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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    PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE For 50 years, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s mission—to advance the biomedical sciences through support of research and education—has remained consistent. Although the Fund has shifted priorities in response to the evolving nature of the research enterprise, our commitment to investing in the career development of young scientists and supporting investigators in underfunded and undervalued areas of science has remained steadfast. In 2004-2005, as the stock market recovered, BWF was able to resume a full program of support. Our program activities are described in the following sections, along with profiles of representative program awardees. Four of our award programs are open to scientists in the United States and Canada—Career Awards in the Biomedical Sciences, Career Awards at the Scientific Interface, Clinical Scientist Awards in Translational Research, and Investigators in Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease. Our fifth program supports creative science education activities for middle school and high school students only in North Carolina. As we write this annual report, BWF already anticipates the 2005-2006 award eycle when we should be able to increase, at least slightly, the number of awards in each program—provided that the stock market continues to recover. We also will continue to convene our awardees for networking, training, and building the BWF family. Charting Future Directions Keeping stride with research encourages us to be mindful of the field and gives us the ability to determine where needs are greatest. BWF serves best as a “niche player,” and our Board of Directors has carefully selected areas of grantmaking in which we will support individual researchers rather than research projects or infrastructure. During the past award year the Fund conducted a strategic planning exercise, or terrain mapping, in which we reviewed our award programs and repositioned them for the next five years (2005-2010). As it reviewed Fund programs, the board considered a number of ongoing changes in the scientific landscape. Notably, these changes include the federal government's increased funding for bioterrorism; the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) efforts to implement its new roadmap, which emphasizes clinical research and recognizes that the scale and complexity of biomedical research requires interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research teams; the Food and Drug Administration’s increased efforts to speed the transfer of innovative medical therapies to patients; and the ongoing national debate about the composition of the U.S. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce.
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