NIGMS Posts FY2011 Funding Outcome
February 15, 2012
Despite a recent bobble of a perfectly reasonable question from Comrade PhysioProf by new NIGMS Director Judith Greenberg, NIGMS continues to be our favorite IC on the grant geekery front because they post their funding outcome data.
The latest info is posted here and I’ve taken the liberty of grabbing the first figure. It depicts the competing R01/equivalent applications by priority score that emerged from the initial review and differentiates the ones that they funded versus the ones that they did not. I like these depictions because you can see the rarity of “skips” (those apps which are not funded despite being scored within the range of nearly certain funding and the way “exceptions” (aka “pickups”) still have some relationship to score. Furthermore, you can maybe look across time and see whether the sharpness of the dropoff in chances of getting picked up as you step up away from the apparent payline (the point under which virtually everything gets funded) has changed. This latter might indicate the degree to which Program is meddling with the initial priority rankings.
DrugMonkey 
February 15, 2012 at 12:08 pm
Dude, why the fucken fucke didn’t you post the fucken 2010FY graph together with this one?
Looks like 2010FY payline (defined as the last percentile before the one that has a significant dropoff from 100% funded) was 16%ile, while 2011FY payline was 15%ile. The dropoff after 21%ile looks substantially steeper for 2011 as for 2010, thus suggesting that they adjusted the curve to try to not have the payline get even worse.
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February 15, 2012 at 4:54 pm
How about Figure 5 in that blog post? I’m impressed by the growth of the difference between total costs and direct costs over the last 15 years. Schools are getting far too much in indirect costs relative to what the investigator is getting to actually do the science. When you calculate in the amount of salary coverage required by the schools from your direct costs, there is very little left over to do the actual science. When is NIH going to address the rate of growth in indirects relative to the stagnation/inflationary decrease in direct costs to the investigators who actually do the work?
This also harkens back to the comment on increased grad student/post-doc salaries without an increase in direct costs made by CPP.
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February 15, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Never, because the setting of negotiation of indirect cost rates and the laws and regulations that require NIH to pay those costs are completely out of NIH’s hands.
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February 15, 2012 at 5:22 pm
This latter might indicate the degree to which Program is meddling with the initial priority rankings.
Program owns the entire process from start to finish. The term “meddling” is inappropriate in this context.
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February 15, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Really whimple? What is the point of peer review then?
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February 16, 2012 at 4:44 am
Peer review is advisory to Program. Program can completely disregard peer review if that’s what they want to do.
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February 16, 2012 at 5:13 am
That is outrageous.
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February 16, 2012 at 8:59 am
Physician Scientist: I believe you are misinterpreting Figure 5. The top curve is the integrated total cost of all R01 equivalent grants versus time read with the left-hand y-axis scale. The bottom curve is the median cost per R01 grant versus time with the right-hand inset scale. I do not believe that the difference between these two curves is meaningful and does not represent the indirect costs provided. This is a somewhat confusing way to present these data. I do not know how much indirect costs relative to direct costs have gone up over this period of time but it might be worth asking the question.
Chebag and whimple: While peer review is advisory to program, program staff have to provide justification for their funding decisions and their are several levels of oversight. A peer review percentile score is an measurement of scientific merit (albeit with some uncertainty) and program staff treat such scores carefully. However, other factors (programmatic balance, overlap with other funded projects, other funds available to the laboratory, etc.) are taken into account in making funding decisions.
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February 16, 2012 at 9:16 am
How come the NIGMS is funding grants waaaay up at 33 %ile? What “priority” could possibly justify that?
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February 16, 2012 at 9:53 am
Chebag: Although I do not know, this is very likely an early stage investigator (ESI). NIH has a policy of trying to set the success rate for ESIs at the same position for established investigators submitting new (as opposed to competing renewal) applications. Many other ICs likely fund ESIs at similar percentiles, but they do not post their data.
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May 4, 2012 at 8:04 am
[…] yep. looks very familiar. […]
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November 14, 2012 at 10:19 am
[…] it was NIAMS which joined NIGMS in publishing funding outcome data that is of high interest to applicants. I'm referring to the number of grants funded/not funded by […]
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