Young faculty vying for their first big grants are feeling the crunch of the flat NIH budget. So the Howard Hughes Medical Institute today announced a new program where up to 70 researchers who have been leading their own labs in the US for two to six years will receive six-year HHMI appointments and a total of more than $300 million. HHMI says it’ll make a second round of appointments in 2011.

This program is designed to help junior professors cross that widening funding chasm (after the startup package runs out but before you get the first R01 grant) that NNB blogger Willy Lensch aptly called the “valley of death” in biomedical academic research. This HHMI initiative is one of a couple other fairly new ones I know of that try to help young researchers make key transitions in their careers (the NIH’s K99 “Pathway to Independence” program is another example).

Is this sort of funding mechanism a step in the right direction for young researchers? Is it enough? What more needs to be done?