Ellie Ehrenfeld leaving CSR

The scientist who has led the massive overhaul of the National Institute of Health's (NIH) grant application review process is stepping down at the end of the month. Ellie Ehrenfeld, director of the NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR), formerly the Division of Research Grants, says now that the design for the reorganization has been finalized and full implementation is expected to be completed in a year, she's accomplished most of what she can. "There is a period of time… between 5 and 8 years usually," said the biochemist, "after which you have solved all the problems you're going to solve. After that it's just time for someone else to come in and solve problems they can solve." Ehrenfeld began her grant review reevaluation when she became CSR director 7 years ago.The problem whose solution she initiated and oversaw was mammoth. No systematic assessment of the adequacy of the reviewing study section boundaries separating academic fields, and whether they mirror the boundaries that have evolved, had been conducted in the past 50 years, said Ehrenfeld. "Everybody is aware that science has changed very dramatically in recent years," she added. "In many instances moving the field forward now requires broad collaborative multidisciplinary efforts from a much more complicated spectrum of fields."The review of NIH reviewing that Ehrenfeld led was itself collaborative, soliciting the continuing input from each field's professional organization over several years. The new system includes a built-in monitoring function to rereview study section boundaries at regular intervals. "She will be remembered as having an incredible amount of energy and thoughtful foresight as to how to better do peer review, which is really the gem of science in this country," said Susan Berget, a professor of biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine and a member of CSR's scientific advisory committee. Reviewing in other countries is more often the purview of higher-ups in the funding bureaucracy, not peers, Berget noted.In the job Ehrenfeld held prior to coming to NIH, dean of the school of biological sciences at the University of California (UC), Irvine, from 1992 until 1996, she initiated a reorganization of the graduate program to eliminate duplications in training with the medical school's similar program. "She wasn't a fan of artificial boundaries," said Barbara Hamkalo, a professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at the UC Irvine School of Biological Sciences. "She was a fan of, 'Let's try an experiment, no reason not to try.'"Ehrenfeld has also been a leader in NIH's new initiative to shift a small portion of its funding, perhaps 15 to 20%, away from conservative, certain-to-succeed projects to high-risk, high-impact, innovative proposals that NIH doesn't now fund. "It's like saying, if you're talking about your own investment portfolio and you put everything in bonds, you might want to take a small percentage of your portfolio and invest in some venture capital," she explained.Ehrenfeld acknowledged that there have been disappointments during her time at CSR. Fully implementing an NIH-wide shift from paper to electronic applications was supposed to take 2 years when she arrived 7 years ago, but it probably won't be completed until 2 years from now, she said. "She's had a hard time convincing the NIH to give her the resources necessary to handle the increasing grant load she's had to deal with," added Berget. Because NIH's funding has doubled over the past 5 years, grant applications have increased 70% since Ehrenfeld arrived in 1996.Ehrenfeld will continue as chief of the Picornavirus Replication Section in NIH's Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, the job she has held concurrently with her CSR post. Although she is returning to her lab, Ehrenfeld told The Scientist that she is open to new possibilities that she couldn't ethically pursue before because her job decisions affected nearly every major university and research organization in the country. "I have no specific plans at the moment," she said. "You can make all the plans you want, and, in general, things just sort of happen."No successor to Ehrenfeld has been named, but NIH Director Elias Zerhouni will soon be announcing an acting director and the formation of a search committee to identify a new CSR director, according CSR spokesman Don Luckett.

Ellie Ehrenfeld leaving CSR

Architect of 7-year NIH grant review overhaul will return to research

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