NHGRI conducts evaluation of CEGS Program

As stewards of federal funds, the institutes and centers that make up NIH are expected to take a critical and evaluative look at their programs and to use the resulting information from those evaluations to drive priority setting and other future planning. Recently, a group of experts - led by Chris Gunter, Ph.D., and including Molly Bird, Ph.D., Maya VanZanten, and a group from Ripple Effect, Inc. - completed a large-scale evaluation of the institute's Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS) Program. The CEGS Program was launched in 2000 and has supported research at 31 centers to date.

The CEGS Program aims to develop new concepts, methods, approaches, tools, and technologies by bringing together multidisciplinary groups of investigators and tackling major genomics challenges. The centers are required to develop outreach plans to enhance the diversity of researchers and research participants and to share data and related resources with the broader research community. To date, the centers have pursued using a "high-risk, high-reward" model, aiming to have a high degree of novelty, strong potential for making a major impact on the field, integrated approaches, and the ability to take scientific risks in pursuit of significant advances. Both developing new technologies and linking existing technologies to biological challenges have proven to be fundamental to the CEGS program

In examining the CEGS Program to date, Dr. Gunter and her collaborators performed a mixed-methods evaluation by interviewing principal investigators, surveying other researchers, and conducting a bibliometric analysis of the work supported by the CEGS grants. For additional context, the team also compiled a comparison group of individual investigator grants. The resulting comparative data were used to assess the impact of the CEGS Program relative to other NHGRI-funded efforts, including the program's influence on genomics knowledge and research applications and the career trajectories of CEGS grantees

Detailed findings of the CEGS Program evaluation can be found on genome.gov, but several high-level summary features deserve highlighting. Since 2000, CEGS grants have yielded 14 times more patents per grant than subject-comparable individual investigator grants, in keeping with their mission to develop new technologies and tools. CEGS grants also produced more papers - including more highly cited papers - per grant than comparable R01 grants, though CEGS grants produced fewer papers per million dollars of funding. This last feature is likely due in part to the additional requirements for infrastructure and outreach associated with CEGS grants.

Additionally, CEGS-supported scientists at all educational levels felt that the CEGS grants contributed to their careers and provided them opportunities that would not have otherwise been available. The CEGS principal investigators noted that the relative strengths of the CEGS grant mechanism include its high-risk, high-reward nature and its focus on technology development with links to biological questions. Suggestions for improving the CEGS Program included broadening the focus beyond DNA and RNA; increasing training opportunities and resources; and developing a smaller or shorter version of CEGS grants.

This evaluation of the CEGS Program is the first among a number of planned efforts to conduct thorough examinations of NHGRI-funded programs. The gathered information and analyses will help NHGRI to improve programs going forward and inform future priority setting and programmatic development.<_o3a_p>