This figure does not capture research traineeships through operating grants, or through the RTC or STIHR programs.
Given that your putative new PI has already told you that she can't support you on a research grant, a traineeship would seem to be the obvious alternative.
The two most common types of support for researchers at U.S. universities are traineeships and research grants.
The report's meandering discussion of the relative pros and cons of fellowships, traineeships, and research assistance highlights the lack of consensus across funding agencies and within the community itself on an issue at the heart of how graduate education is financed.
On the other hand, women and groups underrepresented in the scientific workforce receive a greater share of NIH-funded fellowship and traineeship slots than research assistantships.
A National Institutes of Health (NIH) taskforce recently recommended decreasing the number of graduate students supported on research assistantships, and instead favoring traineeship and fellowship funding mechanisms.
Extramural LRP recipients must have received a postdoctoral National Research Service Award, an individual postdoctoral fellowship (F32), an institutional postdoctoral traineeship (T32), an R01 research grant, or any of a dozen or so other NIH research grants, career development awards, and cooperative agreements.
"The shift from traineeships and fellowships to research assistantships began in the mid-1980s and increased rapidly in the early part of this century with the doubling of the NIH budget," Research Universities says.
The measure also would give big boosts to NSF's prestigious graduate research fellowships and its interdisciplinary graduate traineeships (IGERT), as well as boosting the number of schools offering professional science master's degree programs.
There's an easy way to illustrate the problem: A search of NIH's CRISP database on "hypertrophic cardiomyopathy" results in 43 hits from the current year, but almost all of those are R01's (research grants), K08's (mentored clinical traineeships), or P-series program grants.
Students on the university-based "Global traineeship in sustainable electronics" program are helping to research soy-base resins for circuit board construction, which could one day replace petroleum-based components.
