We are pleased to announce the launch of Rescuing Biomedical Research’s Writing Program. This program is intended to help graduate students and postdocs about to embark on a career in science policy improve their policy writing skills. Working with Chris Pickett, Director of RBR, writers will write three posts for the RBR blog over a … Read more
By Helena Lucente In May, the U.S. Department of Labor announced revisions to the overtime rule provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act making an employee earning less than $47,476 on Dec. 1 eligible for overtime pay. This rule change includes postdoctoral scholars, potentially putting a financial burden on labs, departments and universities. Despite the … Read more
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, universities have issued statements reaffirming their commitments to improving diversity and inclusion on their campuses and expressing solidarity with the Black community. These statements serve as a reaffirmation of the institution’s values and its commitment to faculty, staff and students. But do these commitments reflect reality? … Read more
Postdoctoral scholars are an important part of the research workforce. As experienced scientists, many postdocs enter a lab and are highly productive after only a short amount of time. However, many groups feel that postdocs are underpaid, relative to their experience and importance to the research enterprise. A recent proposed federal rule change has the … Read more
An RBR Writing Program post by Sophia Kaska A sustainable biomedical research enterprise must be diverse along any number of axes, including racial, ethnic, gender and socioeconomic lines. The 2011 Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads from the National Academies laid out recommendations to improve diversity and inclusion in … Read more
By Swagata Basu A recent paper in Nature Biotechnology shows how postdoctoral training in biomedical sciences can affect early career outcomes. Despite a dearth in available academic tenure-track positions in and a drop in National Institutes of Health success rates, there has been sustained growth in the number of biomedical postdocs due to an abundance … Read more
An RBR Writing Program post by Torrey Truszkowski Stagnant National Institutes of Health budgets and increasing competition for grants have made sustaining a steady lab budget a difficult and time-consuming endeavor. Declining success rates for NIH grant applications mean that scientists are submitting more grant applications but also revising and resubmitting more reviewed grant applications. … Read more
By Brittany Aguilar A new study published today in PLoS ONE from researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill demonstrates that some of the quantitative metrics used by graduate-admissions committees are poor predictors of productivity. Specifically, the authors suggest undergraduate grade-point average and Graduate Record Exam scores do not correlate with some standard metrics … Read more
Today, members of Rescuing Biomedical Research published an article in Science proposing the expansion of the National Institutes of Health’s New Innovator (DP2) award. The DP2 award is available only to early-stage investigators and places an emphasis on novel scientific ideas without requiring significant preliminary data. The DP2 program has received a positive evaluation, and … Read more
By Kelsey Hampton Intense competition for a limited amount of federal funding has long been a reality for biomedical researchers. In a post on the Open Mike blog, Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health, and his team examined the pool of research project grant applicants to determine what … Read more