A Fabulous Place to Do Research Posted on October 23, 2007 Mark S. Bauer (bio) talks about the great funding opportunities at the VA.

It happens that the VA turns out to be a fabulous place to do research in many ways because they have a separate funding stream for one. There’s a whole separate series of career development awards that you can get up to six years of career development support, very favorable toward physician researchers, psychology researchers as well and basic neuroscientists, but really are designed to attract physicians into research.

And there are a series of entry-level grants and then R01 equivalents, which are called Merit awards in the VA. And in addition, if you get your, through intervention research, they have a series of facilities such as Cooperative Studies Program that are actually designed to provide the infrastructure to recruit sites and carry out sites and multi-site studies and we were able to get support to do an 11- site study across the country, really coast to coast with kind of infrastructure that I could never have put together myself. The cooperative studies program is sort of the jewel in the crown of VA research.

There’s also a series of health services research opportunities in addition to clinical science research opportunities in dissemination science. So both the, from the clinical trials perspective and then also the dissemination perspective, the VA has tremendous resources and they fund them very well.

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