Annual report : 2005 / Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

  • Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Date:
2005
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Annual report : 2005 / Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in Science (18 June 2004) and suggested that preparing postdoctoral fellows for the transition to a faculty position—where they are suddenly managing a lab—is the collective responsibility of universities, professional societies, and funders of science. HHMI and BWF offered the lab management course again in June 2005—revised and expanded based on evaluations by the initial participants. The value of such training experiences is underscored by a recent survey carried out by Sigma Xi. Called “Doctors Without Orders,” the survey is described in the society’s publication, The Scientist (June 2005). The survey measured how general features of the postdoctoral experience—such as structured oversight, formal training, employment benefits, and salary—correlated with various measures of success. The results were striking. Postdocs reporting the greatest amount of structured oversight and formal training, such as in lab management, are more likely to say they are satisfied, to give their advisers high ratings, to experience relatively few conflicts with their advisers, and to be more productive in terms of numbers of publications, compared with postdocs with the least oversight and training. To extend the work of the lab management course, the Fund is working—in partnership with HHMI, the NIH’s Fogarty International Center, and the Wellcome Trust—on internationalizing the course manual in order to produce a resource for scientists in the developing world. Next Steps and New Initiatives The Health Research Alliance (HRA), a collaboration of 16 nonprofit organizations that support health research, is another institution that BWF is incubating in order to work more closely with other funders on common problems and challenges. The HRA’s mission is to foster collaborations among not-for-profit, nongovernmental organizations that support health research with the goal of enhancing biomedical science and speeding its translation into clinical applications. The group is currently working on a foundation awards database to consolidate information among its constituents in an online and centralized location to provide evidence for strategic planning and decision-making. It is also in the process of developing a “toolkit” of approaches that member organizations can use to evaluate their programs. In order to create a better scientific environment in the developing world and to provide input to new program and program evaluation efforts, BWF and the Wellcome Trust, our sister philanthropy in the United Kingdom, convened awardees from our Joint Program in Infectious Diseases of the Tropical Developing World, in South Africa in November 2005. This program supported the collaborative work of a U.S. or Canadian principal investigator, a U.K. principal investigator, and a principal investigator in a developing country on problems with a center of gravity in the developing world. Our hope is that this meeting will result in new efforts in developing partnerships to address international health matters.