What’s New
After previously backtracking, the National Institutes of Health has once again withdrawn applications to a high-profile predoctoral grant program that were submitted with a diversity notation, effectively blocking many early-career academics from underrepresented backgrounds from being funded.
Applications to the NIH’s F31 diversity fellowship apparently won’t be reviewed “while NIH undertakes a review of its research priorities,” according to a Monday email from an NIH official that was shared with The Chronicle. But applications for the standard F31 fellowship are still being considered as usual.
The Details
This is the second time the NIH has withdrawn applications for the F31 diversity fellowship, which is designed to “promote diversity in health-related research.” In early February, The Chronicle reported that scholars’ applications had been removed from their scheduled reviews, or study sections, without being reassigned. Days later, that decision was apparently reversed, with F31 diversity applications being restored to their original study sections. Now, though, two F31 diversity applicants told The Chronicle, their work is back in limbo: Late last week, they said, they received an automated notice from an online portal that they’d once again been withdrawn from their study section.
According to a now-expired NIH notice, the diversity fellowship is open to people from certain racial and ethnic groups, people with disabilities, and those from “disadvantaged backgrounds,” such as first-generation students and Pell Grant recipients. The awards are fundamentally indistinguishable from those offered through the standard F31 program, said a grant reviewer who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussion. “They’re proposing research projects, just like any standard fellowship would be proposing,” he said. “At a minimum, we’d like them just to be reassigned to a standard fellowship-review track. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
Instead, the reviewer, an associate professor at a research university, said the Monday email from the NIH scientific-review officer noted only that “specific applications have been removed from our upcoming meeting and will not be reviewed in the meeting” while the agency considers priorities under its “statutory and regulatory authorities.”
“If you were assigned to one of these applications, you will no longer see it on your assignment list,” the email read. While the email didn’t specify the F31 diversity program, it used similar language to that which was used in messages reviewers received about the February withdrawals. Indeed, of the 10 applications the reviewer was assigned, four were diversity applications; he said all four were removed Monday. (A second reviewer told The Chronicle that an NIH contact confirmed the removals to him privately.) The NIH did not respond to requests for comment on Friday and Monday.
Not having their work reviewed would constitute a “huge delay” of those applicants’ careers, he said. “That effectively is going to target a subset of the scientific community that’s already underrepresented in a lot of ways, because there’s a reason they were applying to the F31 diversity program.”
The Backdrop
The application removal comes amid a rocky two months for the NIH since President Trump’s inauguration. Grant reviews were temporarily delayed after Trump ordered a freeze on billions of dollars in federal aid, though they continued after a judge blocked Trump’s directive. The NIH’s announcement of a 15-percent cap on indirect-cost reimbursement — which has also been held up in court — sent scholars and institutions reeling, and a block on scheduling grant-review meetings added to the confusion.
What to Watch For
Several scholars whose F31 diversity applications were removed from their study sections in February and again this month told The Chronicle that, rather than wait to be assigned to a new study section, they’d opted to withdraw their applications and submit instead for a standard award. But one applicant facing a second reassignment said she’d made the opposite decision.
“I see that as a backing down, removing my application and taking away the leverage that I have as an applicant right now to say that, ‘These funding decisions are not OK, and I’m going to stay in this pool and I’m going to fight you on that,’” the applicant, a fourth-year doctoral student in neuroscience, said. She sees the second round of removals as part of a larger effort on the administration’s part “to create as much chaos and uncertainty as possible, not only to confuse people and introduce obstacles, but also to beat people down and make people feel like it’s not worth it to continue fighting this, because everything might just be undone next week.”
