If you are curious about how many principal investigators (PIs) NIH supports through research grants, read the March 6, 2024 Open Mike blog post “How Many Researchers: The FY 2023 Cumulative Investigator Rate” by Dr. Michael Lauer, NIH’s Deputy Director for Extramural Research. The post explores the data behind NIH’s cumulative investigator rate, to include awards made with traditional and supplemental coronavirus appropriations, then compares fiscal year (FY) 2023 data for R01 research grants and several other award types against previous years.
What is the Cumulative Investigator Rate?
The Cumulative Investigator Rate is an NIH-wide person-based metric, calculated as the number of unique PIs who were designated on an NIH Research Project Grant (RPG) award, divided by the number of unique PIs who were designated on an RPG application over a 5-year period. NIH focuses on a 5-year timeframe because most research grants last for more than 1 year and applicants apply with the goal to secure multiple years of funding, i.e., not all active PIs apply for funding each individual year.
A Positive Trend
For the 5-year period ending with FY 2023, NIH supported 37,543 PIs out of 92,691 applicants, which resulted in a cumulative investigator rate of 40.5 percent. Compared to the 5-year period ending with FY 2022, the number of supported PIs increased by 2.6 percent while the number of applicant PIs increased by only 0.2 percent; thus, the cumulative investigator rate increased from FY 2022 to FY 2023.
Within the pool of all RPGs, both R01-equivalent and R21 grant types saw an increase in mechanism-specific cumulative investigator rate from FY 2022 to FY 2023. The cumulative investigator rate for R01-equivalent rose to 44.1 percent, which was a 0.4 percentage point increase over the previous year (refer to Figure 2 in the blog post). The cumulative investigator rate for R21 grants was 12.5 percent in FY 2023, which likewise was an increase of 0.4 percentage points from the previous year (Figure 3).
Meanwhile, there were fewer P01 program award applicants in the 5-year period ending in FY 2023 as compared to that of FY 2022, but also fewer P01-funded PIs such that the cumulative investigator rate for the P01 activity code decreased by 1 percentage point from 36.2 percent to 35.2 percent.
For the full analysis, read Dr. Lauer’s blog post, linked above.