UPitt vs Penn State

wgmcp101
Wed, 02 Apr 2014 21:14:26 +0000

The “clinical research” category defined by NIH represents $10.7 billion total of NIH’s budget in FY2013, or about 1/3 of its overall budget, still the minority of its funding, a truth regardless of any politician’s ignorance of the importance of basic/non-clinical funding. The “clinical research” categorization is defined by NIH very broadly and includes not only the $3.3 billion in clinical trial funding mentioned above, but also includes funding for projects that would be considered by most to be more basic biological research (using human samples in some portion of proposed aims) as well as grants that might be psych/learning oriented, or things like sleep studies, EEG/MRI, and social science-leaning studies, etc. But an R01 is an R01 and there isn’t substantial variation in the size of award for a particular mechanism across the landscape whether falling into the clinical category or not. The suggestion that most NIH funding is “clinical” was incorrect, and more importantly, the assertion that labs supported by clinical grants wouldn’t be able to include undergrads is flat out untrue. I’ve personally worked in labs and am colleagues with many others’ labs funded by grants that are currently listed in NIH’s “clinical research” category and all of these have had many undergrads working in them, and thus those undergrads’ work was in part supported by this “clinical” funding whether or not it was specifically budgeted. It was misleading to suggest that research involving human samples (that typically arrive at labs from banks or other sources already anonymized) would preclude, due to HIPPA or IRB restrictions, undergrads (albeit experienced ones) from ultimately working with them, or at least for students to work on other projects in the same lab not directly utilizing them. Heck, I know undergrads that been able to work in P3 facilities, and those experiences are not typically found at places without substantial funding coming in from NIH. Anyone that’s done research in a major med school setting knows that most of the labs such an environment aren’t of such a clinical variety that would prevent students from engaging in research opportunities within them for reasons other than the specific PI of the lab doesn’t want to take them on. And to the undergrad student at a school where research facilities are adjacent to and interspersed among the undergrad campus, the distinction between a university department lab and a lab is a professional health school is largely irrelevant.

And I will state this fact again, the overall money total and the total number of individual awards is absolutely a direct reflection on the quantity, quality, and the variety of work being done at a typical institution (unless something is really out of the norm). Thus, with the obvious caveat the institution has its undergrad and research/graduate components largely in the same physical location, the opportunities for undergrads are also generally reflected in those NIH numbers, which is the case for the point being discussed. It boils down to money and number of labs which aren’t mutually exclusive. The ability to have people work in your lab is all about money, whether derived from your own funding or training grants, because you have to support those individuals’ salaries, stipends, physical space, and obviously the supplies which allows them to do the work. NIH money is the biggest source of this funding, by far. Therefore, NIH totals are a very good reflection on the opportunities for undergrads at universities that have these facilities. It’s also not just the number of faculty, but also the number post-docs and grad students on the undergrad campuses that can take students under their wing. I don’t care how good of a school places like Miami or Georgetown are, the lab experiences there are nearly as voluminous or robust as a place like Pitt or Penn, and that is very much a reflection of the extramural funding they have coming in and I say that from personal experiences at all of them. To suggest otherwise is wrong.

With that said, other considerations regarding the number of labs is also important not just for available space for students, but for the variety of research projects. If a student truly wants to get a jump on exploring the type of research that he or she might enjoy, because 75+% of research involves failure and (when the novelty wears off) repetitive drudgery, they are better off being able to seek out experiences different in lab environments to find ones that match their interests and/or personalities in order to figure out whether or not they want to put 5-7 years into grad school. Nothing is worse than the frustration of failing experiments combined with a poor lab environment, so learning the qualities one needs to look for in a lab is important. Sure, they can wait until grad school to do rotations through labs… but this is about getting a jump on one’s personal direction and having superior opportunities. I’ve seen too many PhDs end up wasting 6 years of their life for something they really didn’t want in the end because they didn’t know what they were getting into. Most of those tend not to have as robust undergrad lab experiences.

Regardless of location, an undergrad student that is interested in a scientific career in a field like biology or neuroscience absolutely needs to obtain solid research experience because these are ultimately research fields and you need such experience to take the next step into graduate training, or to know if you want to take that step. And ideally if one has the opportunity to do undergrad research, one should aim for some sort of authorship; if not in published paper, at least as part of a poster presentation at a national meeting in order to demonstrate to a graduate admissions committee and understanding of what academic research is about and a demonstrated desire to pursue it. Such experiences also develop the beginnings of the ability think critically in a scientific fashion, to practically apply and thus reinforce the background knowledge learned in the classroom; and reach an understanding about why things were done and independently trouble shoot in experimentation, not just follow the instructions of a supervisor in performing assigned tasks. But in order to obtain something like a publication authorship at the undergrad level in a field like biology, a student typically needs to be able to commit to working a lab setting over multiple consecutive semesters to really delve into the project and lab environment, and when looking for a home lab, it is best to seek a lab is adequately funded and has a track record of publishing regularly (preferably with prior evidence of undergrad authorship of some sort) and ideally one that has people that you enjoy being around.