On December 11, the NIH Office of the Director issued a press release describing two main NIH initiatives: workforce development and data and informatics. (see links to the press release and original report here.) Last week Gene Russo published an interview with Francis Collins in the journal Nature in which he asked Dr. Collins to discuss in more detail the workforce development initiative. Dr. Collins states that “Only about 23% of US-trained biomedical PhD holders were in academic tenure or tenure-track positions in 2008,” which may help explain the avalanche of queries I receive about medical writing careers.
Summary from the Nature article:
For years, the US National Institutes of Health has struggled with promoting non-academic career tracks for biomedical scientists, gauging the supply of PhD holders and demand for research jobs, enticing under-represented minorities into science and establishing funding avenues for early-career researchers. Hoping to bring some evidence-based clarity to these issues, NIH director Francis Collins asked two working groups of the NIH Advisory Committee to study the issues and make recommendations. They released their recommendations in two reports in June; Collins responded in December. The NIH has decided to take measures that include raising its postdoc stipend, increasing the number of grants that encourage early-career independence and offering 25 institutional grants, each worth about US$250,000, to support training programmes that prepare students for a broad range of research-related careers, including non-academic paths.
Read the full interview here.
