In the blog post Continued Support for Early-Stage Investigators in FY 2023, Dr. Michael Lauer, NIH Deputy Director of Extramural Research, shares data on early-stage investigator (ESI) applicant and awardee counts for fiscal year (FY) 2023 in the context of previous years and other categories of applicants. Since 2017, with the launch of the Next Generation Researchers Initiative, NIH has prioritized support for ESIs as a strategy to sustainably strengthen a robust and diverse workforce.
The topline summary is this: In FY 2023, there were 5,325 ESI applicants and 1,587 ESI awardees, each a slight decrease compared to FY 2022. At the same time, the ESI funding rate rose slightly, from 29.6 percent to 29.8 percent.
The blog post itself provides a variety of charts and statistics. To highlight a few takeaways:
- The mean age of ESI applicants (40 years old) has remained the same since 2016.
- The count of black or African American ESI awardees increased in FY 2023, as did that demographic’s funding rate (27.4 percent) in comparison to FY 2022 (23.3 percent).
- Among ESIs self-reporting a disability, the funding rate for FY 2023 (26.7 percent) also increased relative to FY 2022 (18.2 percent).
It’s worth noting that the population of new investigators includes early-stage investigators, as the former is defined as “investigators who have not yet competed successfully as a principal investigator to receive substantial independent NIH funding” and the latter follows the same definition but is further restricted to investigators within 10 years of a terminal research degree, medical residency, or equivalent. At NIAID, we set an R01 payline for new and early-stage investigators above the R01 payline for established investigators, typically by about four percentage points. Learn more at How Being New Helps You.
Again, you can read Dr. Lauer’s blog post for a full accounting of ESI funding rates in FY 2023.