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 131 Representatives Signed on to Letter Supporting More Funds for NIH
Basic Behavioral Science and the NIMH Mission
Legislation to Rename NIDA and NIAAA
NIH's Center for Scientific Review Holds Public Open House
Psychological Science in Aviation and Space
Call to Action on Underage Drinking
DHS Centers of Excellence Expand Despite Cuts
Science Government Relations Co-Hosts Meeting with Top VA Officials
Re-Entry Legislation Re-Introduced
Science Directorate's Executive Director Testifies Before Congress in Support of VA Funding
NIMH Places High Priority on New Investigators
131 Representatives Signed on to Letter Supporting More Funds for NIH
U.S. Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA), Christopher Shays (R-CT), and others are asking their colleagues in the House of Representatives to sign a letter to the leaders of the House Appropriations Committee encouraging a 6.7 percent increase for the National Institutes of Health in Fiscal Year 2008. At this point, 131 members of Congress have signed the letter.
We in the Science Government Relations Office sent out an Action Alert last week encouraging members of our Public Policy Action Network to call their members of Congress and urge them to cosign the letter. At last count, 63 psychologists had notified their Representative.
Check the list of Representatives who have signed the letter: if you don't see the name of your Representative, visit our Take Action page and send a note to him or her asking them to sign it. NIH funding increases have not kept pace with biomedical research inflation, and as a result, the budget is eroding. This is the type of action that will help shore up the NIH budget.
If you have questions or need additional information, contact Pat Kobor.
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Basic Behavioral Science and the NIMH Mission
Is NIMH funding grant applications out of order and shortchanging behavioral science? Some behavioral scientists, including Dr. Richard Shiffrin, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, believe that it is. Late in 2006, NIMH Director Dr. Tom Insel declared that the Institute would support up to ¾ of applications that fall below the 20th percentile. This was a move from the previous year's assertion that the Institute would fund applications in priority score order through the 10th percentile, and then half below the 20th. In this era of a decelerating budget, there is growing concern that grant applications that address the Institute's programmatic priorities - reducing the burden of mental and behavioral disorders - could be funded over other applications that receive higher scores.
The concern that researchers have little certainty about ultimate funding decisions even after receiving high scores from peer review panels prompted Shiffrin, on behalf of members of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, to write in a letter to APA that the recent changes in funding guidelines at NIMH "downgrade the role of peer review, unbalance the system, and will lead to poorer science."
Dr. Steve Breckler, Executive Director of APA's Science Directorate, communicated Shiffrin's concerns to Insel asking him to provide a more comprehensive explanation of how the policy is being implemented. A portion of the letter is excerpted below:
"Initially, NIMH assured the community that scientific proposals with scores from the peer review panels within the top ten percent would still be funded. The latest clarification of the NIMH funding guidelines makes it clear that program priorities will be the determining factor, even for those proposals that fall within the top ten percent. Of even greater concern is the recently stated NIMH policy of 'supporting up to three fourths of the applications that fall below the twentieth percentile.' We understand that in times of increasing grant applications and more expensive scientific projects, it is necessary for the Institute to become even more focused on its portfolio. However, this new policy has created more ambiguity, less transparency, and engendered a perception within the scientific community that the NIMH is asserting its authority in a manner that undermines the peer review process."
In response, Insel justified funding decisions that break priority score order by emphasizing the need to address Institute priorities:
"The second level of review at NIMH, provided by the National Advisory Mental Health Council (NAMHC), has been designed to consider not only the results from the initial peer review but also Institute priorities, the overall research portfolio and the Institute's mission."
He went on to say:
"This change [in funding policy] was made to provide greater flexibility for the Institute to manage its portfolio and was not intended to target any specific area of research."
Science GRO staff will continue to monitor the new funding policy guidelines and will provide updates on the status of basic behavioral science at NIMH. We will also continue to update you on activities at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), which has a rich history of funding basic science, but has so far moved only modestly toward funding basic behavioral research. As always, we welcome your comments.
Want More NIMH News? The March edition of Inside NIMH is available here.
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Legislation to Rename NIDA and NIAAA
On March 1, HBO held a standing room only reception to debut the new 14-part series, "Addiction". Science GRO staff had been instrumental in helping coordinate attendance on behalf of the Friends of NIDA, and the effort clearly paid off. Representatives Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) and Jim Ramstad (R-MN) were on hand to make introductory remarks and detail their personal and poignant histories of addiction. A series of clips from the premiere episode provided a graphic look at an ER in Dallas, Texas. The clips included personal stories of patients enrolled in a clinical trial of a new medication called topiramate, and a mother's desperate attempt to save her addicted daughter through the criminal justice system.
In addition to detailing their personal histories, Representatives Kennedy and Ramstad utilized the occasion to announce their plans to introduce a new bill called the "NIDA and NIAAA Name Redesignation Act" (H.R. 1348), which authorizes name changes for NIDA and NIAAA. The bill redesignates the National Institute on Drug Abuse as the National Institute on Diseases of Addiction and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism as the National Institute on Alcohol Disorders and Health. A companion bill was introduced in the Senate on March 28 by Senator Biden (D-DE).
To view photos from the event click here.
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NIH's Center for Scientific Review Holds Public Open House
NIH's Center for Scientific Review (CSR), the first stop for grant applications, held its first of several planned open house workshops on March 2. The goal of the meeting was to address whether the current alignment of neuroscience study sections meets the present and future needs of specific neuroscience areas. The meeting focused on the four neuroscience Integrated Review Groups (IRGs): Brain Disorders and Clinical Neuroscience (BDCN), Integrative, Functional, and Cognitive Neuroscience (IFCN), Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Neuroscience (MDCN), and Biology and Diseases of the Posterior Eye (BDPE). APA member Dr. Michela Gallagher, Professor of psychology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, accompanied Science GRO staff to the workshop.
IRG breakout sessions marked a lively afternoon debate during which neuroscientists identified high priority research areas and discussed the needs of their disciplines. Dr. Gallagher, who studies animal models of age-related memory loss, participated in the IFCN session, along with Science GRO staff.
Breadth of expertise of study section members, as well as training and mentoring of new study section members, emerged as the top two recommendations for enhancing scientific progress in the field and ensuring that good science gets recognized (and funded!).
High priority areas that the group envisioned would characterize the next decade of neuroscience study included real time behavior assessment, computational modeling, machine-brain interfacing, and translational research. Above all, the group stressed the importance of cross-disciplinary research.
Behavioral and social sciences will be the focus of the next CSR workshop, to be held on April 25. For more information and to register for the workshop, please click here.
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Psychological Science in Aviation and Space
Earlier this month, as Congress began consideration of the President's FY08 budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Science Government Relations staff attended a two-day aviation human factors conference in San Antonio, Texas. The purpose of the conference was to build bridges between the human factors/sciences research communities, and aerospace educators and flight operations departments and organizations. Representing aerospace science and industry, presenters highlighted strategies to reduce vulnerability to aviation accidents. Morning Star Aviation Safety, LLC sponsored the event, and Captain David Blair, Morning Star's Founder, is already gearing up for the second annual meeting in 2008.
You may wonder what airplane accidents have to do with psychological science. Human error, it turns out, may be involved in as much as 60% - 80% of all aviation accidents, and scientists have turned to cognitive psychology - error detection, working memory capacity, and shifting attention, for example - to understand human performance limitations in flight. Society's demand for reliability, especially in aviation, is nearly unlimited. The volume of airline flight operations is growing and is projected to be much higher within the next decade. Even if current accident rates are maintained, this growth will entail more fatal accidents each year, and with increasing use of large airliners, the death toll from a single accident can be very large. Thus, it is crucial to understand the factors that make skilled pilots, controllers, dispatchers, and mechanics vulnerable to error, to develop ways to reduce vulnerability to error, and to defuse errors to prevent them leading to accidents. Cockpit operations are becoming increasingly automated, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) plans a next generation of air traffic control that will be vastly more automated than the current one. But the history of automation (and other technology) is that it can either enhance system performance or undercut the performance of human operators (as occurred at Three Mile Island), depending on how well the automation is designed to match human operating characteristics.
Conference participants Dr. Terry Allard, Program Director for Human Factors Research and Engineering at the FAA, and Dr. Judith Orasanu, Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, discussed sources of capacity limitations in flight, such as air traffic control workload, stress, flight deck design/procedures, and inadequate shared mental models ("team cognition") between pilots and first officers. In his presentation concerning the limits of expertise, Dr. Key Dismukes, also from Ames, and author of The Limits of Expertise: Rethinking Pilot Error and the Causes of Airline Accidents, discussed the challenge of managing concurrent tasks, the inherent cognitive limitations in switching attention, and the vulnerability to prospective memory errors when individuals are interrupted, required to defer intended actions, or required to perform habitual actions out of the normal sequence. In these situations, even the most skilled of pilots are vulnerable to forgetting to perform intended actions, even if those actions are highly practiced.
Most of these cognitive limitations create small bumps in our normal day-to-day activities and, one may argue, simply reveal our humanness. But in aviation and space flight, medicine, and many other work domains, errors associated with these limitations sometimes have fatal consequences.
Dismukes discussed two of the most important safeguards the airlines use to prevent and catch errors: checklists and monitoring. Monitoring refers to requiring each pilot to carefully check the actions of the other pilot and to keep track of the status of the aircraft's automation, configuration, and flight path. Although these two safeguards save many lives every year, they sometimes break down, for much the same reasons that humans are vulnerable to prospective memory errors. Dismukes and his colleague Ben Berman are collaborating with airlines to observe flight operations in the cockpit and to develop ways to increase the reliability of checklists and monitoring.
Aeronautics research (including human factors) has long been a cornerstone of NASA (Aeronautics is the first A in the acronym), and universities have depended on NASA funding as the primary source of funding in this domain. But the agency's Aeronautics program, administered by Dr. Lisa Porter, is being restructured to meet President Bush's focus on space exploration, and the President's proposed FY08 budget diminishes the spending power of the aeronautics program by over 40% since 2004. Further, the Aeronautics program has been re-oriented to emphasize disciplines such as aerodynamics over human performance and operational issues. These cuts have already forced NASA centers to substantially cut jobs and university grants in aeronautics research, especially in the area of human performance.
The Administration has undertaken an extremely expensive program to send humans to the Moon and then on to Mars, but without increasing NASA's budget; consequently, the agency's research programs are suffering. (Not just human performance research; earth observation research is also declining). As Congress considers the President's FY08 budget proposal for NASA, APA Science Government Relations will continue to lobby Appropriations staff in both chambers for greater investment in aeronautics research, especially research on human performance issues.
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Call to Action on Underage Drinking
On March 6, Geoff Mumford represented APA at a constituent briefing held at the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to announce the release of the Acting Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking. This is the first focused report on this topic to emerge from DHHS.
Acting Surgeon General Dr. Kenneth Moritsugu provided introductory remarks before turning the briefing over to Dr. Ting-Kai Li, Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and Dr. Terry Cline, Administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). In Dr Li's opening remarks, he noted that underage drinking is an international problem and that other countries are looking to the U.S. for leadership in developing solutions. He also said that individual patterns of underage drinking varied, and that understanding these individual differences might lead to more effective interventions. Additionally, Dr. Li reminded the audience that while not all young people drink, underage drinking can have unintended consequences that affect non-drinkers, including sexual assault, other forms of interpersonal violence, and traffic accidents.
Although Dr. Cline's appointment was only recently confirmed by the Senate, he hit the ground running and assumed the Chairmanship of the Interagency Committee staffing the report. In speaking to the group, he described SAMHSA's role in the development of the Call to Action (including 1,400 Town Hall Meetings across the country last year), as well as in the implementation of the recommendations, which will include a series of state rollouts to ensure the widest possible dissemination.
Several psychologists were involved in producing the report, but both the Acting Surgeon General and Dr. Li singled out Dr. Vivian Faden, NIAAA's Deputy Director, Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research, in recognition of her editorial contributions. Asked to comment on the report, Dr. Faden said, "As psychologists, we recognize the importance of considering problems in the context of overall human development. By adopting an overarching developmental framework, this first ever Surgeon General's Call to Action on underage drinking will profoundly influence the next generation of research and interventions in this area as well as serve as a valuable resource for everyone who interfaces with young people around this issue."
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DHS Centers of Excellence Expand Despite Cuts
On March 14, Geoff Mumford of Science GRO attended a Capitol Hill reception where Undersecretary Jay Cohen discussed the role of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) University Centers of Excellence (COEs) as the extramural funding arm of the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate. Currently, there are seven COEs (two of which are led by psychologists), and while the program faced possible termination last year, Admiral Cohen rescued it as part of a broader reorganization when he took over as head of the S&T Directorate in August of 2006. In fact, despite a proposed 20 percent budget cut in University Programs for 2008, DHS recently announced its solicitation for four additional COEs.
However, the aforementioned rescue came with some strings attached, as each COE was asked to align itself with the mission of one of the six new S&T Divisions. And while COEs are funded for six years at a time, every two years, three of the COEs will face re-competition with the caveat that any given COE can only be funded twice (i.e., a total of 12 years of possible funding). In addition, most of the Scholars and Fellows programs will be functionally turned over to the COEs to administer, and they will receive about 60 percent of the total pot of money to select and train students. The other 40 percent will be held in reserve and used by Cohen to foster the growth of homeland security studies at Minority Serving Institutions.
In a further elaboration of the new Divisions, Admiral Cohen spent the majority of the time discussing the critical importance of the Division he named Human Factors. Acknowledging the emphasis being placed on "risk-informed analysis", he indicated that he was turning to both the psychologists in the room as well as the National Academy of Sciences to ask their help in developing a better understanding of how to conduct science-based risk assessment. Several staff from the Innovation and Technology Subcommittee, the subcommittee of the House Science Committee with jurisdiction over DHS S&T, were also in attendance, and as a result of sidebar discussions at the reception, Mumford is working with them to set-up a "Risk Analysis 101" congressional briefing in April.
In a conversation with Cohen during the reception, Mumford took the opportunity to introduce himself, remind Cohen of their recent correspondence about the Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee (HSSTAC), and ask him directly when he planned to reconvene the HSSTAC. "Within three months", he said, which confirmed what other DHS senior staff had predicted when Mumford had asked about it at a recent Innovation and Technology hearing at which Cohen testified.
Both the hearing charter and Cohen’s testimony provided some of the most detailed information about the budget revealed to date. And while Human Factors is the smallest S&T Division, it is also one of the few slated for an increase in the FY08 budget request. It's clear that Cohen plans to run the Directorate as a platform for basic through applied research.
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Science Government Relations Co-Hosts Meeting with Top VA Officials
On March 19, APA co-sponsored the Friends of VA Medical Care and Health Research Coalition (FOVA) briefing for over 80 member organizations. Heather Kelly of the Science Government Relations Office (GRO) sits on the five-person FOVA Executive Committee, which put together the annual briefing to kick off its FY08 advocacy activities. Guest speakers included Department of Veterans Affairs Chief of Research and Development, Joel Kupersmith, MD; VA Deputy Chief of Patient Care Services for Mental Health, Ira Katz, MD, PhD; and Staff Director of the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Health, David Tucker.
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Re-Entry Legislation Re-Introduced
On March 20, APA member Dr. Roger Peters testified before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security of the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Peters is Chair and Professor in the Department of Mental Health Law and Policy at the University of South Florida, Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute in Tampa, Florida, where he conducts research on the integration of drug abuse treatment in criminal justice settings. The hearing was held in support of the Second Chance Act (H.R. 1593) and was well-attended despite an hour delay as the result of multiple floor votes.
Peters was joined on the witness panel by representatives of various corrections facilities, faith-based programs, Goodwill Industries, and non-profit residential work programs. Peters, the only scientist testifying, was selected as a witness after APA Science Policy staff contacted the subcommittee to suggest that the hearing include a research perspective. Following his testimony, Peters responded to a range of questions related to the importance of mental health services in offender rehabilitation; the effectiveness of short versus longer-term treatment services to those in re-entry programs; and the special needs of older offenders. A full transcript of the hearing is available here.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Science GRO staff accompanied Peters to see Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, who had expressed concerns during the hearing about the lingering effects of gang violence and prison rape on those trying to get a new start via re-entry programs. Peters invited Chairman Conyers and his staff to make a site visit to see his facilities in Tampa and the Chairman expressed interest. Science GRO staff will work with Peters and the Committee staff to facilitate scheduling the visit.
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Science Directorate's Executive Director Testifies Before Congress in Support of VA Funding
March 21st, APA's Executive Director for Science, Steve Breckler, headed to the Hill to testify before the House Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee. APA's testimony included requests for increased VA research funding, additional support for the Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP), and adequate funding for mental health care within the VA system, particularly in regard to personnel returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. There appears to be strong, bipartisan support for veterans issues within Congress, and the acting Chairman of the Subcommittee noted that he and his colleagues would continue their commitment to meeting the mental health needs of veterans. APA joined veterans groups in requesting an increase in the research account from its current level of $412 million (at which it has remained for several years) to $480 million in FY08. Veterans Affairs authorizing committees in both the House and Senate have signaled their support for this level of increase, and APA will continue to push for increased attention to research, training, and care within the VA as the appropriations season gets underway.
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NIMH Places High Priority on New Investigators
In a meeting with scientific and patient organizations on March 27, Dr. Tom Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, outlined some of the challenges the institute will face in the coming year. The final FY07 budget for NIMH was $1.4 billion, a mere .2 percent increase, which results in a cut when considering the rate of inflation for biomedical research is 3.7 percent. With overall success rates for investigators at around 14 percent, the institute is placing a high priority on funding new investigators. This year, NIMH will seek to fund 95 new investigators—its historical average—so those applying for their first award could have success rates closer to 25 percent. To further support the research pipeline, NIH has also added a new Innovator Award to its efforts to fund new investigators.
In discussing the latest priorities for the institute, Insel focused primarily on the needs for new treatment development. While acknowledging that genetics research doesn't provide any complete answers, he predicted that discoveries from genetics and whole genome association will provide a wealth of information on an individual's risk for mental disorders such as bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and autism and could transform the field of mental health research. While NIMH's clinical trials network has conducted several large effectiveness trials in bipolar disorder, adolescent depression, and depression, more needs to be done to find faster and more effective psychosocial and pharmacological treatments for the full range of mental disorders.
Want More NIMH News? The March edition of Inside NIMH is available here.
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Any questions?
If you have any questions regarding SPIN or specific science policy issues, please feel free to contact any of APA's Science GRO staff.
Geoff Mumford, PhD
Assistant Executive Director for Science Policy
email
Pat Kobor
Senior Science Policy Analyst
email
Heather O'Beirne Kelly, PhD
Senior Legislative and Federal Affairs Officer
email
Karen Studwell, JD
Senior Legislative and Federal Affairs Officer
email
Elizabeth Hoffman, PhD
Legislative and Federal Affairs Officer
email
Anne Bettesworth
Science Policy Associate
email
Kirk Waldroff
Science Website Manager
email
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