LAUSR

Certainly, one of the biggest challenges in pursuing a researchoriented academic career is being awarded your first large grant, an R01, from the National Institutes of Health. In general, domestic or foreign, public or private, non-profit or for-profit organizations are eligible to receive NIH grants. One does not need to be a US citizen or permanent resident to apply for an R01. So, for the purposes of giving advice on how to obtain an R01, this advice can be used by the international readership of Pediatric Research. Even those who have obtained a K award will find the transition to an R award daunting. In a recent comment, Good et al observe the limited achievement of NIH independent R funding by pediatric K award recipients. And not much has changed in supporting this transition since 2018 when Alan Jobe wrote in his commentary “the academic pyramid to a successful career in pediatric research is in tatters”. Thus we are writing this editorial so that early career investigators may have a better chance of obtaining independent funding. Co-author Ben Gaston, a reasonably successful and well-funded pediatric researcher—who also has been on a number of NIH study sections—once offered the following advice to a junior faculty member who was starting to write an R01. Here, we offer it more generally to the pediatric research community.