Hello! Thank you for visiting the I Am Intramural Blog. Our goal is to bring you thoughts and experiences from scientists and clinicians of the NIH Intramural Research Program. If you have questions about the blog, please email IRPinfo@mail.nih.gov.
Most workplaces would never think of having hawks, turtles, beetles and stick bugs at an event for kids—but most workplaces are not the National Institutes of Health. Each year, the NIH Bethesda campus holds its Earth Day celebration in conjunction with Take Your Child to Work Day. Employees share their love of science with their kids while also learning about how to protect the environment.
If you’ve ever skipped meals for a whole day or gone on a strict, low-calorie diet, you know just how powerful the feeling of hunger can be. Your stomach may growl and rumble, but, ultimately, it’s your brain that signals when to start eating—and when to stop. So, learning more about the brain’s complex role in controlling appetite is crucial to efforts to develop better ways of helping the millions of Americans afflicted with obesity.
Have you ever wondered why someone becomes a biochemist or a biophysicist, or how to find a career in both fields at the same time? Peter Bandettini, Ph.D., is Director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Facility and Chief of the Unit on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In the interview below, he shares some thoughts on what motivates him and what it's like working at the NIH IRP.
Welcome to LabTV! If you haven’t already, take a look at this video. I hope you will enjoy meeting the first young scientist featured in this brand new series that I’ve chosen to highlight on my blog. The inspiration for LabTV comes from Jay Walker, who is the founder of PriceLine, and curator and chairman of TEDMED, an annual conference focused on new ideas in health and medicine.
Postdocs help power aging research. They receive NIA funding for training. They work with and for NIA grantees. In-house at NIA, they are a critical component of research conducted in NIA labs, which we call “intramural” research. Across the research community, postdoctoral research fellows contribute the long hours necessary to organize and implement research activities. I know this because I am one of them, and colleagues, I see how hard you work!
In 2007, the NIH Clinical Center (CC) established two research nursing roles that are critical to the success of the many studies undertaken at the CC. Clinical Research Nurses (CRN) are staff nurses who focus on caring for research participants, while also providing support for studies in a clinical delivery setting. Research Nurse Coordinators (RCN) are responsible for managing research studies and enormous amounts of data collection. They are in charge of recruiting and enrolling participants, maintaining study consistency, and overseeing regulatory adherence.
Phoenix, Arizona, received its name from a British pioneer named Darrell Duppa. When he saw what was left of prehistoric settlements built by the Hohokam civilization thousands of years before his arrival, he knew that another great civilization would “rise from these ashes” just like the mythic bird. The desert city is today home to the Phoenix Epidemiology and Clinical Research Branch, one of six IRP research campuses.
Each day, hundreds of thousands of biomedical researchers around the world design and execute studies, with diverse trajectories and outcomes and where success is based largely on reproducibility. However, a large percentage of experiments using cell culture techniques have been labelled as irreproducible, with around 25 percent of all cell-line research described as either contaminated with other cells or mischaracterized in some way. In other words, if your kidney cancer cell isn’t really a kidney cancer line, then how will anyone else be able to reproduce your work?
Jill Koshiol, Ph.D., is an epidemiologist and one of eight Stadtman Investigators who joined the NIH IRP in 2009-2010, the search's inaugural recruitment year. As a tenure-track principal investigator within the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG), Dr. Koshiol and her team study the epidemiology of infectious agents and cancer, and they are increasingly interested in the role of immune stimulation and inflammation in carcinogenesis.
In the following Q&A, Dr. Koshiol shares some thoughts on how she became a scientist and what's its like to conduct biomedical research at the NIH IRP.
February 19, 2015 kicked off one of the largest celebrations on Earth, the Chinese New Year. For the next 15 days, people around the world ushered in good luck and prosperity by gathering with friends and loved ones to celebrate the Year of the Goat—or Sheep, depending on translation—which is the eighth animal of 12 within the Chinese zodiac. Looking back 24 trips-around-the-sun, to the year of the Goat/Sheep in 1991, it was a particularly busy and successful time for the NIH IRP.
This page was last updated on Thursday, January 20, 2022
