Biophysical Society Bulletin | February 2018

Public Affairs

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Graduate Students Spared in the Final Tax Bill After a fierce lobbying effort by graduate students and others in higher education across the country and a considerable amount of press, Congress dropped the provision in the House tax bill that would have made the value of the tuition waivers taxable income. Graduate students will continue to be taxed on the salaries they receive for lab or teaching work, but not on the tuition discounts they receive. Thank you to the 270 members who sent over 950 messages to their elected officials letting them know how this provision would harm them and graduate education.

First Chief Facilities Officer BeginsWork at NSF

an additional 200 promising investigators. Promising inves- tigators were defined as those with no more than 10 years of NIH funding support. The targeted individuals would have scores in the top 25 percent of grant proposals. It turns out that implementation was difficult, the messaging was off, and NIH received push back on setting a 10-year deadline. At the December 15 meeting of the Advisory Council to the Director, NIH Deputy Director Larry Tabak announced that the plan will be tweaked to target younger and at-risk in- vestigators, defined as those who are at risk of losing all their funding. Tabak said NIH still hopes to award an additional 400 grants per year to this targeted group. He also clarified that not all investigators in these targeted groups who score in the top 25 percent of proposals will be funded by NGRI—it is just a benchmark indicating that these grants scored well and are worthy of funding. NIH had received calls from many inves- tigators in the targeted groups who scored within the top 25 percent and did not get funded; they felt misled. An NGRI working group is expected to release a report in June 2018, at which time, there will probably be additional tweaks to the program.

With the start of 2018, the National Science Foundation (NSF) added a new member to its management team. Jim Ulvestad is the agency’s first chief officer for research facilities. Congress directed NSF to create this position to improve oversight of NSF’s large facilities throughout their lifecycles. He will also work with the newly created Facilities Governance Board to develop standards

Jim Ulvestad

for facilities operations, and oversee the Foundation’s mid- scale research infrastructure program. Prior to assuming this role, Ulvestad was the acting head of NSF’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate. NIH Revises the Next Generation Researchers Initiative Just six months after scrapping a plan to limit funding per investigator to free up money for young investigators and replacing it with the Next Generation Researchers Initiative (NGRI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced changes to that program. Through NGRI, NIH had planned to annually fund an additional 200 early career investigators and

President Trump provided some insight into his vision for the 2019 federal budget in the State of the Union on January 30. His full budget proposal is due to Congress on February 5.

February 2018

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