4 ms·

Where extramural NIH competing grant application are concerned, I thought PIs were pretty much free to include a staff scientist, or anyone else, in the budget

Where extramural NIH competing grant application are concerned, I thought PIs were pretty much free to include a staff scientist, or anyone else, in the budget as "key personnel". Anecdotally, the NIH hasn't raised this as an issue in any of the grants I've been involved with. Would you mind clarifying the context in which you've seen / heard of the NIH requiring budget revisions to exclude staff? Overall I agree that the NIH & NSF extramural funding policy is designed with the sole goal of maximizing the number of tenure-track faculty. The messaging around sequestration, and the Grant Support Index mechanism, made it explicit that the main policy goal was to keep creating tenure-track faculty at the same rate. Even if this isn't sustainable. There are many programs to buoy the supply of (aspiring) tenure-track faculty, but few for any other career path. I'm just not aware of any policies to prevent grant recipients from hiring staff should they choose to do so.

mattkrause 6y ago
It's not so much a policy itself so much as it is the entirely-foreseeable consequence of other policies. As far as I know, the NIH has only one mechanism for directly supporting staff scientists: the R50. I think the NCI is the only institute that does them, and there aren't many. You're right that staff scientist can, theoretically, be funded by research project grants...but it's tricky. Students and postdoc funding comes from many sources: institutional training grants to the program, individual fellowships from the NIH, NSF, and private foundations, and sometimes even internal money (either as a RAship or in exchange for TAing). Virtually all of these are limited to those within a few years of their PhD[0]. Anyone more senior needs to be paid from research funds. The "workhorse" grant of the NIH is an R01. Most labs have 1, maybe 2, and their standard "modular" budget is $250k/year [1]. Profs with soft money jobs typically have to cover much of their salary from these grants. Adding on another $75k + 25-30% fringe for a staff scientist therefore puts a pretty big hole in the budget, even before you've started to buy reagents, equipment, scan time, etc. This biases labs towards hiring trainees. Even if you are paying several of them them with grant money now, there's a decent chance that some of them can be moved onto a non-research grant funding stream later. In contrast, the staff scientist costs more now and will definitely cost even more later. Some places are also wary of letting staff scientists write grants[2], which makes it even harder for them to defray their own costs. [0] The CZI-funded "Imaging Scientist" is one notable exception, but for a fairly specific type of person. [1] You can do some extra paperwork to request more than this amount, but people's advice on whether this is wise is all over the map and depends on your study section, career stage, and the phase of the moon. [2] Ghostwriting one for the prof to submit is an option, but an unsatisfying one since it won't show up on your CV, which makes it harder to (eventually) move on.

mattkrause 6y ago

It's not so much a policy itself so much as it is the entirely-foreseeable consequence of other policies. As far as I know, the NIH has only one mechanism for directly supporting staff scientists: the R50. I think the NCI is the only institute that does them, and there aren't many. You're right that staff scientist can, theoretically, be funded by research project grants...but it's tricky. Students and postdoc funding comes from many sources: institutional training grants to the program, individual fellowships from the NIH, NSF, and private foundations, and sometimes even internal money (either as a RAship or in exchange for TAing). Virtually all of these are limited to those within a few years of their PhD[0]. Anyone more senior needs to be paid from research funds. The "workhorse" grant of the NIH is an R01. Most labs have 1, maybe 2, and their standard "modular" budget is $250k/year [1]. Profs with soft money jobs typically have to cover much of their salary from these grants. Adding on another $75k + 25-30% fringe for a staff scientist therefore puts a pretty big hole in the budget, even before you've started to buy reagents, equipment, scan time, etc. This biases labs towards hiring trainees. Even if you are paying several of them them with grant money now, there's a decent chance that some of them can be moved onto a non-research grant funding stream later. In contrast, the staff scientist costs more now and will definitely cost even more later. Some places are also wary of letting staff scientists write grants[2], which makes it even harder for them to defray their own costs. [0] The CZI-funded "Imaging Scientist" is one notable exception, but for a fairly specific type of person. [1] You can do some extra paperwork to request more than this amount, but people's advice on whether this is wise is all over the map and depends on your study section, career stage, and the phase of the moon. [2] Ghostwriting one for the prof to submit is an option, but an unsatisfying one since it won't show up on your CV, which makes it harder to (eventually) move on.