NCI urges psychologists to tap postdoctoral funds

Psychology students and research sites seeking postdoctoral training funds in cancer can look primarily to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

Although some training grants for individual postdoctoral trainees are available through the American Cancer Society, DoD and NCI offer funding to institutions for cancer research training as well as to individual researchers.

And, with its recent reorganization, NCI now wishes to bolster its research focus on preventive and behavioral research, making the outlook for securing funding from its $100 million training pool better than in years past.

"We've got 1,500 training slots and less than 10 percent of our grants are going to psychosocial research training," says Lisa Begg, PhD, chief of NCI's cancer training branch. "We hope to see more behavioral applications coming in, though of course they'll need to go through peer review."

Begg provides a quick run-down of the NCI postdoctoral grants open to psychology:

* R25 Cancer education and career development program-- This comprehensive grant provides one or more institutions with five years of support for curriculum development, mentoring and interdisciplinary research in cancer. The maximum funding is $499,000.

* T32 Institutional National Research Service Award training grant-- This program provides an institution with an individually determined stipend and coverage of expenses for research training in a particular specialty for predoctoral fellows for up to five years and postdoctoral fellows for up to three years.

* F32 Individual postdoctoral fellowship-- This grant, also available to postdoctoral fellows, provides between $26,000 and $42,000 in stipends to individual researchers, depending on years of research experience, for up to three years of research.

* K07 Cancer prevention, control and population sciences career development award-- This five-year award, aimed toward junior researchers and new postdocs, pays a maximum of $75,000 per year and fringe benefits for work on prevention and control and behavioral research. It also covers research support for up to $30,000 a year.

--B. Murray

For further information about training grants, visit NCI's web site at deainfo.nci.nih.gov/flash/awards.htm#RPPC, DoD's web site at cdmprp.army.mil/cgi-bin/cdmrpframescount.pl and the American Cancer Society's web site at www.cancer.org/research/grants/rpg_deff.html.



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