To ensure that young investigators remain in the field, the National Institutes of Health should consider strategies for assisting these investigators in making the career and funding move from mentored career development awards and career development awards for independent investigators (K awards) to research awards (including but not limited to R01 awards).

Patients with vascular anomalies frequently see many physicians and undergo extraneous tests with incorrect diagnoses. A major reason for this is due to the fact that medical training does not include Vascular Anomalies in the syllabus. Thus, many specialties erroneously use the term "hemangioma" for any vascular diagnosis. Over the past 2 decades, there have been major breakthroughs in basic and genetic research, as ...more »

What trainee outcomes will best fulfill the mission of NHLBI, and what programs best promote these outcomes?

Maintaining the pipeline of clinician scientists via early and mid-career awards. Promote the development of collaborative teams.

Why the funding rate for AREA (R15) grants from NHLBI is at its lowest with a success rate of only 7.2% in 2014?

Should training in biostatistics, computer science, bioinformatics become broader for the entire biomedical community in this era of very large data sets?

How can we grow the number of specialists in biostatistics (and these related fields) without causing an oversupply?

How do we add communication skills to our training programs to improve scientists’ communication with the public?

What can research institutions do to entice and support potential and actual K award applicants to become independent scientists?

Create a "Center of Excellence" designation in Cardiovascular Research akin to NCI's Comprehensive Cancer Center designation. Specific qualifications for such a designation will need to be defined. However this will encourage institutions to invest heavily in CV research to support such designation. In this way, local institutions will partner with NHLBI to support discovery in heart and vascular research.

The current generation of heart,lung, and blood investigators are not equipped with competitive training needed to approach, design, and test appropriately small molecule therapeutics that may move through the FDA pipeline. Appropriate in silico ligan or structure based design, HTS, design of Pd/Pk models, "go-no-go" branchpoints in drug development, screening approaches, and drug target validation are issues that are ...more »

The research on pulmonary vascular biology including smooth muscle cell biology and endothelial cell biology and related pulmonary vascular diseases such as pulmonary hypertension and related right heart failure, and endothelial dysfunction in lung vascular inflammation and acute lung injury, as well as pulmonary embolism and lung transplantation has been rapidly expanding. The field is attracting an ever increasing ...more »

A critical challenge will be making career paths transparent to prospective PhD students and postdocs. At present, few departments, programs and institutions are collecting and making readily available any credible data about the career experiences of their past graduates. To be useful, such data should address at least five years of post-PhD career experience; shorter-term data is likely to be dominated by postdoctoral ...more »