Faculty at the Yale School of Public Health were awarded more than $60 million in research grants in the 2021 fiscal year, further powering the school’s leadership in major science areas.
The research funding, a modest increase over the previous fiscal year, continues the school’s steady upward trend in research growth. Much of the funding came from the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government’s primary agency responsible for biomedical and public health research. The NIH consists of 27 institutes and centers, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMN) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
“To have an increase year over year is great,” said YSPH Associate Dean of Research Melinda Irwin, Ph.D., M.P.H., Yale’s Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Diseases). “As we continue to shift to more team-based science in addition to individual awards, we expect this upward trend will not only continue, but accelerate.”
With this financial support, researchers at YSPH led critical investigations into some of the most significant public health questions and concerns of 2021 including infectious diseases, climate change, cancer, cardiovascular disease, structural and social determinants of health, and health care policy and management.
YSPH scientists’ studies also drew praise from their peers. Three research publications in which YSPH faculty were key authors were identified as being among the best papers of 2021 by two leading science publications (Annals of Internal Medicine and Health Affairs) and The Commonwealth Fund.
Faculty researchers aren’t the only ones who benefit from these successes, Irwin said. YSPH students do as well as they are either actively involved in important research as a member of a team or learning from experienced faculty who are deeply engaged in significant scientific investigations.
“Our primary focus is to do research, and doing so makes us a better school,” Irwin said. “If we’re teaching in our area of expertise, we are experts in that topic, and we’re teaching it from an evidence-based perspective.”
YSPH holds a number of NIH Training grants (T32s), which provide tuition and stipend support for pre- and post-doctoral students and fellows. Training programs in HIV prevention, cancer prevention and control, alcohol-related research, health services research and implementation science are all active training programs at YSPH.
Research grants come in many different forms and are used for many different purposes. The most common grant that researchers receive from the NIH – the highly competitive and hypothesis-driven R01 grant – supports mature research projects that have strong preliminary data and are led by independent investigators. Twenty-nine of these grants, which can provide financial support for up to five years, were awarded to YSPH researchers during the 2021 fiscal year.