NIH Loan Repayment Program

[pirateyoho]

Any other vet students interested in research looked into this or have any personal experience with it? I hadn't ever heard of it before today.

"If you commit at least two years to conducting qualified research funded by a domestic nonprofit organization or U.S. federal, state, or local government entity, NIH may repay up to $35,000 of your qualified student loan debt per year, including most undergraduate, graduate, and medical school loans. Loan repayment benefits are in addition to the institutional salary you receive for your research."

https://www.lrp.nih.gov/about_the_programs/index.aspx

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[WhtsThFrequency]

It's a great program, but the problem is it is aimed at almost purely human-focused research (especially the clinical medicine category which has the largest number of awards - that is strictly for patient research), and the categories can sometimes be difficult to apply even to animal models of human disease (e.g. health disparity research). No veterinary or animal model research would likely qualify in any of the categories unless there was a significant human medicine component (i.e. you are working primarily with human patients or samples, and your other disease models are secondary or supporting). But yes, it's a nice option if you can get it.

E.g. when you look at the fine print:

"NIH defines clinical research as "patient-oriented clinical research" conducted with human subjects, or research on the causes and consequences of disease in human populations involving material of human origin (such as tissue specimens and cognitive phenomena) for which an investigator or colleague directly interacts with human subjects in an outpatient or inpatient setting to clarify a problem in human physiology, pathophysiology or disease, or epidemiological or behavioral studies, outcomes research or health services research, or developing new technologies, therapeutic interventions, or clinical trials."

http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-15-121.html