C&EN talks with Noni Byrnes, who leads grant review at the NIH

Abstract

For many scientists, grant review at the US National Institutes of Health is a black box. But Noni Byrnes, the director of the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR), wants to shine a light into a process that affects the lives of thousands of scientists every year and sets the direction of health-related research in the US. “When you don’t know what’s going on, you’re much more likely to assume the worst,” Byrnes says from the CSR’s offices in Bethesda, Maryland. “Any attempt we have to make the process transparent, to bring more people into our system, is going to help that.” The CSR is the prime facilitator of peer review at the NIH, with its staff of 500 handling 77% of the agency’s grant applications. The staff manage more than 18,000 reviewers evaluating 62,000 grants from over 200 topical study sections. Byrnes is relatively new to the job—she officially