitled “An Alarming New Stimulant, Legal in Many States“. I was alerted to this by David Kroll who reposted some prior comments at his Take as Directed blog. I’ve been getting some traffic from a BoingBoing linker from Maggie Koerth-Baker to an older post from me so I thought I’d better address a couple of points that jump out at me.
First and foremost, the reader should be extremely cautious whenever there is conflation of two different drugs under one purported street name. Even if they are structurally quite similar and some human reports have overlapping properties. In the case of “bath salts”, there is quite a bit of confusion over whether a news account is referring to 4-methylmethcathinone (4-MMC), methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), sees no difference between them* or doesn’t know if there is any difference.
Following some chatter at the Rock Talk blog I ran across some very interesting news from the NHLBI:
The NHLBI will continue a commitment to help ESIs by a policy of maintaining separate paylines for new competing (Type 1) R01 and First Renewal (Type 2) applications in accordance with NIH guidelines. Regardless of amendment status, the paylines for new competing (Type 1) and First Renewal (Type 2) ESI R01 applications will be 5 percentile points above the regular R01 paylines for unamended (A0) applications in FY 2011. In addition and also regardless of amendment status, new competing (Type 1) ESI R01 applications that are >5 but <=10 percentile points above the regular R01 paylines for unamended (A0) applications in FY 2011 may undergo an expedited review to resolve comments in the summary statement. The funding policies will apply to all new competing (Type 1) and First Renewal (Type 2) ESI R01 applications under special funding consideration regardless of the amendment status of the application. All awards to ESI applicants under this policy will be funded for all years recommended by the NHLBAC. Please note that the NHLBI considers both NI and ESI status to have been determined at the time of the initial A0 grant application submission.
This is going to really, really anger the late Assistant Prof folks out there who are looking down the barrel of tenure decisions. Decisions in which the ability to renew their first (very hard won) award looms large.
As well it should anger them.
You Can’t Take It With You….But Most of the Time You Can
July 11, 2011
GertyZ has a new post up at Balanced Instability which discusses the joys of Indirect Costs in the context of major grant awards, for our purposes we’ll focus on the NIH grant.
This is not a mere inconvenient detail of little direct importance to the PI, nor is it merely a topic for “Do it to Julia!” type solutions to the
A Twitt-scussion blew up [PP, avert your eyes, everyone else: @GertyZ, @profgears, @DoctorZen, @namnezia, @biochemmebelle, @multi_cellular, @salsb] which focused on the disposition of equipment when a PI left one University to take up a job at another. As we’ve discussed on several occasions, the NIH grant is awarded to the University or other Institution, not the PI who is named in (and in most cases wrote) the application. That means the starting position is quite simple:
The. University. Owns. EVERYTHING. Up to them to set policy RT @saban_lab but if you move will they hold on to that “stuff”?
