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Public Health On Call

975 - A Tumultuous Year for NIH Funding

Public Health On Call

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

News, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.6 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

About this episode:

Between lawsuits, layoffs, and lags in funding, NIH has undergone significant changes in how it reviews and approves grant proposals for critical research. In this episode: Jeremy Berg, a former NIH leader, talks about what's changed and what's to come for indirect cost reimbursements, funding approvals, and the scientific research ecosystem as a whole.

Guests:

Jeremy M. Berg, PhD, is a professor of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also the Associate Senior Vice Chancellor of Science Strategy and Planning. He previously served as the Director of the National Institute for General Medical Sciences at NIH.

Host:

Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Transcript information:

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

0:05.9

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

0:16.3

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.edu.

0:23.8

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

0:31.5

It's Lundee Smith-Rogers.

0:33.7

Today, what's happening with NIH funding for scientific research and, more broadly, the future of the partnership between universities and the federal government?

0:42.9

I speak with Dr. Jeremy Berg, a former NIH Institute director who has been closely following the changes since January.

0:50.8

Let's listen. Dr. Jeremy Berg, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call.

0:55.5

Would you start off by giving us a little bit of background about you and your work?

0:59.4

Certainly.

1:00.0

Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here.

1:01.8

So I was actually at Hopkins for a long time.

1:04.3

I started off my career as a postdoc and was on faculty first at Homewood and then in the medical school.

1:09.6

So I have roots in Baltimore.

1:12.2

My left had become director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH, which is

1:16.8

one of the 27 institutes in 2003. And I spent there from 2003 to 2011. And then me and my wife,

1:25.3

who's a Hopkins, MD PhD alum, moved to University of Pittsburgh

1:29.2

where we've been ever since. And so today we're going to talk about NIH funding. You've been

1:34.5

really following this closely for the last year or so. Would you talk to us about where the overall

1:39.8

ecosystem of scientific research funding is at this moment now and what contributed to where it is?

1:45.8

Sure. So I was in a somewhat unusual position in that I had been an institute director,

1:51.4

so I sort of understood how NIH normally functioned from the inside, and I'd been a long time

...

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