Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels will be a guest Thursday on a WAMU's The Kojo Nnamdi Show, where he will discuss the decline in federal research funding for young scientists.
Image caption: President Ronald J. Daniels
The hour-long segment will air live beginning at noon on WAMU-FM 88.5; it can be heard online at http://thekojonnamdishow.org.
Daniels will be joined by Sally J. Rockey, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C.; and Rebecca Riggins, assistant professor of oncology at Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. More information
Earlier this month, Daniels authored an article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which he noted that America's youngest scientists are increasingly missing out on research dollars and leaving the academic biomedical workforce, a brain drain that poses grave risks for the future of science.
The number of principal investigators with a leading NIH grant who are 36 years old or younger dropped from 18 percent in 1983 to 3 percent in 2010, Daniels wrote. Meanwhile, the average age when a scientist with a medical degree gets her first of these grants has risen from just under 38 years old in 1980 to more than 45 in 2013.
"The inability to staunch—if not reverse—the above trends stands as an urgent and compelling policy challenge," Daniels wrote in PNAS. "The current stewards of the U.S. research enterprise bear a responsibility to sustain and safeguard that enterprise so that it can provide a platform for the scientists and the science of generations to come."
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