Fellowship awards, timing, academic credit and moving on

We live in interesting times, those of us in NIH-funded science careers, do we not? I’m sure there has always been change that looked dramatic but still. There is a lot on our plates.

• Historic low paylines, verging down below 10%ile in a sustained way
• Endless churning of revised grant applications
• A fight between local Universities, desperate to support themselves on Federal funds, and the NIH, hapless to respond to the unilateral abandonment of the old “shared cost” collaborative arrangement.
• The closing of three multi-decade Institutes/Centers of the NIH to make way for two new ones
• A halving of the length of the research grant application
• A sudden realization on the part of the NIH that postdoctoral wheelspinning prior to independent positions simply must be shortened

There are other factors, many of them with far reaching implications.
The one on my list for today is the individual postdoctoral fellowship, the NIH’s NRSA / F32 award.

How many NIH grants are too many?

I’ve been reading a little chatter from a few newish looking PI types today on the perennial topic of lab size. It provides a nice counter to a recent post at the Sb DM and a note today from Mike the Mad Biologist.

The most defined statement was to the effect that “we can all agree” that 4 R01 awards (concurrently) is excessive. The corollary is that science would be so much more efficient and productive if individual PIs were capped somewhere south of 4 R01s.

I’ll let the comments run for a bit but I have some woodshed time for the n00b PIs saved up for later.