Washington Update

NIGMS Advisory Council Discusses Training and Workforce Development Priorities

By: CJ Neely
Thursday, February 12, 2026
At its February meeting, the Advisory Council to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) received an update on training and workforce development activities from Kenneth Gibbs, PhD, Director of the Division of Training and Workforce Development (TWD). The presentation reviewed NIGMS’s training portfolio and outlined current priorities and planned updates across programs.

Dr. Gibbs emphasized that NIGMS will continue to advance its training mission primarily through parent Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs), consistent with NIH-wide efforts to reduce administrative burden. He also noted that clinically focused training areas will remain in place but will transition from the institutional postdoctoral T32 mechanism to parent K12 awards.

Program evaluation informs updates to the institute’s basic biomedical predoctoral research training framework. The revised framework restructures the existing 12 training domains into eight proposed training areas. The eight proposed predoctoral training areas are:
  • Behavioral–Biomedical Sciences Interface
  • Biostatistics
  • Biotechnology
  • Cellular, Biochemical, and Molecular Sciences
  • Chemistry–Biology Interface
  • Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Data Science
  • Systems and Integrative Biology
  • Trans-Departmental Basic Biomedical Sciences
Several of these areas reflect longstanding components of the NIGMS training portfolio. Dr. Gibbs also noted that there will be no cap on the number of T32 awards that may be made to a single institution. The revised framework is intended to simplify structure while preserving breadth across the biomedical sciences, increase flexibility for institutions, and reduce administrative complexity.

Council discussion also highlighted the Trans-Departmental Basic Biomedical Sciences training area, which was announced in 2023 and is designed to broaden the institutional and geographic distribution of NIGMS supported training. This area focuses on strengthening organizational capacity for basic biomedical research training and supporting students across a wide range of biomedical disciplines, with encouragement for applications from institutions with few or no NIH supported predoctoral T32 awards and from institutions in IDeA states.