The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, in collaboration with the American Heart Association, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the John Templeton, Rita Allen, and Walder foundations, has announced grants totaling $12.1 million in support of early-career faculty at U.S. medical schools.

Grants were awarded through the COVID-19 Fund to Retain Clinical Scientists (FRCS) program, the nation’s largest funding collaborative aimed at advancing equity in the biomedical sciences by supporting policies, practices, and processes that advance the research productivity and retention of early-career faculty who face growing family caregiving responsibilities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty-two medical schools and their affiliated hospitals will receive grants of $550,000 each to deploy programs that provide eligible faculty who are experiencing periods of caregiving crisis with supplemental support for their research, such as hiring administrative personnel, statisticians, and technicians. The funding is expected to enable at least two hundred and fifty researchers to keep their important work on track while tending to the needs of their families.

Recipient institutions include Boston University, Emory University, Ohio State University, UT Southwestern Medical Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Pittsburgh, University of Utah, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center/Meharry Medical College.

According to FRCS, the pandemic has exacerbated the caregiving demands often borne disproportionately by women and people of color. The sciences have been especially hard hit, putting at risk decades of gains in greater representation of women in those fields. Even before the pandemic, studies pointed to unsupported family caregiving as a likely factor behind the loss of more than 40 percent of early-career physicians at their first full-time faculty appointments at academic medical schools within ten years, and COVID-19 has led to bioscience researchers, especially those with dependents, spending as much as 40 percent less time on research, while a National Academies of Sciences survey of women faculty found that 58 percent of respondents faced childcare or eldercare demands and most were shouldering a majority of school and childcare responsibilities.

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