Twenty six scientific societies and organizations, including NSC Alliance, as well as more than 280 individual researchers, have expressed support for a BioScience editorial by Drs. Charles Fenster and Scott Collins that calls for restoring the Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG) program within the Divisions of Environmental Biology (DEB) and Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS) at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Biological Sciences Directorate (BIO).
“DDIGs facilitated the development of independent researchers and provided the opportunity for early-career scientists to chart their own research paths,” the authors note. The program was terminated for DEB and IOS in 2017 due to increased proposal workload and changes in agency priorities.
View the organizational and individual endorsements.
On April 4, AIBS shared the endorsements for DDIG and its goals with NSF-BIO officials and urged them to think of new, alternative ways to meet those goals as they consider new programming.