It’s with profoundly mixed emotions that I tell you that Susan Gregurick has been named the NIH associate director for data science and director of the Office of Data Science Strategy. This new position will allow her to play a key role in shaping data science activities across NIH.

Susan has provided extraordinary leadership to our Division of Biophysics, Biomedical Technology, and Computational Biosciences (BBCB) for the past 6 years and has been an essential member of the Institute’s senior staff. I’m confident that she’ll bring the same level of enthusiasm, professionalism, judgment, and keen intellect to her new office as she did here at NIGMS. The appointment becomes official on September 15, although Susan will remain here at NIGMS through the end of the month. Deputy Director Judith Greenberg will serve as acting director of BBCB while we search for a permanent replacement.

For more on this appointment, see the statement from NIH Director Francis Collins. Please join me in wishing Susan the best in the next phase of her career. NIGMS’ loss is certainly NIH’s gain!

I’m pleased to congratulate four members of the NIGMS community who are among the recipients of the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. This award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.

On June 12, NIH Director Francis Collins announced that he will not take part in conferences or meetings in which “attention to inclusiveness is not evident in the agenda.” In keeping with this announcement, all NIGMS staff, including leadership, program and scientific review officers, grants management specialists, and others, will only attend meetings and conferences where the organizers have shown a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion in their selection of chairs, speakers, and panelists. NIGMS has a long-standing mission to promote diversity in the scientific enterprise. Helping to ensure that the organizers of scientific conferences and meetings plan diverse and inclusive agendas will further our goal of developing the most creative, vibrant, and productive biomedical research workforce possible.

UPDATE: Figure 2 of this post was updated slightly in March 2021 to reflect NIGMS-supported Early Stage Investigator counts more accurately.

On September 28, 2018, the Department of Defense and Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Act, 2019 and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2019 was signed into law. The law includes an NIGMS budget of $2,872,780,000 for Fiscal Year (FY) 2019—a 3.1% increase from FY 2018. This budget increase follows a 5.1% rise in funding in FY 2018.

NIGMS is committed to ensuring that taxpayers get the best possible returns on their investments in fundamental biomedical research . As part of this commitment to stewardship, we regularly monitor trends in our funding portfolio.

I’m pleased to announce the debut of Pathways, a collaboration between NIGMS and Scholastic, Inc., that provides a collection of free educational resources about basic biomedical science and research careers.

As we work on issuing a new funding opportunity announcement (FOA) for the established investigator (EI) MIRA program, we thought it would be useful to address a few common questions we’ve been hearing. The new FOA will allow applications from NIGMS grantees who have one or more single-Principal Investigator (PI) R01-equivalent awards, just as the current FOA does. In addition, the new FOA (to be published by Fall 2019) will allow renewal applications from PIs who already have MIRA grants.

I'd like to draw your attention to a very important statement issued yesterday outlining actions NIH is taking to address the issue of sexual harassment in science. The full statement is also available below. For additional information, please visit NIH's webpage: Anti-Sexual Harassment: for NIH Awardee Organizations and Those Who Work There.

I’m very pleased to announce that two long-time NIGMS grantees are among today’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They include:

• Frances H. Arnold, Ph.D., of the California Institute of Technology, “for the directed evolution of enzymes”
• George P. Smith, Ph.D., of the University of Missouri, Columbia, who shares the prize with Sir Gregory P. Winter of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, U.K., “for the phage display of peptides and antibodies”

Last week, NIH Director Francis S. Collins issued a statement about the pervasive problem of sexual harassment in science and reaffirmed NIH’s commitment to address it. He noted that NIH is working to bolster its policies and practices to foster a culture of respect wherever NIH research activities are conducted, and to ensure that sexual harassment is not tolerated or ignored. NIH has launched a new website on anti-sexual harassment activities. I encourage you to explore the site and become familiar with NIH’s policies, practices, and initiatives. Consistent with NIGMS’ strong commitment to research training, the Institute recently announced that applications for our predoctoral T32 training programs must include in their required institutional support letters information about the institution’s policies and procedures to prevent discriminatory harassment and respond appropriately to allegations or findings of discriminatory harassment. Moving forward, NIGMS will require this information in institutional support letters for applications for all of our training programs.

I’m pleased to congratulate six members of the NIGMS community who are among the recipients of the 2018 Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. They include:

• Ann L. Chester, Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) principal investigator, West Virginia University
• John A. Pollock, SEPA principal investigator, Duquesne University
• Virginia L. Shepherd, SEPA principal investigator, Vanderbilt University
• Elba E. Serrano, Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) principal investigator and IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence mentor, New Mexico State University
• Maria da Graça H. Vicente, Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) principal investigator, Louisiana State University
• John K. Haynes, Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards (IRACDA) co-investigator, Morehouse College

The award recognizes outstanding mentors whose efforts encourage the next generation of innovators and help to develop a science and engineering workforce that reflects the diverse talent of our nation, key goals of a number of programs here at NIGMS.

Awardees received a Presidential certificate and a $10,000 grant to continue their mentoring activities at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., last month. Please join me in congratulating all winners of this prestigious honor.