Purpose
The Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Development Award provides grants to junior physician-scientists to facilitate their transition to independent clinical research careers.
Rationale & History
The transition to an independent research career is often more difficult for physician-scientists conducting clinical research than it is for other researchers, as these individuals must balance both the demands of seeing patients with those of conducting research. The Medical Research Program created the Clinical Scientist Development Award to provide mentored research funding to early career physician-scientist faculty to enable their transition to independence.
Since the beginning of the program in 1998, the foundation has awarded 185 Clinical Scientist Development Awards totaling approximately $80 million.
2012 CSDA Competition Overview
The deadline for nominations has passed. This information is provided for reference only.
The foundation plans to award up to 12 grants in 2012 of $150,000 per year in direct costs and $12,000 per year in indirect costs over three years to junior faculty level physician-scientists conducting clinical research in any disease area.
Nominations
Each U.S. accredited, degree-granting institution may nominate up to two candidates. For this purpose, an institution is defined as all affiliated graduate schools (including schools of public health), related hospitals and research institutes.
Different divisions, departments, hospitals, centers or schools of the same degree-granting institution should confer to submit one slate of nominees. Deans of medical schools are encouraged to confer with schools of public health or other appropriate graduate schools within their institution.
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation values the diversity of the nominees; thus, we are collecting data on race/ethnicity and gender to measure progress in the nomination of diverse applicants. Biographical information about the nominee – year of birth, gender, and race/ethnicity – are for statistical purposes only, will only be described in aggregate and will not be provided to the review panel.
Eligibility
It is the responsibility of each institution to ensure that its nominees meet all of the eligibility requirements. The replacement of nominees will not be permitted.
A nominee must:
- Be a physician-scientist conducting clinical research in any disease area.
- Have received an M.D. or a foreign equivalent from an accredited institution.
- Be working in a U.S. degree-granting institution, but do not have to be a U.S. citizen.
- Have a full-time faculty level position not higher than the Assistant Professor level. Full-time post-fellowship Instructor positions will be considered full-time faculty level appointments only when these positions are recognized as such by the nominating institution. Adjunct or acting positions are not eligible.
- Have been appointed to their first full-time faculty level position between January 1, 2007 and January 1, 2012.
- Be guaranteed a minimum overall research time protection of 75% effort by the nominating institution.
- Not be the principal or co-principal investigator on a National Institute of Health R01 research grant, a research project that is part of a P01 program project or P50 center grant, or a U01 cooperative agreement.
There are no fellowship level or research associate level awards as part of this competition.
Applicants are allowed to hold a National Institutes of Health K series award or other career development award at the same time as the CSDA grant. However, applicants must propose distinct and different research aims in their CSDA application, and there should be no scientific or budgetary overlap.
Experiments that utilize animals or primary tissues derived from animals will not be supported by this program.
Selection Process
An advisory panel of distinguished scientific leaders in major disease areas will review the proposals based on the criteria listed in the Request for Nominations and will recommend the strongest proposals for funding to the DDCF.
Read the Request for Nominations for complete details.