“The National Institutes of Health’s new strategic plan highlights data and diversity as critical components to realizing the future mission of its institutes.”
“The strategy — which updates the first five-year NIH-wide strategic plan released in 2016 — emphasizes three objectives: advance biomedical and behavioral science, develop and maintain scientific research capacity, and promote scientific integrity and public accountability.”
“The updates maintain goals of advancing basic biomedical research and enhancing the research workforce, and also includes new crosscutting themes that will drive the new objectives forward. These include focuses on:
- Improving minority health and reducing health disparities
- Enhancing women’s health
- Addressing public health challenges across the lifespan
- Promoting collaborative science
- Leveraging data science for biomedical discovery…”
“On the data maturity and resource front, the new strategic plan builds on the 2018 NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science, a roadmap of the agency’s data science activities. The 2018 plan also reinforces crosscutting collaboration across different agencies and groups of expertise, said NIH Associate Director for Data Science and Office of Data Science Strategy Director Susan Gregurick.”
“’Advances in biomedical data science require cross-disciplinary researchers to engage in data harmonization and sharing and have awareness of privacy and security, ethics and bias,’ Gregurick told GovernmentCIO Media & Research in an emailed statement. ‘NIH is partnering with [National Science Foundation] to engage data and computer scientists and engineers with clinicians, research participants, ethicists, and the public in its plans to address future challenges and opportunities.'”
“Gregurick said that to help NIH meet its goals in leveraging data in biomedical research over the next 5 years, her office is expanding on preexisting initiatives it started and also launching new ones. This includes building on STRIDES, for instance, to allow NIH to explore the use of cloud environments to streamline NIH data resources by partnering with commercial cloud providers…” Read the full article here.
Source: New NIH-Wide Strategic Plan Emphasizes Data, Diversity – By Melissa Harris, August 12, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
