National Institute on Aging Butler-Williams Scholars Program: The first 30 years+

ABSTRACT

The development of a skilled research workforce in aging is fundamental to understanding conditions associated with growing older and extending healthy, active years of life. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) supports the training of health scientists, and its National Institute on Aging (NIA) prioritizes the professional development of investigators with an interest in aging. Since 1987, NIA’s Summer Institute on Aging Research, renamed the Butler-Williams (B-W) Scholars Program in 2013, has offered an intensive one-week experience on issues, opportunities, and challenges of research on aging, with emphasis on disparities and health equity. The first 30 years of the Program are described in this report, including its history, selected curriculum highlights, Scholar outcomes, and qualitative data from faculty, and the program’s impact on the training, growth, and development of scientists in aging research. Questions raised over a decade ago by the Committee on the Future Health Care Workforce for Older Americans Board on Health Care Services are revisited, and recommendations for the future are provided. This important Program remains an exemplar for the training and development of health scientists for careers that advance biomedical research and emphasize an equitable understanding of factors related to extending healthy years of life.

KEYWORDS:

• Training programs
• grants
• geriatrics
• gerontology
• health disparities

Acknowledgements

Each of the authors is a past participant in the NIA Butler-Williams Scholars Program. Drs. Hill and Harden also had an employee/employer relationship with the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging (NIA) ending in 2019 and 2011, respectively. Dr. Harden served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Aging, 2017–2020 and was extended to May 2021. The opinions shared in the paper are those of the authors alone and do not represent the views of the current NIA leadership or employees supporting the current Butler-Williams Scholars Program. The authors wish to thank the NIA Leadership, Office of Planning, Analysis and Evaluation and Office of Special Populations (OSP), especially Dr. Samir Sauma, Catherine Nagy, Dr. Jaron Lockett (former NIA Program Analyst), and Dr. Patricia Jones, current OSP Director. We are indebted to Ms. Nagy for her past roles in the analysis of data and preparation of tables. We acknowledge support from Dr. Marie A. Bernard, NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity and former NIA Deputy Director, and Andrea Griffin-Mann, NIA Program Analyst, OSP. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02701960.2022.2097670

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.