Chevy Chase-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute has committed $600 million to hiring 50 new biomedical researchers by next spring, the organization announced Thursday.
The Institute is focusing on hiring investigators in the earlier part of their careers, meaning they have between four and 10 years experience since their first academic appointment, according to HHMI Senior Science Officer Josie Briggs.
“We want people at different career stages, because our investigators do get older and we wanted to get the new cadre of people in early,” Briggs said.
HHMI’s strategy for hiring new talent focuses on “people, not projects,” choosing investigators basedon their ability and experience rather than one proposed research project, Briggs said.
This way, scientists can change direction in their research if necessary and spend the time they need to follow their ideas to fruition, she said.
The competition comes at a time when budgets at research institutes such as the National Institutes of Health have been consistently flat, triggering worries of a brain drain to other countries.
HHMI’s investment, compared with NIH’s $28 billion budget, will “in no way will make up for the impact that a loss of growth in the NIH budget will have on the biomedical community,” Briggs said. “Everyone’s finding it very, very painful.”
While candidates for the HHMI researcher positions will focus on solving biomedical problems, their work can emerge from other disciplines including medicine, biology, chemistry, physics and engineering, Briggs said.
Briggs expected applicants to tackle such problems as imaging methods, the chemistry of natural products, molecular biology and neuroscience, she said.
Applications for the job competition, which ends June 13, will have to meet various criteria in terms of degrees and experience. They do not need to be nominated by their institution to apply, unlike in previous HHMI competitions, Briggs said.
