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The number of researchers with three or more simultaneous National Institutes of Health grants grew across several demographics from the early 1990s to 2020, a study published Tuesday found.
But disparities persist between how many Black and female researchers and how many white men become these triply-or-more granted “super principal investigators (PIs),” as the study authors dub them.
The gaps between women and men and Black and white researchers narrowed, but remained.
“The percentage of researchers with three or more grants tripled from 1991 to 2020, increasing from 3.7 percent to 11.3 percent of NIH-funded researchers,” a news release accompanying the study says. “Further, the percentage of researchers with four or more grants increased more than six-fold and those with five or more grants nearly 10-fold.”
“In 1991, 2.1 percent of women and 4.4 percent of men were super PIs,” the release said. “By 2020, rates had increased to 8.7 percent and 13.1 percent, respectively. Similarly, at the start of the assessed period, 4.1 percent of white researchers, 4 percent of Asian researchers, 4.4 percent of Hispanic researchers and 1 percent of Black researchers were super PIs. By 2020, those rates increased to 11.5 percent, 12.8 percent, 9.8 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively.”
Since the last major NIH funding increase, in 2015, “Black women were 71 percent less likely to attain super PI status than white men,” the release said.
The study was published in JAMA Network Open. The release said Mytien Nguyen, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the Yale School of Medicine, was the lead author, and the senior author was Dowin Boatright, vice chair of research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
“Concentrating resources among investigators who are more likely to be white and male has implications for the level of innovation we’re going to see in the science that’s produced. It’s also going to affect the trust that people in the United States have in scientific research,” Boatright said in the release. “Also, research has shown that people of color are not well-represented in clinical trials and a homogenous research workforce is going to affect the diversity we see in clinical trials, which will impact the outcomes we can deliver to our patients.”
The NIH has itself released research on disparities.
