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NIH Office Of Emergency Care Research NIH Training Grant Focus: The Research Career Development Award
NIH Training Grant Focus: The Research Career Development Award
By Jeremy Brown, MD
There are dozens of different grant types at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and they make up an alphabetic smorgasbord. There are U01 grants and U10 grants and UG3/UH3 grants, P01 grants and P20 grants, R01 and R21 and R33 and R56 grants, and on and on. But in this month’s column we will learn about another of the alphabetic grant types, known as the K awards. And K awards are special because they are training awards, in which the principal investigator is a mentee as well as a researcher. These K awards are known as Research Career Development Awards.
Not surprisingly, there are many kinds of K awards — at least twenty. But for emergency physicians, the most used is the K23, with about 36 awards to emergency medicine (EM) physicians over the last decade. The K08 is a distant second, with 16 awards over the same period. But it is possible to think of these two K grants as differing only in one important aspect: for the K23 grants, the focus is on clinical research, while for K08 grants, the focus is on basic research. (Just to keep it confusing, note that Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a federal research funding agency that is not part of the NIH, also has a K08 award, but that one has a clinical focus. Got it?)
The NIH K23 supports “the career development of individuals with a clinical doctoral degree, who have the potential to develop into productive, clinical investigators, and who have made a commitment to focus their research endeavors on patient-oriented research.” These individuals may be residents, but are more likely to be early EM faculty, perhaps a few years after completion of their residency or fellowship.
During the award, the principal investigator (PI) pursues a specific training program, but the makeup of that program will vary. One might obtain a master’s degree in public health or take a few courses in statistics or the ethics of clinical research, while another might work with a named mentor and complete courses for a PhD. The training component and the clinical research you undertake is yours to decide.
In general, the application is judged on two points: Is there a good
mentoring plan, and is there a good clinical research plan? Both need to be addressed in the application, and both are equally important to your success. One way of thinking about the application is to use a “gap-based” approach, in which the candidate describes her existing skill set and expertise, and outlines what skills and expertise she still needs to obtain to become an expert in their field. This does not have to involve taking courses or obtaining a degree; but the needs must be clearly articulated and relevant.
The way the K23 awards are managed varies among the many institutes and centers that make up the NIH, and you should carefully read the notices that each publishes. Just as importantly, you should contact the program officer who runs the training programs at each institute. They will be an invaluable source of important information and can make all the difference to the chances of success. In fact, there is a golden rule when applying to the NIH for any kind of grant: always, always talk to the program officer. Another tip is to find a K award that was successful and read it. You can find the abstracts on the NIH RePORTER website, and then ask the PI if he or she might share the complete application with you. The time spent tracking down a successful K application is more than offset by the tips you will learn when you read it.
The K23 awards offer significant salary support — typically up to $100,000 (plus fringe benefits) for each of the 3-5 years of the award; you will use that to buy protected time for your research and education. That’s a lot of tax-payer money, but all those taxpayers ask of you is that at the end of your award, you will use your expertise to improve their health. And that seems like a good deal.
You can learn more about the National Institutes of Health here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Brown is the director of the Office of Emergency Care Research (OECR) where he leads efforts to coordinate emergency care research funding opportunities across NIH. Additionally, Jeremy is the primary contact for the NINDS Exploratory and Efficacy FOAs and serves as NIH's representative in government-wide efforts to improve emergency care throughout the country. He is also the medical officer for the SIREN emergency care research network which is supported by both NINDS and NHLBI. Jeremy.brown@nih.gov
