State Funding Means Tufts Researcher Can Continue | Schonhoff says research has its share of highs and lows
Chris Schonhoff, a researcher at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in North Grafton, will be able to keep researching how nitric oxide signals liver cells to produce bile and hopefully use that information to fight bacterial infections in the liver.
He knows with certainty that he’ll be continuing his research because he is one of 11 “new investigators” that will get research funds from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. The center said the grants would be up to $100,000 a year for three years for each investigator.
Young Blood
Schonhoff has been at Cummings for almost three years now, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. Biology has held his interest since high school, where he did well enough to make it his major in college. After college he worked for a couple of years as a laboratory technician, then went back to school at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester for his graduate degree and post-doctoral fellowship.
“It’s a frustrating business at times. There aren’t a ton of highs and there can be a lot of lows,” he said. But perseverance pays off: stick around, show up every day and do your best work. When you do that, things usually work out for the best, he said.
And he said he has great mentors at Cummings: his boss, Mohammed S. Anwer, who is the associate dean for research in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Cynthia R. L. Webster, who is a professor of internal medicine in the Department of Clinical Sciences. “I’ve been really lucky. I have a very supportive boss and Cindy Webster has been a mentor to me as well. When you’re with really smart people, you raise your game and some things just rub off on you,” he said.
While his salary has been covered by Anwer’s NIH grant, it was not a sure thing that it would continue. “This has definitely set me at ease for a couple of years,” he said. The state grant will allow him to hire a technician, supplies and maybe, go to a scientific conference or two.
That uncertainty is why the center decided to award research grants for young investigators. NIH’s funding has been flat for five years. The result is that younger researchers have even less chance of scoring a grant.
Dwindling Resources
The situation is so serious that a report by a group of academic research organizations, such as Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Partners HealthCare Inc. and the University of California, Los Angeles, was issued this spring entitled “A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk.”
The report shows that the success rate for NIH project grants dropped from 32 percent in 1999 to 24 percent in 2007, meaning three out of four submitted are not funded.
Fewer grants get funded on the first application, which went from 29 percent in 1999 to 12 percent in 2007.
With fewer grants being awarded, young researchers are getting “older” by the time they get their first grant, from 39 in 1990 to 43 in 2007.
It might not seem like a huge difference to people not in the field but some researchers just can’t wait that long when they don’t know if they will get funding at all. Many are choosing to go into corporate re-search or go overseas to finish their work.
There just aren’t too many other places that researchers can get grants. The NIH uses 85 percent of its $29 billion budget to support scientists at universities and medical centers all over the country.
This lack of funding at the federal level, particularly for younger investigators, is of nationwide concern, according Susan Windham-Bannister, the new head of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, and led to the decision to begin offering these grants to young researchers here in the Bay State.
And Schonhoff agrees. “I want to branch out and carve my own little niche with my own lab and this is the first step. This is perfect for me. Over the next three years I’ll be doing a lot of research, publishing a lot of papers and hopefully be using this as a jumping off point for continuing my research.”
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