Nakamura reports on the ECR program
June 17, 2016
If I stroke out today it is all the fault of MorganPhD.
Jeffery Mervis continues with coverage of the NIH review situation as it pertains to the disparity for African-American PIs identified in 2011 (that’s five years and fifteen funding rounds ago, folks) by the Ginther report.
The main focus for this week is on the Early Career Reviewer program. As you will recall, this blog has advocated continually and consistently for the participation of more junior PIs on grant review panels.
The ECR program was created explicitly to deal with underrepresented groups. However, what happened is that there was immediate opposition which insisted that the ECR program had to be open to all junior faculty/applicants, regardless of representation in the NIH game.
One-quarter of researchers in ECR’s first cohort were from minority groups, he notes. “But as we’ve gone along, there are fewer underrepresented minorities coming into the pool.”
…
Minorities comprise only 13% of the roughly 5100 researchers accepted into the program (6% African-American and 7% Hispanic), a percentage that roughly matches their current representation on study sections.
Ok, but how have the ECR participants fared?
[Nakamura] said ECR alumni have been more than twice as successful as the typical new investigator in winning an R01 grant.
NIIIIIICE. Except they didn’t flog the data as hard as one might hope. This is against the entire NI (or ESI?) population.
The pool of successful ECR alumni includes those who revised their application, sometimes more than once, after getting feedback on a declined proposal. That extra step greatly improves the odds of winning a grant. In contrast, the researchers in the comparison group hadn’t gone through the resubmission process.
Not sure if this really means “hadn’t” or “hadn’t necessarily“. The latter makes more sense if they are just comparing to aggregate stats. CSR data miners would have had to work harder to get this isolated to those who hadn’t revised yet, and I suspect if they had gone to that effort, they could have presented the ESIs who had at least one revision under their belt. But what about the underrepresented group of PIs that are the focus of all this effort?
It’s also hard to interpret the fact that 18% of the successful ECRs were underrepresented minorities because NIH did not report the fraction of minorities among ECR alumni applicants. So it is not clear whether African-Americans participating in the program did any better than the cohort as a whole—suggesting that the program might begin to close the racial gap—or better than a comparable group of minority scientists who were not ECR alumni.
SERIOUSLY Richard Nakamura? You just didn’t happen to request your data miners do the most important analysis? How is this even possible?
How on earth can you not be keeping track of applicants to ECR, direct requests from SROs, response rate and subsequent grant and reviewing behavior? It is almost as if you want to look like you are doing something but have no interest in it being informative or in generating actionable intelligence.
Moving along, we get a further insight into Richard Nakamura and his position in this situation.
Nakamura worries that asking minority scientists to play a bigger role in NIH’s grantsmaking process could distract them from building up their lab, finding stable funding, and earning tenure. Serving on a study section, he says, means that “those individuals will have less time to write applications. So we need to strike the right balance.”
Paternalistic nonsense. The same thing that Scarpa tried to use to justify his purge of Assistant Professors from study sections. My answer is the same. Let them decide. For themselves. Assistant Professors and underrepresented PIs can decide for themselves if they are ready and able to take up a review opportunity when asked. Don’t decide, paternalistically, that you know best and will refrain from asking for their own good, Director Nakamura!
Fascinatingly, Mervis secured an opinion that echoes this. So Nakamura will surely be reading it:
Riggs, the only African-American in his department, thinks the program is too brief to help minority scientists truly become part of the mainstream, and may even exacerbate their sense of being marginalized.
“After I sat on the panel, I realized there was a real network that exists, and I wasn’t part of that network,” he says. “My comments as a reviewer weren’t taken as seriously. And the people who serve on these panels get really nervous about having people … that they don’t know, or who they think are not qualified, or who are not part of the establishment.”
If NIH “wants this to be real,” Riggs suggests having early-career researchers “serve as an ECR and then call them back in 2 years and have them serve a full cycle. I would have loved to do that.”
The person in the best position to decide what is good or bad for his or her career is the investigator themself.
This comment also speaks to my objection to the ECR as a baby-intro version of peer review. It isn’t necessary. I first participated on study section in my Asst Prof years as a regular ad hoc with a load of about six grants, iirc. Might have been 2 less than the experienced folks had but it was not a baby-trainee experience in the least. I was treated as a new reviewer, but that was about the extent of it. I thought I was taken seriously and did not feel patronized.
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Related Reading:
Toni Scarpa to leave CSR
More on one Scientific Society’s Response to the Scarpa Solicitation
Your Grant In Review: Junior Reviewers Are Too Focused on Details
DrugMonkey 