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发帖数: 6201 | 1 01/27/2012 Megan Scudellari
In 2011, the number of funded grants dropped while the number of submitted
applications rose.
Hoping to score a big National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant? Well, don’
t hold your breath. The numbers from last year are in, and they’re not
pretty. It is getting harder and harder to win an NIH award. Only 18% of
research project grant applications were funded in 2011, the lowest success
rate in the Institutes’ history.
The stiff competition was the result of an unfortunate combination of fewer
awards and more applicants. Overall, 8765 awards were distributed in 2011,
about 700 fewer than 2010. But the number of applicants for those awards
increased about 8%, from roughly 46,000 to 49,500.
“It’s just a lot harder to get grants,” said Barbara Entwisle, vice
chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (
UNC). The NIH is UNC’s largest single funder of research, as it is for many
universities. “Obviously this is a concern for all of us,” she said.
The decline in total awards is due to a number of factors, said Sally Rockey
, the NIH's deputy director for extramural research. For one, the NIH
experienced a 1% budget cut in 2011. In addition, a large portion of the
institutes’ money was tied up in commitments for past awards (since most
NIH awards are multi-year), so there was simply less green to go around. “
All those things in combination led to a reduced number of awards,” she
said.
The increased number of applications is partly a result of the lingering
effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, which
pumped $10 billion into the NIH for new scientific research, said Rockey. “
We have a number of applications still trickling in from there that weren’t
funded originally, and also those that were funded are coming back for
continued support,” she added. One notable change in 2011 was a 17%
increase in proposals for a short-term R21 grants, accounting for more than
half of the total increase in applications.
It is too soon to feel the effect of fewer grants on research, said Entwisle
. The momentum from previous multi-year grants is sustaining a significant
amount of research, but academic centers may begin to feel the pinch as
those grants run out. “I think it will continue to be difficult,” she said
. For now, researchers are looking more broadly for funding sources and
investing more time grant writing, she added. “People are really putting a
lot of effort into proposals,” she said.
But Rockey is cautiously optimistic that funding rates will not continue to
decline. The NIH received a modest 1% budget increase from Congress for 2012
(though significantly less than the 3.3% boost requested by the Obama
administration). And as the effect of the ARRA funding years wears off, the
number of grant applications is likely to flatten, said Rockey. “I would
hope that we’ll be able to sustain last year’s success rate and that we
don’t see further decline,” she said. “But we’ll see.” | A******y
发帖数: 2041 | 2 Also, the one resubmission policy. First, if you don't score, guess what?
You odd of getting funded is significantly lowered. If you get scored, you
better make sure the resubmission is perfect (It might take a year or year
and half to perfect the grant).....which is sad. |
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