Inside STAT: Racial disparity in NIH funding partly driven by research topic 

Biomedical researchers — especially those at the NIH — have long known that black scientists receive grant funding from the agency at a lower rate than their white colleagues. And a newly published study suggests that the bias may partially lie in the kinds of research that get funded. Looking at nearly 160,000 grant applications from 2011-2015, NIH scientists found that clinical research that focused on population-level interventions and socioeconomic disparities is less likely to be funded than research on cellular and molecular mechanisms. At the same time, black researchers are more likely to be working in areas that focus on patient- and community-level interventions, making these scientists less likely to receive NIH funding. All told, the choice of research topic accounted for 20% of the funding gap between black and white researchers. I have the full story here.