Association Between Receiving an Individual Mentored Career Development (K) Award and Subsequent Research Support

NIH’s career development K awards intend to help early career scientists become independent. These awards afford the recipient protected time for research, publishing, and generating new ideas. As part of ongoing efforts to take a data driven approach to managing NIH programs, my colleagues within the NIH Division of Biomedical Research Workforce (DBRW) in the Office of Extramural Research sought to determine whether K awards might be achieving this goal, and published their findings in Academic Medicine last December. Dr. Silda Nikaj and Dr. P. Kay Lund focused their attention on a particular subset of K awards called individual mentored career development awards. Their study used a “regression discontinuity design” to assess the possible causal effects of mentored career development K awards. Drs. Nikaj and Lund assessed how likely early-career scientists who received a K01, K08, or K23 award (referred to as “K award participants”) were to subsequently receive an R01-equivalent or other RPG award. Their funding success was compared to those who did not receive an independent mentored career development award, but who had scores close to the ‘funding cutoff’ (referred to as “unfunded K applicants”). To further assess the K award’s effect, individuals in these two groups were matched on variables including sex, race, ethnicity, type of grant activity code, degree type, and the NIH Institute or Center that funded the award. Figure 1 shows the li...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike career development K application K award Source Type: funding