3 ms·
The impact of these travel restrictions is to cancel/delay grant review meetings, which could plausible "fuck up the NIH grantmaking process". However, grant r
by dekhn 2y ago
The impact of these travel restrictions is to cancel/delay grant review meetings, which could plausible "fuck up the NIH grantmaking process".
However, grant review can really be done remotely. And there are many other embedded inefficiencies in granting. For example, when my PI and I applied for an R01 (the basic individual investigator grant that is core to funding early investigators) we had to print a 500 page application which contained duplicate data, full CVs, pages and pages of boilerplate, and fedex it to NIH where it sits in a room with all the other applications (it's been 20 years; maybe this doesn't happen anymore?). The review committees instead get a digital copy and the grant meeting itself is really just a bunch of people sitting in a circle making yes/no decisions.
- tptacek 2y agoYes, I share the concern this article relates and hopefully saner (conservative) heads will prevail on the administration not to jank this up further. What I really want to do here is defang dumb debates about whether operational efficiency and headcount cuts inside NIH proper are disastrous. They may not be, so long as the grants keep happening.
- cozzyd 2y agoI've only applied for NSF and NASA grants, but it's digital. Can't imagine NIH is too different.
- dekhn 2y agoGood to know. It looks like NIH dropped the fedexed physical copy requirement around when I left academia (https://cen.acs.org/articles/84/i14/NIH-Grants-Electronic.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/84/i14/NIH-Grants-Electronic.ht...). In fact now that I think of it, the R01 I submitted must have been digital-only, and that must have changed between 2003 and 2007.