New Award for Mid-Career Investigators

This is the first time Hope is offering the award, a two-year fellowship that offers $50,000 annually for salary support, for a total of $100,000. Funding is aimed at helping those investigators just a bit further along than our young investigators to work on SWOG clinical trials. Other projects that use SWOG resources (e.g., specimens or data) may be eligible.

The application deadline is 5 p.m. EST on March 1. If you’re interested, here are the eligibility criteria for applicants:

• Must hold a faculty appointment at a SWOG member institution
• Must be a SWOG member at time of award
• Must be 7-14 years out from completion of fellowship, or demonstrate 7-14 years of research experience
• Must have a minimum of 25 percent protected time for research
• Must not have an active multi-year career development award (K-Award, ACS, DOD)

For complete details on the award, and the application, please visit the Hope grant page here.

I’m thrilled with this new Hope award. It emerged from a conversation held at the March 2018 Hope board retreat. We were discussing our successful support for early career investigators - but the group noted that we had another significant unmet need. With fewer NCI sponsored trials, and trial funding from all sources being tighter, we talked about the necessity of providing a broader (or at least longer) continuum of research and educational support for our scientific leaders. While we have a pretty good variety of Hope programs aimed at young investigators, the board quickly determined that mid-career investigators potentially needed grant support as well.

These same sentiments were shared last month at our committee chairs’ retreat, with leadership talking about the importance of keeping mid-career researchers engaged in SWOG and offering them the opportunity to actively run their own trials in the group.

Mid-career support makes sense all around – for investigators, for SWOG, for the National Cancer Institute, and for the NCTN. Experienced researchers of course have much to contribute. Some just need a bit more time, and some additional funding, to launch their own projects and help us meet our mission of improving the lives of people touched by cancer.

As always, I am grateful to Hope for allowing us to help another group of SWOG investigators. I hope those eligible will take advantage of this new program! It’s been a long time in the planning, but this week, it arrived.