This is critical to avoid having experienced researchers fall off the edge, so to speak, due to gaps in funding. There is a need for continued career support beyond the currently truncated K24.

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 »

Evaluating whether a particular training program is effective can be difficult if an appropriate comparison group is not available.

The apheresis medicine encompasses treatment of numerous diseases many of which are directly related to blood, lung and heart. However, there are very limited opportunities for training young investigators in basic and translational research related to Apheresis Medicine. There is a need to promote Apheresis Medicine as a viable field of research for junior and established investigators. The influx of well-trained junior... more »

Progress in rare lung diseases, such as interstitial lung diseases, has been hampered by a lack of patient-derived samples in large enough quantities or high-enough quality for systematic study. This is due to the inability of individual centers to recruit enough patients, and because of the varied samples each center obtains. Collecting, preparing, and storing such samples is not fundable by the NHLBI because it is not... more »

Expanding the training efforts (e.g. greater number of funded summer programs, extend training beyond 2 summers, provision for 5-year grants so an additional cohort can be included) would be highly beneficial.

What kinds of incentives, reforms, and exposures would work best with students from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds to pursue careers in science?

Transformation of the professional development pathway – moving promising trainees and junior faculty to independent and productive investigators– is critical to ensuring a vibrant clinical and basic research workforce.

Insufficient funding and resources hamper scientific progress. Providing funding opportunities that require collaborations across multiple institutions would encourage open and collaborative research while promoting advances in research due to complementary expertise, sharing of resources, combining scientific efforts, etc.

What are the best methods for NHLBI to contribute to reforms that make careers more attractive to people from disadvantaged backgrounds?

There is a critical challenge to retain highly trained basic and clinical scientists in the biomedical research enterprise and expediently promote their independence and capacity to produce innovative discoveries. There is a need to provide more funding opportunities for collaborative, team-science approaches to scientific investigation by interdisciplinary teams comprised of clinician scientists, basic researchers, and... more »

What are the best methods to identify future training areas and develop/adapt training and mentorship programs to address future critical needs?

NHLBI should consider creating specific programs that encourage the participation of investigators that often do not apply to NHLBI such as kidney researchers.

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 »

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