How to find funding for your lab’s trainees

Laboratory leads often find that personnel costs can take up the bulk of grant budgets. To assist with this common challenge, NIA offers a

(PDF, 517K) to help support early-career scientists working on a research team, including graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty. Supporting team members in applying for their own funding is a win-win that can help relieve budget pressures while sharpening early-career investigators’ grant-writing skills.

Grad student awards

Graduate students have three NIA funding options :

  • The National Research Service Awards (NRSA), including the F31 for doctorate students and the F30 for dual-degree students, can provide several years of funding.
  • The F99/K00 Transition to Aging Research Award can provide a total of six years of funding across graduate and postdoc career phases, and is the only individual option open to international students conducting research in the United States. A focus on aging research is required for the K00 postdoctoral phase but not the F99 graduate student phase.
  • The R36 Aging Research Dissertation Award , which can only support the final two years of research, provides the highest salary — to $42,500 per year — of any NIH graduate student award.

Postdoc Opportunities

Postdocs are also eligible for the NRSA program via the F32 postdoc award . Additionally, postdocs can apply to a wide range of career development (K) awards . These include transition awards, such as several different K99/R00 programs, and the K22 , both of which are designed for researchers nearing the end of their postdoc work and preparing for tenure-track positions. As noted above, the K99/R00 is also open to international postdocs conducting research in the U.S. Be sure your postdocs know that NIA participates in several different K99/R00 programs and that they can improve their chances of success by applying to a program that’s a best fit.

Three additional career development awards do not require awardees to transition to a tenure-track faculty position. The K25 supports researchers with a quantitative background, for example, in engineering or statistics, to develop careers in biomedical research. The Research and Entrepreneurial Development Immersion K01 supports researchers exploring career options such as entrepreneurship, policy and regulation, or intellectual property. The parent K01 award provides career development support for researchers in the biomedical and behavioral sciences who are headed to research independence. NIA requires parent K01 candidates to hold a faculty position by the time of award, but since a tenure-track position is not required, individuals with titles such as instructor or research scientist may also be eligible.

Supplement support for new lab members

While the awards described above are a great way for your current lab members to partially fund their own salaries, note that fellowship and career development awards follow the same timelines as research project grants, which can take more than nine months from application submission to award. The good news is that there are other options for handling a promising researcher interested in joining your lab even when there are no funds available.

For example, if you have already received NIA project funding, you can apply to certain supplement award programs to help bring new personnel into your research group. The Diversity Supplement program offers flexible training and mentoring to researchers at all education and career stages starting as early as high school. Reentry supplements can fund a postdoc or faculty member to reenter the workforce after a qualifying life event. Similarly, reintegration supplements can fund a grad student or postdoc who is switching labs due to an unsafe or discriminatory environment. A major benefit of all these supplements is a faster timeline with rolling application dates, and funding that can begin as early as two months after submission.

Connect with the training team

If you have questions about early career funding for your lab team members, reach out to our training officers at NIATraining@mail.nih.gov . Better yet, have your lab members reach out to us directly so they can gain experience interacting with NIA program staff!

Funding Opportunities Training and Career Development 2024-10-02T00:00:00Z