Here are the award rates for 11 different postdoc fellowships in 2019.
There’s a huge variation in success rates: four different organizations fund fewer than 6% of applications that they receive, while the success rates for the K99 and F32 are >24%.
To back up - my appointment at CSHL let me run a lab without doing a postdoc, so I never had the experience of applying for these grants. To help out my current postdocs, I wanted to make up for my lack of experience by doing some research.
I collected the award rates for each of these grants either from the org’s website or by emailing them directly. (I included an asterisk to indicate uncertainty. For instance, Beckman said they received “over” 150 applications, and I used 150 as the denominator).
It was really striking to me how low the success rate is for some of these grants! <3% for LSRF and Hope! That’s less than half the award rate of the ultra-prestigious, ultra-competitive DP2 “New Innovator” grant for PIs.
The F32 has the highest award rate (28%), but there’s variability between institutes. It ranges from 0% (NHGRI: Human Genome) to 80% (NCCIH: Complementary & Integrative Medicine).
In related news, my lab’s postdocs will now be studying the effects of yoga on genomic instability.
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