Many academics have been hoping Congress would save science, meanwhile NSF and NIH administrators need to deal in realities.

WHILE FRANCE OFFERS US SCIENTISTS FUNDING IF THEY EMIGRATE, NSF CUTS PhD TRAINING PROGRAM

Letter from the NSF:

Dear Colleague:

With this Dear Colleague Letter, the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO) is notifying members of the research communities served by the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS) and the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) to changes to the Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG) Program.

Following a process of internal review and discussion regarding available resources, both the DEB and IOS Divisions will no longer accept DDIG proposals. This difficult decision was necessitated because of increasing workload and changes in Division priorities. This change is consistent with decisions made by other programs in BIO, which have not participated in the DDIG competition for more than a decade. This decision does not affect DDIGs that are already awarded.

We recognize that the independent research that was encouraged by the DDIGs has been an important aspect of training the next generation of scientists; we hope that this culture will continue. BIO continues to support graduate

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student participation in PI-led research across the entire spectrum of topics supported by its programs. Proposals for conferences are encouraged to include support for graduate and postdoctoral trainee travel and attendance. Further, NSF continues to support graduate research through the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) and the NSF Research Traineeship Program (NRT).

Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) (NSF 17-095) related to this DCL for more information.

If you have any questions pertaining to graduate student support under existing awards or future grant proposals, please contact the cognizant program director in the relevant Division.

James L. Olds
Assistant Director
Directorate for Biological Sciences

After researchers received the NSF’s letter, social media lit up

Kristina Schierenbeck, a botanist at California State University, Chico, won a DDIG grant in 1990 to study the population genetics and ecology of invasive Japanese honeysuckle and native honeysuckle in South Carolina while doing her PhD at Washington State University. “For $9,000 I got three publications—one in Ecology and two in the American Journal of Botany—which really, even then (27 years ago), that was a great bang for the buck,” she tells The Scientist. “It also gave me experience writing grants and the grant process and the review process. I went on to get three more NSF grants.”

Mariana Vasconcellos, a postdoc in the City University of New York lab of Ana Carnaval, got a DDIG grant when she was a PhD candidate at the University of Texas, Austin, doing a genomic survey of a South American frog species. She says she used the $10,000 she got from the NSF to do next-generation sequencing for her project after the funding her advisor had when she started her PhD ran out. “[With] the previous funding that my advisor had, I collected some data for my first chapter,” Vasconcellos says. “With NSF, I collected data for the last two chapters of my dissertation. That was very, very crucial.”

In addition to awardees of DDIG grants, principal investigators who mentor students in the environmental sciences also voiced their dismay concerning the NSF’s decision. In its letter, the NSF assured researchers that the decision to discontinue DDIG grants “does not affect DDIGs that are already awarded.” But the death of the program will make funding students that much more difficult, says Kelly Zamudio, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University. She tells The Scientist that she’s had five grad students funded by DDIG grants in her lab. “The two students that I have right now . . . intended to apply this year for DDIGs. And they won’t be able to.”

Tracy Heath, a computational evolutionary biologist at Iowa State University, says that she’s in a similar situation. “I have a PhD student who was planning to apply next year,” she writes in an email to The Scientist.“The damage on science will be substantial—in a field like organismal biology that has a culture of training very independent student researchers (unlike more molecular fields, wherein students operate in more of an apprentice model), this leaves an enormous gap at the early career stages,” writes Butch Brodie, a biologist at the University of Virginia, in an email to The Scientist. “It will gut the best people out of a generation of scientists at just the time we are beginning to make inroads on increasing the diversity of field.”

“It’s just tearing another rung off the ladder and making us work even harder to climb that ladder,” says AJ Reisinger, a postdoc studying ecology at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York who received a DDIG grant as a PhD student. “I don’t think that cutting the DDIG program by itself is the end of researchers or is going to completely dishearten all early-career researchers. But it’s just another sign that scientific research isn’t valued, and it’s disheartening to see.”