Making sense of the T32 effect on the NIH funding disparity

A new blog post from Mike Lauer, Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the NIH, presents new data on grant award (K and R01equivalent) to applicants assuming they had a prior appointment on a NIH funded T32 training grant. This particular post included some demographic analysis which addressed URM vresus majoritarian status. Leaving aside for a moment the obvious concerns about who gets selected for T32 appointments and where and with whom they are correspondingly training, I was curious about the relative advantage.

Now, the first thing you will recognize is that the critical data are collapsed across all URM groups, although this post doesn’t seem to specify if Asian is included in non-URM, the total N in Table 1 and Table 3 suggest this is the case. This is a little disappointing of course, since the original Ginther report found such striking differences in award rates across URM groups. There was an Asian PI disparity and a Hispanic PI lackthereof, so would it not be super important to keep these groups separate for this post-T32 analysis? Of course it would.

But what got me scratching my head was the presentation of the percentages in Table 3. The show, for example, that 12.9% of non-URM T32 trainees eventually became PI on a funded R01 whereas only 9.8% of URM trainees became PI on a funded R01. That’s all well and good but it obscures the success rate because it doesn’t account for the differential submission rate (24.5% of nonURM T32 trainees eventually submitted an R01, 21.8% of URM trainees).

Doing a little math here, I make it out to be a 52.9% award rate for non-URM applicants and a 45.1% rate for URM applicants. This is a 7.8 percentage point differential which means the URM applicants have a success rate that is 85.3% of the non-URM applicant success rate.

Now we can put this in familiar terms. The Hoppe report found that Black applicants had a success rate that was 60.5% of that enjoyed by white applicants (it was 60.4 in Ginther et al, 2011). So if we take this 24.8 percentage point differential and divide it by the 39.5 percentage point deficit for Black applicants in the Hoppe sample…we end up with about 63% of the Black/white gap reported in Hoppe. The combination of T32 training history, combining of all URM together and adding Asian PIs to the non-URM group closes 63% of the gap.

See my problem here? We want all this broken down so we can answer the most simple question, does T32 training close the gap between Black and white PIs and if so to what extent.

THEN we can go on to ask about other URM populations and the effect of adding the Asian* T32 participants to the non-URM pile.

*reminder that Ginther found that applications with Asian PIs with domestic doctorates had success rates similar to those with white PIs. There is a major complication here with T32 eligibility for Asian-Americans versus Asians who were not T32 eligible as postdocs.

NOSI for URM Investigators: Choose Wisely

I was recently describing Notice NOT-NS-21-049 Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): NIH Research Project Grant (R01) Applications from Individuals from Diverse Backgrounds, Including Under-Represented Minorities in the context of the prior NIH Director’s comments that ESI scores got worse after the news got around about relaxed paylines.

One thing that I had not originally appreciated was the fact that you are only allowed to put one NOSI in Box 4b.

Which means that you have to choose. If you qualify as an individual from diverse backgrounds you could use this, sure. But that means you cannot use a NOSI that is specific to the topic you are proposing.

This is the usual NIH blunder of stepping on their own junk. How many ways can I count?

Look, the benefit of NOSI (and the predecessor, the Program Announcement) is uncertain. It seemingly only comes into play when some element of Program wishes to fund an award out of the order of review. Wait, you say, can’t they just do that anyway for whatever priority appears in the NOSI? Yes, yes they can….when it comes to the topic of the grant. So why do NOSI exist at all?

Well…one presumes it is because elements of Program do not always agree on what should be funded out of order of review. And one presumes there is some sort of conflict resolution process. During which the argument that one grant is related to the Programmatic Interest formally expressed in the NOSI has some weight or currency. Prioritizing that grant’s selection for funding over the identically-percentiled grant that does not mention a NOSI.

One still might wonder about a topic that fits the NOSI but doesn’t mention the NOSI directly. Well, the threat language at the bottom of some of those NOSI, such as oh I don’t know this one, is pretty clear to me.

• For funding consideration, applicants must include “NOT-DA-21-006” (without quotation marks) in the Agency Routing Identifier field (box 4B) of the SF424 R&R form. Applications without this information in box 4B will not be considered for this initiative.

Applications nonresponsive to terms of this NOSI will not be considered for the NOSI initiative.

So what is a PI to do? Presumably the NOSI has some non-negligible value and everyone is motivated to use those if possible. Maybe it will be the difference between a grey zone pickup and not, right? If your ideas for this particular grant proposal fit with something that your favorite IC has gone to the trouble if mentioning in a NOSI…well….dang it….you want to get noticed for that!

So what can you do if you are a person underrepresented who qualifies for the NOSI NOT-NS-21-049 ? The value of this one is uncertain. The value of any other NOSI for your particular application is likewise uncertain. We know perfectly well the NIH as a whole is running scared of right wing political forces when it comes to picking up grants. We know that this NOSI may be related to the well meaning ICs’ staff having difficulty getting PI demographic information and could simply be a data collection strategy for them.

Cynical you say? Well I had a few exchanges with a fairly high up Program person who suggested to me that perhaps the strategy was to sneak the “extra” NOSI into the Abstract of the proposal. This would somehow get it in front of Program eyes. But….but….there’s the “will not be considered” boilerplate. Right? What does this mean? It is absolutely maddening for PIs who might like to take advantage of this new NOSI which one might think would be used to fix the Ginther Gap. It is generally enraging for anyone who wants to see the Ginther Gap addressed.

It makes me positively incandescent to contemplate the possibility that the mere announcing of this NOSI will lead to study sections giving even worse scores to those applications, without any real assistance coming from Program.

A couple of more thoughts. This doesn’t apply to anything other than an R01 application, which is nuts. Why not apply it to all investigator initiated mechanisms? Trust me, underrepresented folks would like a leg up on R21 and R03 apps as well. These very likely help with later R01 getting, on a NIH wide statistical basis. You know, the basis of the Ginther Gap. So why not include other mechs?

And did you notice that no other ICs have joined? NINDS issued the NOT on May 3 and they were rapidly joined by NIDA (May 6) and NIAAA (May 11). All in good time for the June 5 and July 5 submission rounds. Since then….crickets. No other ICs have joined in. Weird, right?

I was on a Zoom thing awhile back where a highly authoritative Program person claimed that the Office of the Director (read: Francis Collins) had put a hold on any more ICs joining the NINDS NOSI.

Why? Allegedly because there was a plan to make this more general, more NIH wide all at one fell swoop.

Why? Who the heck knows. To cover up the reluctance of some of the ICs that would not be joining the NOSI if left up to their own devices? If so, this is HORRENDOUS, especially give the above mentioned considerations for choosing only one NOSI for Box 4b. Right? If they do extend this across all NIH, how would any PI know that their particular IC has no intention whatsoever of using this NOSI to fund some grants? So maybe they choose to use it, for no help, while bypassing another NOSI that might have been of use to them.

Good Mentoring

One of the recurring discussions / rants in academic circles is the crediting of good mentoring to the Professor. I’m not going to tag the stimulus of the day because it generalizes and because I have no idea what motivates any particular person on any particular day.

There does seem to be a common theme. A Professor, usually female and usually more-junior, is upset that her considerable efforts to mentor students or postdocs does not seem to get as much credit as they should. This is typically contextualized by oblique or specific reference that some other professors do not put in the effort to “mentor” their trainees as well and this is not penalized. Furthermore, there is usually some recognition that a Professor’s time is limited and that the shoddiness of the mentoring of those other peers lets them work on what “really counts”, i.e., papers and grants, to an advantage over the self-identified good mentor.

Still with me?

There is a further contribution of an accusation, implicit or explicit, that those other peer Professors are not just advantaged by not spending time on “mentoring” but also advantaged by doing anti-mentoring bad things to their trainees to drive them to high scientific/academic output which further advantages the bad mentor colleagues against our intrepid hero Good Mentor.

Over on Twitter I’ve been pursuing one of my usual conundrums as I try to understand the nature of any possible fixes we might put in place with regard to “good” and “bad” academic mentoring, i.e., the role of career outcome in influencing how the mentee and evaluating bodies might view the quality of mentoring practices. My point is that I’ve seen a lot of situations where the same PI is viewed as providing both a terrible and a good-to-excellent mentoring environment by different trainees. And the views often align with whether the trainee is satisfied or dissatisfied with their career outcomes, and align less well with any particular behaviors of the PI.

Here, I want to take up the nature of tradeoffs any given Professor might have, in the context of trying to mentor more than one academic trainee, yes concurrently, but also in series.

My assertion is that “good mentoring” takes time, it takes the expenditure of grant and other funds and it takes the expenditure of social capital, in the sense of opportunities. In the case of most of the Professoriate, these are all limited resources.

Let us suppose we have two graduate students nearing completion, in candidacy and up against a program requirement for, e.g., three published papers. Getting to the three published papers, assuming all else equal between the two trainees, can be greatly affected by PI throw down. Provision of assistance with drafting the manuscript, versus terse, delayed “markup” activities? Insisting the paper needs to get into a certain high JIF journal, versus a strategy of hitting solid society journals. Putting research dollars into the resources, capital or personnel, that are going to speed progress to the end, versus expecting the trainee to just put in more hours themselves.

A PI should be “fair”, right? Treat everyone exactly the same, right? Well…it is never that simple. Research programs have a tendency not to go to plan. Projects can appear to level themselves up or down after each experiment. Peer review demands vary *tremendously* and not only by journal JIF.

Let us suppose we have two postdocs nearing a push for an Assistant Professor job. This is where the opportunities can come into play. Suggesting a fill-in for a conference presentation. Proposing conference symposia and deciding which trainee’s story to include. Choosing which project to talk about when the PI is herself invited. Pushing collaborations. Manuscript review participation with a note to the Associate Editor. Sure, it could be “fair”. But this is a game of competitive excellence and tiny incremental improvements to the odds of landing a faculty position. Is it “good mentoring” if taking a Harrison Bergeron approach means you never seem to land any postdocs from the laboratory in the plummiest of positions? When a focal throwdown on one would mean they have a good chance but divide-and-conquer fails to advance anyone?

More importantly, the PIs themselves have demands on their own careers. “Aha”, you cry, “this selfishness is what I’m ON about.”. Well yes…..but how good is the mentoring if the PI doesn’t get tenure while the grad student is in year 3? Personal experience on that one, folks. “not good” is the answer. Perhaps more subtly, how is the mentoring going to be for the next grad student who enters the laboratory when the PI has generated “fair” publishing prior trainees but not the glamourous publications needed to land that next grant? How much better is it for a postdoc entering the job market when the PI has already placed several Assistant Professors before them?

Or, less catastrophically, what if the PI has expended all of the grant money on the prior student’s projects which the student constructed and just happens to be highly expensive (“my mentor supports my research (1-5”))? Is that good mentoring? Well yeah, for the lucky trainee but it isn’t fair in a serial sense, is it?

Another common theme in the “good mentor” debate is extending “freedom” to the trainee. Freedom to work on “their ideas”. This is a tough one. A PI’s best advice on how to successfully advance the science career is going to be colored in may cases by practicality of making reasonable and predictable forward progress. I recently remarked that the primary goal of a thesis-proposal committee is to say “gee that’s nice, now pick one quarter of what you’ve proposed and do that for your dissertation/defense“. Free range scientists often have much, much larger ideas than can fit into a single unit of productivity. This is going to almost inevitably mean the PI is reining in the “freedom” of the trainee. Also see: finite resources of the laboratory. Another common PI mentoring pinch point on “freedom” has to do with getting manuscripts actually published. The PI has tremendous experience in what it takes to get a paper into a particular journals. They may feel it necessary to push the trainee to do / not do specific experiments that will assist with this. They may feel it necessary to edit the hell out of the trainees’ soaring rhetoric which goes on for three times the length of the usual Intro or Discussion material. …..this does come at a cost to creativity and novelty.

If the “freedom” pays off, without undue cost to the trainee or PI or other lab members…fantastic! “Good mentoring!”

If that “freedom” does not pay off- grad student without a defendable project or publishable data, significant expenditure of laboratory resources wasted for no return – well this is “Bad mentoring!”

Different outcome means the quality of the same behaviors on the part of the PI is evaluated as polar opposites.