The Funding Treadmill Posted on February 28, 2008 Funding rates of ten to fifteen percent make the NIMH process a difficult one, agrees Peter Salovey (bio).

Most recently, I've been on the Advisory Council for NIMH, and I'm finishing a four-year term. And that's been a fascinating experience in that it reveals the breadth of really remarkable scholarship and research going on in the mental health and illness field. That has been very encouraging.

It has also been a frustrating experience. I strongly believe that funding rates of 10 or 12 or 15 percent are much too low and that there are many, many good ideas that are just not being funded. It is difficult to get funding now. It requires every ounce of resilience that investigators can muster, and I urge people to submit their grants and stick with them and revise them because the funding climate is very tight. I think we could probably be funding easily twice the number of grant proposals that are funded now with no loss of quality.

Myself, I have never had an NIH grant proposal funded on the first submission in 20 years. Most of my proposals have taken three submissions. It's a lot of work. It's frustrating. I curse the day sometimes that I got on that treadmill. But ultimately our best proposals have been funded. They've just taken a lot; we've taken the reviews seriously and revised them.

I have one pet concern. I'm a behavioral scientist. I do basic behavioral science that then is applied to problems in health psychology, in clinical psychology, and more broadly than that. I think the research that's being funded now in the brain sciences at the molecular level is very, very important. These are where there are wonderful breakthroughs happening, but I also think we have to be careful not to lose sight of basic behavioral science. There are phenomenon where key insights will only be made at that more macro level, and I think NIMH needs to embrace that and stay in the business of funding excellent basic behavioral science.

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