MSFHR Career awardees successful in leveraging funds

A new study by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research indicates MSFHR-funded Career awardees are more successful in obtaining national awards than their unfunded counterparts. The study investigated “leverage” in terms of additional Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) awards secured by both funded and unfunded MSFHR Career applicants in the five years subsequent to the MSFHR award start date. 

The MSFHR Career Investigator Program supports the recruitment and retention of new and mid-career investigators by providing salary contributions that allow successful applicants to devote major portions of their time to research.

“We know that many of the 283 Scholars and Senior Scholars we’ve funded to date in our Career Investigator Program have been able to leverage their MSFHR awards significantly,” says Dr. John Challis, MSFHR President & CEO. “But this is the first time we have quantified the effect.”

The analysis compared the annual amount of CIHR funding held by MSFHR-funded Career awardees to that of unfunded Career award applicants, for the five years following the start of MSFHR award. Both the funded and unfunded groups were almost identically distributed across the four CIHR research themes: biomedical, clinical, health services, and population/public health. The cumulative difference between the funded and unfunded groups for the five years after the MSFHR award start date was $321,000 per researcher.

“The results clearly indicate that MSFHR Career awardees perform significantly better than the unfunded Career applicants in terms of CIHR funding,” says Dr. Martin Schechter, MSFHR Chief Scientific Officer. “And while CIHR funding is only one measure of research effectiveness, it has the advantage of being readily available, reliable, and fair, because the investigators are judged by national panels on a level playing field.”

“It is increasingly important that funding agencies demonstrate return on investment,” adds Dr. Challis. “For our part, this is just one of several analyses of different kinds that we will be doing on a regular basis to help determine the impact of MSFHR programs.”

Read the full report.