End of Year Funds in 2020
October 1, 2020
As you know, the end of the Federal fiscal year can be a fun time for hopeful NIH grant applicants. This is when your favorite ICs are counting up the beans and making sure they use all of their appropriated money.
This means that they often pick up some grants with scores that otherwise looked like they were not going to fund.
This is great if you are one of the lucky ones. I have had 9/30 grant starts in the past. It feels awesome.
This year however….this year.
I am thinking about the Hoppe finding and the original Ginther report. I am thinking as always about the NIH’s complete and utter failure to address this issue. And I am hopeful. Always. That IC Directors will take it upon themselves to follow the advice I had right from the start.
Just FIX this. It won’t take much. Just a few extra grant pickups that happen to have Black PIs. End of year is a great time to slip one or three or five into the portfolio. Nobody can complain about these decisions.
So… pull up RePORTER. Click the start date of 9/15/2020, enter the two letter code for your favorite ICs and start searching.
See any of your Black colleagues getting grants?
DrugMonkey 
October 2, 2020 at 3:53 pm
As a POC in this game of sticks, the Ginther reports notion that equality in science should be a reflection of population distributions in a nation of immigrants is appalling. Systemic bias in science serves the state’s narrative and is an OECD-wide blunder. Your suggestion of moving a touch in the right direction would not do anywhere near enough.
This is a problem of values. Once upon a time, this was a business of collegial scholars. I didn’t always think this, but after 17 years in the lab, I have now had sufficient opportunity to meet plenty of them still playing in the lab, asking questions and inspiring the students.
Today, science is well on its way towards becoming baseless twitter nonsense that’s equally destroying the rest of society. A part of our role as academics is also to use our education to rise above and light the torch of equality and freedom thru our actions, not to make tiny steps that are otherwise used to justify the status quo.
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October 6, 2020 at 2:35 am
Lol. Gotta hand it to you. You’re tenacious if nothing else. Been banging on about this lo many a year now.
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