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The 10th Anniversary of ABRCMS: Preparing Underrepresented Minority Students for Scientific Careers

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The 10th Anniversary of ABRCMS: Preparing Underrepresented Minority Students for Scientific Careers

Last week, I had the privilege of giving a keynote address at the 10th Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) Link to external website in Charlotte, North Carolina. The conference, sponsored by NIGMS and organized by NIGMS Council member Cliff Houston, had a record attendance of 3,100, including more than 2,000 students and about 20 NIGMS staff members.

The meeting contributes in two major ways to the goal of a scientific workforce that reflects the diversity of the U.S. population. It provides a forum for promising scientists from underrepresented groups to showcase their talent and knowledge and make important training and career connections. It also gives faculty mentors valuable resources for facilitating their students’ success.

My address was organized around the themes from Randy Pausch’s lecture “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams Link to external website,” and it described key events and strategies that facilitated my own path to a career in science. I greatly enjoyed discussing science and career opportunities with many of the students at the poster session and after my talk.

Other keynote speakers at this impressive conference included Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Maya Angelou, NIH Director Francis Collins and NIGMS grantee Carolyn Bertozzi.

Jilliene Mitchell, who staffed the NIGMS exhibit booth and talked to a lot of attendees, writes:

The energy level among the meeting attendees soared through the roof of the Charlotte Convention Center. The undergraduate and graduate students were tremendously enthusiastic about networking, presenting their research, listening to scientific talks and getting advice about their career paths from accomplished scientists. The NIGMS exhibit booth received a lot of traffic, with students lined up to talk about training opportunities and faculty members lined up to discuss their grants.

Throughout the conference, I encountered many students who thanked NIGMS for sponsoring ABRCMS. One postdoc summed it up best when she said, “This is the best career development workshop I’ve been to—it’s huge!”

These video clips I took capture the mood and excitement.

The announcement for next year’s ABRCMS meeting is expected soon, and we will post information here when it is available.

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Assessing the Outcomes of NIGMS Glue Grants

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NIGMS Glue Grants Outcomes Assessment, November 4-December 15In September 2009, we announced that we were not reissuing the funding opportunity announcement for our Large-Scale Collaborative Project Awards (Glue Grant) program, which has supported research teams tackling significant and complex problems that are beyond the means of any one research group. We are currently assessing the need for this type of support and how best to manage programs of such scope and magnitude.

As part of this effort, we are conducting an assessment of the glue grant program’s major outcomes and their impact. We’re seeking your views through voluntary input forms posted on the NIGMS Web site. The forms will ask about various aspects of the glue grant program as a whole and about specific glue grant projects, including:

You can read more about the assessment and view the forms at http://www.nigms.nih.gov/Initiatives/Collaborative/GlueGrants/OutcomeAssessment. The site will be open for input until December 15, 2010.

UPDATE: We have extended the comment period from December 15 to January 15.

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National Festival Put Science in the Spotlight

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Supermodels of ScienceMany kids (and adults) learned more about science and technology at the 2-week-long USA Science & Engineering Festival Link to external web site this month in Washington, D.C. The event featured hundreds of activities, including performances, workshops, demonstrations, tours of mobile labs and interactive games. A number of these were hosted by NIH, which was also one of the event sponsors, and most of its components. The festival wrapped up last weekend with a grand finale expo on the National Mall.

On Sunday, I helped host the NIGMS booth, where we presented a computer activity called “Supermodels of Science.” It showed how model organisms—from slimy worms to furry mice—help scientists learn more about human health. The kids were most excited about responding to the quiz questions at the end of each segment. They also were very interested in how scientists use GFP to make organisms glow different colors.

Other NIH activities included a musical performance by NIH Director Francis Collins; the National Human Genome Research Institute’s “Strawberry DNA Extraction,” a hands-on lab experiment where visitors used a soapy mixture to remove DNA from mashed strawberries; and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders’ “It’s a Noisy Planet,” where staff increased the volume on an iPod to demonstrate dangerous noise levels.

The festival’s turnout was excellent—about 500,000 people attended the weekend event. The kids were excited about science and eager to learn, and the volunteer staff members were thrilled to teach them about the research we support.

We’ll post the “Supermodels of Science” activity on the NIGMS Web site soon, and you’re welcome to use it in your own educational outreach efforts.

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Nation’s Top Science Honor to Benkovic, Lindquist, Others

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Last week, President Obama announced the 2010 recipients of the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. The 10 winners of the National Medal of Science include long-time NIGMS grantees Steve Benkovic from Pennsylvania State University and Susan Lindquist from the Whitehead Institute, MIT. As always, I am pleased when our grantees are among the outstanding scientists and innovators recognized by the President in this significant way.

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Changes in NIH Application Policies

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Here are several new NIH Guide notices regarding applications:

New Time Limit for NIH Resubmission Applications
Revised applications must be submitted no later than 37 months after submission of the preceding version. In most cases, the clock will start at the original receipt date. For special cases, please refer to NOT-OD-10-140.

NIH to Require Use of Updated Electronic Application Forms in 2011
Submissions for deadlines after May 7, 2011, must use an updated forms package (ADOBE-FORMS-B1). For deadlines before then, applicants may use either the new forms package or the current one, ADOBE-FORMS-B. There are some exceptions: K, T, D or F series applications submitted for deadlines on or after January 25, 2011, must use the new forms package. For more information, see NOT-OD-11-008 and NOT-OD-11-007.

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Nobel News

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Purdue University Nobel Prize for Chemistry News Conference 

(Download the free Windows Media Player Link to external web site to view)

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that long-time NIGMS grantee Ei-ichi Negishi from Purdue University will share the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Richard Heck from the University of Delaware and Akiri Suzuki from Hokkaido University in Japan for “palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis.” All of us at NIGMS congratulate them on this outstanding recognition of their accomplishments.

Carbon-carbon bond-forming reactions are the cornerstone of organic synthesis, and the reactions developed by these Nobelists are widely used to produce a range of substances, from medicines and other biologically active compounds to plastics and electronic components. NIGMS supports a substantial portfolio of grants directed toward the development of new synthetic methods precisely because of the large impact these methods can have.

I have personal experience with similar methods. I am a synthetic inorganic chemist by training, and a key step during my Ph.D. training was getting a carbon-carbon bond-forming reaction to work (using a reaction not directly related to today’s Nobel Prize announcement). I spent many months trying various reaction schemes, and my eventual success was really the “transition state” for my Ph.D. thesis: Within a month of getting this reaction to work, it was clear that I would be Dr. Berg sooner rather than later!

I’d also like to note that this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to Robert Edwards “for the development of in vitro fertilization” also appears to have an NIGMS connection. Roger Donahue sent me a paper he coauthored with Edwards, Theodore Baramki and Howard Jones titled “Preliminary attempts to fertilize human oocytes matured in vitro.” This paper stemmed from a short fellowship that Edwards did at Johns Hopkins in 1964. Referencing the paper in an account of the development of IVF, Jones notes that, “No fertilization was claimed but, in retrospect looking at some of the photographs published in that journal (referring to the paper above), it is indeed likely that human fertilization was achieved at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the summer of 1964.” The paper cites NIGMS support for this work through grants to Victor McKusick.

In all, NIGMS has supported the prizewinning work of 74 grantees, 36 of whom are Nobel laureates in chemistry.

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Nominate Your Outstanding Graduate Students to Meet Nobel Laureates

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Graduate Student Awards for the Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates and Students in Lindau, GermanyIt’s the 1st of October, and there’s a Nobel buzz in the air. We’re eagerly awaiting next week’s prize announcements and hoping to see more of our grantees added to the list.

But we’re also feeling the Nobel excitement in another way: the opening of the nomination process for your graduate students to attend the next Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Nominations are due from your universities on November 1.

Through this extraordinary opportunity, the most exceptional young researchers go to Lindau, Germany, to engage with Nobel Laureates and meet their peers from around the globe. The upcoming meeting takes place June 26-July 1, 2011, and will feature Nobel prizewinners from physiology or medicine.

A student from last year’s meeting said, “Lindau is much more than a meeting. It is an experience that will change how you look at science and inspire your career.” Other students have told us that it’s “amazing” and “life-changing,” giving them extensive opportunities to network and have focused discussions with the Nobelists. John Schwab and Ravi Basavappa, NIGMS program directors who accompanied the students in past years, came back from the meeting equally charged up.

You can get a sense of what the excitement is all about by viewing a video about the meeting Link to external web site.

If you would like to nominate one of your students, visit http://www.orau.org/lindau/ Link to external web site for details, instructions and forms. Your universities must submit the applications via this Web site by the November 1 deadline.

Please note that your university president or designee can submit only two candidates to be considered for NIH support. Eligible students can be supported by any NIH institute or center, as long as it funds the research the student is involved in or supports the student through a training award. Universities may also submit up to six additional nominations (two to each of the three other sponsors—DOE, ORAU and Mars, Inc.).

The application process has three phases. First, candidates are selected by their universities for consideration by NIH. Second, NIH selects approximately 40 student nominations, which represents more than half of the U.S. delegation. The last phase is conducted by the Lindau Meeting. Selection is a highly competitive process, and we’re counting on you to identify the best candidates to represent U.S. science next year!

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New Online Evaluation Resource

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Evaluation: Measuring What WorksAt the recent NIGMS Council meeting, I gave an overview of a new section of the NIGMS Web site called Evaluation: Measuring What Works. In addition to offering tips on planning and conducting evaluations, the section provides links to “how-to” guides, tools and other resources.

I invite you to take a look at the material and send your comments and suggestions via the feedback form link (no longer available).

Why did we develop this new Web site section? Increasingly, the Office of Management and Budget and other entities are calling for the use of formal program evaluation to help determine if programs are operating efficiently and achieving their goals. Some NIGMS research and training grant programs already include an evaluation component. If you’re an applicant or grantee on one of these programs, you may find our new online program evaluation resource useful.

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NIH-Wide Correlations Between Overall Impact Scores and Criterion Scores

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In a recent post, I presented correlations between the overall impact scores and the five individual criterion scores for sample sets of NIGMS applications. I also noted that the NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) was performing similar analyses for applications across NIH.

OER’s Division of Information Services has now analyzed 32,608 applications (including research project grant, research center and SBIR/STTR applications) that were discussed and received overall impact scores during the October, January and May Council rounds in Fiscal Year 2010. Here are the results by institute and center:

Correlation coefficients between the overall impact score and the five criterion scores for 32,608 NIH applications from the Fiscal Year 2010 October, January and May Council rounds.

Correlation coefficients between the overall impact score and the five criterion scores for 32,608 NIH applications from the Fiscal Year 2010 October, January and May Council rounds. High-res. image (112KB JPG)

This analysis reveals the same trends in correlation coefficients observed in smaller data sets of NIGMS R01 grant applications. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed in the correlation coefficients among the 24 NIH institutes and centers with funding authority.

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Measuring the Scientific Output and Impact of NIGMS Grants

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A frequent topic of discussion at our Advisory Council meetings—and across NIH—is how to measure scientific output in ways that effectively capture scientific impact. We have been working on such issues with staff of the Division of Information Services in the NIH Office of Extramural Research. As a result of their efforts, as well as those of several individual institutes, we now have tools that link publications to the grants that funded them.

Using these tools, we have compiled three types of data on the pool of investigators who held at least one NIGMS grant in Fiscal Year 2006. We determined each investigator’s total NIH R01 or P01 funding for that year. We also calculated the total number of publications linked to these grants from 2007 to mid-2010 and the average impact factor for the journals in which these papers appeared. We used impact factors in place of citations because the time dependence of citations makes them significantly more complicated to use.

I presented some of the results of our analysis of this data at last week’s Advisory Council meeting. Here are the distributions for the three parameters for the 2,938 investigators in the sample set:

Histograms showing the distributions of total annual direct costs, number of publications linked to those grants from 2007 to mid-2010 and average impact factor for the publication journals for 2,938 investigators who held at least one NIGMS R01 or P01 grant in Fiscal Year 2006.

Histograms showing the distributions of total annual direct costs, number of publications linked to those grants from 2007 to mid-2010 and average impact factor for the publication journals for 2,938 investigators who held at least one NIGMS R01 or P01 grant in Fiscal Year 2006.

For this population, the median annual total direct cost was $220,000, the median number of grant-linked publications was six and the median journal average impact factor was 5.5.

A plot of the median number of grant-linked publications and median journal average impact factors versus grant total annual direct costs is shown below.

A plot of the median number of grant-linked publications from 2007 to mid-2010 (red circles) and median average impact factor for journals in which these papers were published (blue squares) for 2,938 investigators who held at least one NIGMS R01 or P01 grant in Fiscal Year 2006. The shared bars show the interquartile ranges for the number of grant-linked publications (longer red bars) and journal average impact factors (shorter blue bars). The medians are for bins, with the number of investigators in each bin shown below the bars.

A plot of the median number of grant-linked publications from 2007 to mid-2010 (red circles) and median average impact factor for journals in which these papers were published (blue squares) for 2,938 investigators who held at least one NIGMS R01 or P01 grant in Fiscal Year 2006. The shared bars show the interquartile ranges for the number of grant-linked publications (longer red bars) and journal average impact factors (shorter blue bars). The medians are for bins, with the number of investigators in each bin shown below the bars.

This plot reveals several important points. The ranges in the number of publications and average impact factors within each total annual direct cost bin are quite large. This partly reflects variations in investigator productivity as measured by these parameters, but it also reflects variations in publication patterns among fields and other factors.

Nonetheless, clear trends are evident in the averages for the binned groups, with both parameters increasing with total annual direct costs until they peak at around $700,000. These observations provide support for our previously developed policy on the support of research in well-funded laboratories. This policy helps us use Institute resources as optimally as possible in supporting the overall biomedical research enterprise.

This is a preliminary analysis, and the results should be viewed with some skepticism given the metrics used, the challenges of capturing publications associated with particular grants, the lack of inclusion of funding from non-NIH sources and other considerations. Even with these caveats, the analysis does provide some insight into the NIGMS grant portfolio and indicates some of the questions that can be addressed with the new tools that NIH is developing.