Stanford top in radiology research funding with $182M since 2012
California-based Stanford University is No. 1 in diagnostic radiology research funding from the National Institutes of Health, collecting some $135 million since 2012, according to new research.
The University of California, San Francisco, meanwhile, leads the way in interventional radiology funding with about $37 million collected through 2025. And the University of Michigan is tops for radiation oncology, earning about $68 million in NIH funding, experts detail in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
With about $1.65 billion doled out between 2012 and 2025, much of the total was concentrated among top institutions. Five universities accounted for more than 38% of the funding total and nearly 35% of all grants, experts note.
“These findings have implications for policy and workforce development,” lead author Ajay Malhotra, MD, with the department of radiology at the Yale School of Medicine, and colleagues wrote Oct. 29. “Strategies to broaden the institutional base of NIH-funded clinician research in radiology could include targeted mentorship programs, multi-institutional research collaborations, and increased investment in career development awards at institutions with emerging research programs,” they added.
For the study, Malhotra et al. extracted NIH research records from the institute’s database, filtering investigators by specialty. They identified a total of 437 unique clinician researchers, including 226 in diagnostic radiology, 46 in interventional care, and 165 more for radiation oncology. NIH-funded clinicians were distributed across 47 different institutions in diagnostics, 29 in IR, and 45 for radiation oncology.
Stanford University received the largest total clinician funding since 2012 with $182 million across 277 grants. UC San Francisco was next with $117 million, followed by the University of Michigan ($116 million), the Washington University in St. Louis ($114 million), and the University of Pennsylvania ($104 million). Among 58 institutions with clinician funding, dollars were unevenly distributed, the authors noted. The top 10 universities accounted for nearly 59% of funds, the study found, underlining the need to further distribute these dollars.
“NIH funding among radiology clinician investigators is concentrated at a small number of academic medical centers, principally because those centers host larger clinician investigator workforces, with substantial variation in institutional leadership across DR, IR, and RO,” the authors concluded. “These findings highlight opportunities to broaden research capacity and strengthen clinician scientist pipelines.”
Read more, including potential study limitations, in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.