The White House established the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) program in 1996. The program is administered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on behalf of the White House and is intended to identify outstanding individual and institutional mentoring efforts in all scientific fields including those supported by the NIH.  The PAESMEM is the highest national STEM mentoring award.

Individuals nominated for awards must be US Citizens or permanent residents.   An organizational nominee must be affiliated with a U.S. corporation, educational institution or agency, military or government agency, non-profit organization, or foundation.    Individual and organizational nominees must have demonstrated outstanding and sustained mentoring of underrepresented students, trainees, and/or early career scientists and engineers for at least 5 years.  Individuals and organizations in all public and private sectors are eligible including industry, academia, primary and secondary education, military and government, non-profit organizations, and foundations. Details about eligibility, the nomination process, review, and the nature of the award are available at www.nsf.gov/PAESMEM where you can find a recorded webinar on preparing and submitting nomination materials.  

Candidates can be nominated by a colleague, administrator, or a student.  Self-nominations also are accepted.   Nomination packages are reviewed in a process administered by the NSF.  Selection of award recipients is coordinated with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).  Awardees are invited to Washington DC for various recognition and award events.   Up to 16 new awards can be made in each year. The awards are bestowed for past work in the amount of $10,000. Nomination packages are due by June 5, 2013.       

High quality mentoring is important to the success of NIH programs as reinforced by the recent study of the Workgroup on Biomedical Research established under the aegis of the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director.  The report from the Workgroup can be found at http://acd.od.nih.gov/dbr.htm.   Accordingly, participation in the PAESMEM program is appropriate for NIH affiliated researchers and institutions.  PAESMEM operates harmoniously with several NIH programs and activities that foster mentoring.  Programs include NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Research Training Grants and Institutional Career Development Awards among others.  Information on such activities can be found at http://grants.nih.gov/training/nrsa.htm and at http://grants.nih.gov/training/careerdevelopmentawards.htm. 

Participants in NIH research with a strong history of mentoring are encouraged to apply for this special Presidential Award.

To the NCI-supported scientific community:

As you have heard and read, the Budget Control Act (aka “sequestration”) has gone into effect as of March 1^st.  All components of the NIH, including the NCI, are working diligently to assess the impact of this unprecedented budget reduction on our ability to manage the current research portfolio and to continue to award new and competing grants in this fiscal year.  Knowing the anxiety that we all share about these developments, I am writing to report to you on our objectives, progress, and prognostications, even though a full account is not yet possible.

First, I must emphasize that we cannot provide a definitive and detailed account of our plans for the year at this time because we are currently operating on a so-called Continuing Resolution that extends only through March 27^th.  Funding for the rest of the fiscal year (FY2013) will depend on Congress’s ability to propose and pass appropriations measures that carry us through September 30^th.  This could be done through another Continuing Resolution, through a more typical appropriations bill, or through some kind of omnibus bill that bundles measures affecting many agencies.

At present, our Continuing Resolution provides funds to the NCI for the first six months of this fiscal year (October 1 – March 27) at 0.62% above last year’s level for the same time period.  Under these circumstances, as in many other years that have begun with Continuing Resolutions, we are paying both new and continuing grants at about 90% of expected levels—a conservative measure that acknowledges our uncertainty about the rest of the year.  Even in this especially difficult year, we anticipate increasing the funding level for those awards (by an amount still to be ascertained) once our funding for the full year has been determined.  As I have described in earlier messages and as is detailed on the NCI’s web site (https://deaissl.nci.nih.gov/roller/ncidea/entry/2012_funding_patterns), we continue to evaluate our applications for new and renewing grants by a careful combination of peer and programmatic review.  I urge you to visit the site to see the outcomes of that process for the past two years. 

One of the guiding principles in our plans for adapting to sequestration is to maintain the number of competitive awards —new grants and renewals—at levels similar to that achieved in the past few years (over 1000 grants, with success rates of 13 to 14 percent).  These are, of course, fewer grants than we would like to make, and the grant sizes are often smaller than they should be.   Moreover, to achieve this goal, we need to make reductions, modest but significant, in virtually all of our extra- and intramural programs, including non-competitive (type 5) grant renewals, cancer centers, and research contracts.    In addition, we do not expect to reduce salaries, place employees on furlough, or take other drastic steps in making these adjustments.  Yet in the plan we envision, we hope to protect, as best we can, the potentially most vulnerable parts of our community:  fully trained scientists who are applying for their first grants, experienced investigators who are renewing their grants and maintaining their research teams, and the trainees we will need for cancer research in the future.

I intend to send you more details about plans for FY2013 once budgets for the rest of the year have been defined.  But I want you to know that those of us working on your behalf at the NCI are making every effort to sustain the functionality of our research enterprise in difficult times. 

Harold Varmus

Director, NCI