Articles tagged Advocacy
(41 results)

I have always been passionate about science and outreach is something I think I’m good at. So when I received an email from GSA saying I was on the shortlist for a very important advocacy and outreach event, I thought about how I might be the best scientist to represent GSA. I drafted the following…

A couple of weeks ago I presented a poster at an unusual event, entitled “Wasteful” Research? Looking Beyond the Abstract which was sponsored by the Coalition to Promote Research (CPR) and the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF).  It was unusual (at least in my experience) for two reasons. First, because I was accompanied by…

Last night, a milieu of scientists, Congressional staffers, members of Congress, and representatives from the National Science Foundation (NSF) filled the banquet room of the Rayburn House Office Building to show how investments in STEM research and education are fueling American innovation. Among those scientists was GSA member Ahna Skop, an Associate Professor of Genetics and…

The National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO) has put two funding programs on hiatus, pending an evaluation of the “long term resource needs and research priorities” within the directorate. The suspended programs are both within BIO’s Division of Biological Infrastructure (DBI).   Collections in Support of Biological Research (CSBR) The Collections in Support of Biological…

In 2014, Bruce Alberts, Marc Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus published an article in PNAS detailing the pitfalls and challenges of the structure of the biomedical workforce. Though many have written about and discussed these problems before, people seemed to pay attention to the conversation this time. Scientists at all stages of their careers…

 FY 2017 Budget Process Underway President Obama submitted his budget request for Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 to congress at the beginning of the month, proposing funding levels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to accommodate a nearly $1 billion increase in mandatory spending to fund special projects like the BRAIN, Precision Medicine, and Cancer Moonshot…

With the Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 omnibus bill  signed into law and in effect, Congress now shifts its attention to the budget for FY 2017, which begins on October 1. To aid in this process, the House Appropriations Committee has asked individual Representatives to submit “Programmatic Requests.” These requests are used by the Committee to identify what programs are…

A proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Labor could soon mandate that postdocs making less than $50,440 per year will be eligible for overtime pay at 1.5 times their hourly rate. Research labs are generally not prepared to track overtime hours and many do not have the additional funds available to pay postdocs above…

Last week, the National Academies of Science and Engineering joined forces with the Chinese Academy of Science and the Royal Society of the United Kingdom to host an International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, DC. Top scholars in genetics, bioengineering, ethics, and law debated the merits of human gene editing; however consensus was far from achieved.…

Johnny Kung, Director of New Initiatives for the Personal Genetics Education Project (pgEd), fills us in on their latest Congressional briefing. A version of this post is published on the pgEd website and is posted here with permission. On Nov. 17, our group, the Personal Genetics Education Project at Harvard Medical School, held a Congressional…