r/NIH

Fellow NIH funded scientists, I am experiencing an uncomfortable tension in my professional life: How do I maintain my inspiration, creativity, and curiosity, while also accomplishing the minutia and busy work of a scientist?

I feel like I'm driven to be a researcher because im naturally curious, passionate, and interested in exploring the world with an open mind. I enjoy making observations about the natural world, generating hypotheses, and discussing these ideas with others. However, in order to actually explore something deeply and accomplish something, it requires living in the granularity and minutia of grant writing, IRB protocols, budget management, etc. These worlds often seem like they live in a tension that feels uncomfortable - you have to be curious and creative enough to have a fundable idea, but you also have to br focused and systematic enough to execute them.

I feel like my inspiration and curiosity are often stifled by the un-fun parts of being a scientist and I dont want to lose the inner curiosity about the world that drives my interest in doing this work in the first place. For example, I have my NIH funded work, which pays the bills and is exciting to me, but its not as novel and creative as many other ideas I have that feel hard to explore and would take bandwidth that my funded work doesnt leave me with.

Have you experienced this tension in your own life/career? How have you held space for both of those realities? How have you protected, made space for, and even explored your curiosities and creative interests within your life as a scientist. Looking forward to your insight.

https://projects.propublica.org/trump-team-financial-disclosures/

Of course, I used ScienCV to make my biosketch. It is "certified". It is labeled as such within the pdf created by ScienCV. I even redid it yesterday and did not change the file name, as I read that can cause problems. Still got the Error message. I have my correct ORCID in my identifying information. I've read other threads on reddit and elsewhere with multiple people having this issue. What else? I'm on a Mac (in case that causes an issue)using firefox. I downloaded the pdf directly from the ncbi common form biosketch site, and uploaded it into my application on grants.gov.

I opened a ticket yesterday (Thursday) for the ERA help desk, but I don't expect to hear anything until Monday at the earliest. And of course the deadline is 5pm on Monday. How panicked should I be at this point? Is there a reliable way to resolve this, as I believe I've done everything required of the process. Thank you in advance for any insights you may have!

Just received the score - 27 impact score and 9th percentile. I am not ESI and has one R01 from another IC. Anyone knows if there is a chance at NHLBI for a 9th percentile R01 this year? Many thanks!

Jeffrey Mervis, Senior Correspondent, News from Science

Every congressional hearing has a subtext. And this week, when Democrats on a House spending panel sharply criticized the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russ Vought on his recently proposed new rules for overseeing federal research grants, their real message was: We’re going to end your assault on science once we’re back in the majority.

As the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D–CT) is widely expected to become chair if her party wrests control of the House from Republicans in the November midterm elections. And at Tuesday’s hearing on next year’s budget request for the OMB, she led the grilling of Vought, who authored the proposed rule changes.

DeLauro is 83 and was first elected to Congress in 1990. Over the years, she’s been a strong voice for biomedical research. And at 83 she’s lost none of her passion. “For someone working on Tourette syndrome or cancer or Alzheimer’s disease, it shouldn’t be a question of the president’s priorities,” she told Vought. “This is peer-reviewed science, and you are reversing that by putting all these grants through a political lens.”

In particular, DeLauro and her colleagues on the panel accused Vought of dismantling peer review at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) so that Vought and other political appointees could make new awards—and terminate existing grants—based on the “whims” of his boss, President Donald Trump.

“Why are you a better judge of an NIH clinical trial than a panel of medical doctors and researchers?” DeLauro asked Vought, who muttered “not true” in the midst of her grilling. “And what is the set of criteria that you will be using to judge these grants?”

Vought’s response—“You’re misconstruing the proposal; OMB will not be making these determinations”—did little to blunt her anger. “And it also says that peer review is no longer binding,” she went on. “It’s all spelled out in this 412-page document. But maybe you thought people wouldn’t read it.”

Critics of the proposed changes have asked OMB to extend by 45 days the 13 July deadline for public comments in hopes of delaying its implementation until after the election. Vought told the committee that wasn’t in the cards, although he acknowledged that it would take some time for OMB to satisfy the requirement to respond to all the comments—70,000 and counting—it receives.

As would be expected, the Republicans on the panel avoided any discussion of research grants or the proposed rules in their much more gentle questioning of Vought. The panel’s chair, Representative Dave Joyce (R–OH), even ceded the last word to DeLauro, who tipped her hand.

“You flout the Constitution, and you’ve been doing it every day for the last 18 months,” she berated Vought. “It’s wrong, and we’re not going to allow that to continue to happen.”

On July 30th, 2026 Stand Up for Science held a press conference on our announcement of our Impact Report on the OMB-2026-0034 Proposal.

Just received my summary statement for my R01…it is first submission. There were 4 reviewers! Never seen before…and I have been applying for the last 20 years. Is it something new?

I’m happy about the early dismissal but who saw RFK Jrs. email about “getting outdoors”. Seriously!? With an extreme heat warning across three days? Hope he heeds his own advice…

As you may have surmised from the subject header, I'm a "dry lab" scientist submitting NIH proposals. I started a few years ago - I've gotten one proposal discussed through one of the ESI mechanisms, and little success on other attempts. One theme in terms of feedback I have received - my approaches are fundamentally "correlative" (not causal) because they lack an experimental component.

I strongly disagree with this. I work in human genetics, and I use databases with hundreds of thousands of whole genome sequences to understand how germline variation predisposes to disease. If done right in terms of the data analysis and study design, I strongly believe this discovers in vivo, human, causal observations about biology. Germline variation is extremely well understood, easy to measure, static throughout the lifetime, and precedes disease longitudinally. Confounding is possible, but if you know what you're doing, it's generally not an issue in 2026.

I don't think the grant reviewers that I've had agree with this. This is consistently true in foundation proposals as well, with my field dismissed as "correlative." From what I gather, this belief is very common as well more broadly in the biomedical research enterprise.

My sense, with slightly less evidence, is that broadly there is a much greater desire for boutique/cool molecular/experimental work in some tiny slice of a problem. Why look at human disease in >100K real humans when we could study a somewhat related phenotype in 3 mice? we could understand these 3 mice very well! My apologies if that was a bit flippant but there's some truth there.

My cynical take is that this belief (human genetics is not causal) is held because if true, it would obviate/diminish many traditional "wet lab" research programs. So best to bury one's head in the sand and write it off as "correlative" or "data mining" or "fishing expedition."

My request for you: I obviously hold some irritation about this, and I would love to be enlightened about why I am wrong. I'd like to be less cynical, and more hopeful. And even better - let me know how I can constructively improve how I think about writing grants.

Burner account. Had to get this off my chest!

Edit: Thank you for your feedback. Many of you are generous with your advice. I don't think I'm going to accept arguments that computational genomics isn't worth funding, but this thread is good confirmation that I need to be more creative with my proposals, and perhaps to give up on mechanisms where my proposals aren't going to a relevant study section.

Thank you Sir.

These will be available starting Monday, July 6

Custom License Plate - $10 https://govemployee-nih.square.site/product/nih-custom-license-plates/LHXNPXQRUCU2LZLINQNFERJ2?cp=

Onesies - $15 https://govemployee-nih.square.site/product/little-lab-experiment-nih-onesie/2SWKUQXACRJGTCGAHDQ6YILT

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^(Bhattacharya is literally wrong about everything and a criminal)

Government shutdown, staff shortages have complicated effort to meet 30 September deadline to spend funds

I recently accepted a research position at NIH that will be filled through a contractor. I'm now speaking with several approved vendors, and I'm seeing salary offers that are much higher than I expected (around $90k+ for a position I would have expected to be closer to $50–60k based on similar roles).

Is this normal for NIH contractor positions? How much flexibility do vendors actually have in setting compensation, and are there things I should know about this process? The NIH department isn't able to advise me on vendor selection or salary, so I'm trying to understand how this works from people who've been through it.

I submitted an NIAID F32 back in December. It got a really good score but the status hasn’t changed since the study section back in March. The AC was last week. Should I be worried? Has anyone heard about any funding decisions being delayed?

For an initiative led by communications professionals, this process has been anything but a model of stakeholder communication.

NIH peers, Institute, Center, and Office (ICO) leadership, and dedicated staff were not meaningfully engaged in decisions about information architecture, navigation, content organization, page layouts, or the overall user experience. Instead, ICOs were directed to complete data calls and populate spreadsheets. That is not collaboration—it is information collection.

The numerous office hours offered by OCPL were largely focused on explaining how to complete the required data submissions. They were not forums for discussing the proposed consolidation, validating assumptions, providing meaningful feedback on the site's structure, or influencing key decisions. Presenting information after decisions have effectively been made is not the same as engaging stakeholders throughout the process.

Given NIH's recent workforce reductions and the resulting impact on employee morale, this project represented an opportunity to rebuild trust through transparency, collaboration, and genuine partnership. Instead, it reinforced the perception that decisions were made in a silo and communicated only after the fact.

Equally concerning is the proposed information architecture. The new content buckets, or "hubs," outlined on the intranet appear to reflect an internal organizational model rather than how members of the public actually seek information. It is unclear whether formal user research or usability testing was conducted to validate these design decisions. If it was, those findings should be shared. If it was not, NIH is taking a significant risk by implementing a major public-facing redesign without evidence that it improves the user experience.

The intranet FAQ states: "The web modernization effort would not have been possible without the participation of NIH's ICOs. Since early 2026, the Office of Communications and Public Liaison (OCPL) conducted more than 50 meetings and presentations and provided more than 200 hours of office hours. ICOs also reviewed content inventories, identified mission-critical information, validated priorities, and provided ongoing feedback throughout development."

That characterization does not reflect my experience. Completing inventories, responding to data calls, and validating content lists are administrative activities—not evidence of meaningful participation in strategy, governance, information architecture, or design. Attendance at presentations and office hours does not equate to stakeholder engagement when there is little opportunity to influence outcomes.

Successful communications projects depend on collaboration, transparency, iterative feedback, and shared ownership. This effort fell well short of those standards.

Do better NIH OCPL, and perhaps, when this fails, will you be the next group RIF'd?

This post is an in-between of venting, holding out hope, and curiosity as to whether others in this community may have some helpful information or perspectives

I'm a PhD student that submitted an F grant early last year, made it through review group with a good impact score, through advisory council, and got a JIT request a few months ago. Ever since then, .... crickets. I was told that in a different timeline, these signs are reassuring, but seeing recent funding curves and NIH RePORTER barely fund any F-awards in the past month has been admittedly demoralizing.

My PO suggested I do a resubmission just in case (which I did) because no one really knows what's going on. I just feel frustrated that I put the time and effort into my initial application and a seemingly unnecessary resubmission -- and then am spending mental energy into constantly checking for eRA status updates and funding curves.

I recognize my ego is also a bit hurt because I see others being recently celebrated for receiving F awards, so I'm left wondering I did something wrong, if I should have left out 1 or 2 words that may have gotten my app flagged, and because if this funding doesn't come through, I'll have to TA which I know will take time away from research and potentially delay graduation. I also recognize that my situation is far from the worst possible case, given that others have had to close down labs or switch careers.

I haven't really run into anyone else in a similar situation to mine, but I imagine this isn't unique. Does anyone else feel similarly or have any words of wisdom? Also, if funding doesn't occur by the end of the fiscal year, is there any chance that proposals might still be funded next year or are they ineligible for funding?

Finally, thanks to all the POs and GMSs if you're reading this. I can only imagine the frustration on your end dealing with all of this administratively from both the agency + applicant perspectives. I'm sorry if I've been annoying asking for occasional status updates. I think it's just because y'all are the point of contact so it's been difficult to direct this energy in other ways...