Returning to Research Posted on November 21, 2007 Michael J. Ostacher (bio) describes the career reentry award that helped him move from clinician to researcher.

I had been a clinician in the community, and people who do clinical work in administration as far as I can tell make more money then people who do research and have academic careers. And so I actually had to sacrifice some in order to go back into research. And part of the reason that I was doing clinical work was because I had a family.

So I had had a child, and my wife was pregnant with the second child. And even under those circumstances, I made a decision to go into research. I had what amounts to really important opportunity. The National Institute of Mental Health has a number of different, for NIH as a whole, has a number of different mechanisms for helping people who’ve left research to return to research.

There is a reentry award, something called the reentry award. I believe it’s out of the Office of Women’s Careers. So my career is not a woman’s career obviously. But the intent of the award is to help people who’ve left an academic or research setting, return to research, for people who’ve left because of personal or family obligations that have required that they do so.

And so I was fortunate along with my mentor Andy Nierenberg to get this reentry award where I was able to study substance use disorders as part of his R01 where he studied minor depression.

And so I was able to get funded for a couple of years while I developed a research career. So I didn’t have to have solid funding in order to do this; I had some seed money that has enabled me to do this.

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