In 2008, NIGMS issued a strategic plan, Investing in Discovery, that was intended to provide guidance for the Institute over the next 5 years. How well have we done in addressing the plan’s strategic goals? After a critical self-examination, we have produced a progress report that describes some of our accomplishments, strategic decisions and outcomes.
To cite a few highlights, we have:
- Maintained a funding success rate of approximately 24 percent and funded about 200 new/early-stage investigators each year.
- Maintained peer review excellence through the implementation and evaluation of innovative review practices.
- Examined our large-scale science initiatives to determine which to continue, change or phase out, while also ensuring that the resulting knowledge and resources are made widely available to the broader scientific community.
- Published Investing in the Future, our strategic plan for biomedical and behavioral research training, which articulates a clear, multiyear approach and strategy to ensure that future NIGMS-supported training reflects scientific and workforce needs and contributes to the development of a strong and diverse biomedical research workforce.
- Established a new Division of Training, Workforce Development, and Diversity, which merges NIGMS research training programs with activities that were previously in the Institute’s Division of Minority Opportunities in Research.
- Launched this blog to share information about funding opportunities and trends, meetings and scientific resources with our grantees, applicants and others in the scientific community.
I encourage you to read the report for further details and to let us know your thoughts. Although the plan was originally envisioned as a 5-year guide, it is still relevant, and because we hope to have a permanent director later this year, we decided to wait until 2014 to pursue a new strategic planning process.
That “24%” funding rate must include non-competing renewals, since the rate for new apps has been closer to 10% for the last several years.
It would be useful to present the NIGMS plan for the increasingly likely implementation of sequestration. The bulletin makes it sound that all is well and is improving being based on what was planned. The presentation ignores the gorilla in the room and leads to a lack of political action among scientists who are already quite apathetic towards crises in funding will now feel justified in their certainty that all is and will be well. I am not talking about panic, but a reasoned plan that must be in place so that PIs can be involved in a rational discussion not about politics but the realities of responding to diminished funds.