More Data on Age and the Workforce

We examined total and direct costs of NIH research project grants from 1998 through the last full fiscal year, and graphed the distribution of research funding by age group. The full data is posted on RePORT, and since the patterns are similar, I’ll post the graph of direct cost funding distribution below: *On average 7.5% of the awards analyzed have unknown information on age, and those data are removed in this graph, but are included in the Excel file on RePORT. This graph shows we are seeing exciting, high quality science by investigators at almost every age, and it tracks with data previously shown on the blog regarding the distribution of NIH-funded principal investigators PIs. We’ve also updated those charts with age data for NIH PIs with R01s and NIH PIs with RPGs. The patterns are similar comparing the NIH RPG PI pool with the NIH R01 PI pool, with a greater number of principal investigators being age 66 and older. The distribution of funding shown above follows this trend as well. It is important to remember, however, that this information is just a narrow snapshot of the NIH-supported workforce, and the biomedical research workforce as a whole is a very large and complex enterprise. These trends do not occur in isolation, and while NIH funding and policy can influence these demographics, we know that the workforce is aging across all sectors. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew Research Center show that more people in the US who are in th...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Rock Talk Biomedical Workforce Funding data Source Type: funding