The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has named its new class of investigators, the Chevy Chase-based medical research nonprofit announced Tuesday.
Out of 1,070 applicants, the institute chose 56 scientists from across the country: 42 men and 14 women.
The program, which has been around since the 1980s, fundamentally changed its application process for the first time, allowing applicants from over 200 institutions to self-nominate. Previously, applicants had to be nominated by a few select schools.
“We had heard some people complaining” about “political reasons why so-and-so wasn’t picked,” said Jack E. Dixon, vice president and chief scientific officer at HHMI.
This also meant more work for HHMI; applications jumped from 200 or 300 to over 1,000, Dixon said. Scientists from 31 institutions, including seven new ones, were
chosen.
But in the end, “diversity came out of the process,” as the openness of the competition “introduced us to people and fields that wouldn’t have been considered in the past … by institutions nominating them,” he noted.
Nontraditional biology fields such as bioengineering, computational science and chemical biology were also brought into the mix.
HHMI is also hoping the wider range of fields will lead to more discoveries. “It’s not uncommon that breakthroughs often occur at the intersection of two fields,” added Dixon.
To be eligible, scientists had to have between four and 10 years of experience as faculty members. HHMI has committed more than $600 million to this new class. The money will be used to pay the full salary and benefits of the investigators over five years. Funds are also used to hire people to help run their labs and purchase new equipment. With the addition of the new class, there are about 356 investigators total, which is about as large as the program has ever been, said Dixon.
There are also fewer strings attached to the funding than to monies from the National Institutes of Health, said Duojia Pan, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the only recipient in the Washington-Baltimore region. “You have much more freedom in choosing a project,” Pan said, which allows scientists to work in a variety of areas. Pan, who has NIH funding for studying genetics and cell size in fruit flies, would like to branch out and study mice.
HHMI, which has a total endowment of over $18 billion, announces a new competition about every three years.
