"Where the Money Goes: Institutional Distribution of NIH Funding Among Radiology Clinician-Scientists (2012-2025)".
Oct 29, 2026DOI: 10.1016/j.jacr.2026.10.026Journal ArticleJACR
Written by: Ajay MalhotraKeervani KandalaKyle TegtmeyerPaul Timothy GomezSiddhi SinghaniaXiao WuSuyash MohanSeyedmehdi PayabvashDheeraj Gandhi
BACKGROUND: Prior analyses of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to radiology departments have characterized aggregate grant volume and funding levels but have not systematically examined the institutional landscape of clinician-led research. This study characterized the institutional distribution of NIH funding awarded to clinician principal investigators (PIs) in diagnostic radiology (DR), interventional radiology (IR), and radiation oncology (RO) from fiscal years 2012 through 2025.METHODS: In this retrospective cross-sectional analysis, grant records were extracted from the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results (RePORTER) database and filtered to PIs with an institutional department designation of "Radiation-Diagnostic/Oncology." Clinician investigators were identified by cross-referencing with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) datasets. Institutional funding, grant counts, unique investigators, grant mechanism portfolios, and career development awards were analyzed.RESULTS: A total of 437 unique clinician investigators (DR: 226; IR: 46; RO: 165) were identified, accounting for $1.65 billion in inflation-adjusted funding. NIH-funded clinicians were distributed across 47 institutions in DR, 29 in IR, and 45 in RO. The top five institutions accounted for 34.5% of grants and 38.4% of total funding, largely reflecting workforce size: institutional clinician PI count explained 82% of the variance in funding, and funding per clinician PI was more evenly distributed (Gini 0.38) than total funding (Gini 0.62). Stanford received the largest grant funding in DR ($134.9M), UC San Francisco in IR ($36.9M), and University of Michigan in RO ($68.1M). R01 awards were the dominant mechanism across all subspecialties. Forty new K-awards were issued across 21 institutions.CONCLUSIONS: NIH funding to radiology clinician investigators is concentrated at a small number of academic medical centers, principally because those centers host larger clinician investigator workforces, with a narrow clinician-scientist pipeline. These findings identify opportunities to broaden research capacity across the radiology workforce.
