We know this community is familiar with the NIH, the nation’s biomedical research agency and major federal funder of academic medicine. But the NIH isn’t the only science game in town. How well do you know the National Science Foundation (NSF)? NSF is an independent federal agency that supports basic research, including approximately 25% of all federally-supported basic research at America’s colleges and universities.
Here are five things you probably didn’t know about the NSF:
- NSF-funded research has led to innovations and technologies used across medicine. DNA sequencing and clinical tests for several diseases, including COVID-19, rely on polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a process made feasible by an NSF-funded discovery of bacteria from thermal pools at Yellowstone National Park. NSF has also long supported the research of Jennifer Doudna on bacterial innate immunity, which led to the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas system of gene editing for which Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
- Several Nobel laureates with ties to medical schools and teaching hospitals have gotten their start with or received NSF funding. In addition to Doudna, NSF also provided support to Francis H. Arnold (2018, chemistry), David Julius (2021, physiology or medicine), and Paul Modrich (2015, chemistry) among many others. Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley, the Nobel laureates whose research helped develop the algorithm for the residency Match® and organ donation matching, received multiple NSF awards for research in game theory and mathematical economics.
- NSF partners with NIH to fund research in areas of interest to the medical community. NSF programs such as Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) and Enabling Discovery through Genomics are co-funded by NIH. Of note, EEID funded research identified the source of the 2002 SARS outbreak and has aided in advancing knowledge around malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, Lyme disease, and more.
- NSF supports research across the sciences and engineering, with an impact on medicine. The agency funds programs focused on biological anthropology, biomaterials, genetic mechanisms, mathematical biology, neuroscience, robotics, synthetic biology, and more. Even programs in the economic sciences have relevance to academic medicine: NSF-supported a team of economists – including Nobel Prize awardees Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banarjee – in researching the most effective ways to communicate medical information (physicians are among the most trusted communicators).
- NSF also funds infrastructure at medical schools and teaching hospitals. Just this year, NSF’s Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure II (MSRI-II) program provided support for the development of a geographically distributed Network for Advanced Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NAN), led by the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. The network will allow researchers across the country to have access to ultra-high field nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers to study the structure, dynamics and interactions of biological systems and small molecules.
Fans of NSF, we want to hear from you! Has this agency funded any of your research? Tell us about it.
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Jodi Yellin
Director, Science Policy
Association of American Medical Colleges
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