Summary of Our 1st Career Dev Webinar: LGBT Opportunities at NIH

Are you a student interested in health? Then we need you to get graduated and trained as fast as possible — because we desperately need more leaders in LGBT health and health research. We’ve got major gaps in LGBT health research, esp in tobacco & cancer & subpopulation disparities… and we know we won’t get those gaps filled until we expand the pipeline of incoming researchers. The Network for LGBT Health Equity has had great experiences in youth development over the years, and we’ve had some really positive collaborations with junior researchers, see our recent Huffington Post piece as one example of that fruit. So we love spreading the word about health needs through the ranks of next leaders and clearly offering you career development insights is one smart way to do that. So — if you weren’t able to join us for the NIH leadership webinar, see some highlights here, and if you’re interested in being notified of future health leadership development opportunities, email us directly at healthnetwork@lgbtcenters.org.

Dr. Sharon Milgram is the head of NIH’s Intramural Office of Training & Education. She gave us a great romp through the many training opportunities NIH has for everyone from high school students (Summer Internship Program) through to postdocs. First step in finding out about most of these is heading off to http://www.training.nih.gov and exploring the options that fit you. Actually that Summer Internship Program (SIP) is one of the most popular programs and a great way to start off before you go for more indepth commitments, (like their sweet $20k a year scholarship programs). If you want to get in the SIP they’ve got a video on the website about how to apply. Important thing to know is that the application just puts you in the database for folk to search, in order to really be in contention you need to find researchers whose work interests you and contact them. Now to be fair, one of the webinar folk searched the intramural research database and not one instance of “LGBT” or even “gay” research is in it… so Sharon urges us to be openminded about what we can maybe add a good LGBT perspective to! And if you can’t figure out which scientists have work that fits, Sharon has offered to be a matchmaker for folk, you can contact her directly at milgrams@od.nih.gov, and tell her we sent you!