NIH Grants 01: Why you should apply for a NIH grant

Regardless of where you are on your academic journey, there are many excellent funding opportunities out there and I encourage everyone to apply for as many as possible. Compared to other grants, NIH applications are long and a take a lot of work to complete, but don’t let that discourage you! The NIH is a major source of research funding for all major research universities and you should apply too for anything you are eligible for.

In 2023, institutions within the Seattle area received a total of 1,555 grants amounting to $1,145,135,735 in NIH funding.
If you are interested in looking up NIH awards by location, go to: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm

In addition, while funding success rates for NIH awards are low (ranging from about 15-30% depending on the institute), they are still much higher than other fellowships (like the Helen Hay Whitney, Life Sciences, and Ford Fellowships).

Published success rate for the F32 NRSA Postdoctoral Award in 2022.

Lastly, studies published in Science indicate that NIH funding success is often associated with more NIH funding success… so, why not start now?

“Training fellowship recipients are more likely to get future funding” by Michael Price (2018)
“Training awards increasingly important for future funding and landing a faculty job” by Viviane Caller (2019)