New $100M NIH Faculty Recruitment Program: Good News for State, Local TBED?

On March 30, the National Institutes of Health announced a new funding opportunity to use up to $100 million of Recovery Act funds to enable academic institutions "to hire, provide appropriate start-up packages, and develop pilot research projects for newly independent investigators, with the goal of augmenting and expanding the institution's community of multidisciplinary researchers focusing on areas of biomedical research relevant to NIH." 

Sounds worthy enough, right? It is like an eminent scholar, endowed chair, or centers of excellence program at the national level. Just recently SSTI wrote about Canada having a $2.3 billion decade-long program that is supporting nearly 2,000 university research chairs in several disciplines (see Feb 25, 2009 Digest). At least 25 percent of the Canadian Research Chairs were recruited from the United States. A similar program dedicated to biomedical research should be good for the U.S., However.

Without the goal of recruiting faculty from outside the geographic area targeted for benefit means some areas of the United States could lose - not only be unsuccessful in the competition for this new pool of NIH funds, but may lose their resident emerging biomedical research talent as well. Just as "stealing" industrial manufacturing facilities from one community to get them to relocate to another is a zero-sum or even economic loss on the macro level, NIH's new program could be seen as achieving the same results - or worse - for state and regional bio-based economic development efforts.

On the other hand, these are not the types of positions that can be equally effective or productive anywhere. The new funding pool could optimize the productivity, creativity and value of the individual researcher and the academic institution as well as speed biomedical research advancement. All boats rise if our nation's biomedical investments yield beneficial results more quickly.

As it is designed, the NIH program is not targeting foreign superstar biomedical researchers and, given the Buy America provision of the Recovery Act, it cannot be. Instead it is targeting "newly independent" investigators that are not already in tenure track positions. The investigators can be recruited from any other institution, including those in the same state, region or country.

However, given the limited funding of individual awards, varying in size by participating NIH institute but ranging between $500,000 and $1 million per year for two years, retention and promotion of junior faculty is perhaps a more likely scenario. In that case, the NIH funding could provide a boost to the investments states have already made to support and nurture their academic research community.

More information regarding RFA-OD-09-005 "Recovery Act Limited Competition: Supporting New Faculty Recruitment to Enhance Research Resources through Biomedical Research Core Centers" is available at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-OD-09-005.html.  Letters of intent are due April 29.