A Message from NAEVR/AEVR

A Message from NAEVR/AEVR

The NAEVR and AEVR Boards wish you a happy New Year and our best for your health and well-being. With the start of vaccination, we are all hopeful that COVID-19 will begin to abate. This message describes the final Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 funding, announces a new AEVR Initiative and recognizes an impending end-of-2021 change for the Alliances.

On December 27, the president signed the massive Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, which includes $1.4 trillion in federal funding that reflects all twelve FY2021 spending bills and $900 in COVID-19 relief stimulus. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funded at $42.93 billion, a $1.25 billion or 3 percent increase over FY2020, and the National Eye Institute (NEI) is funded at $835.71 million, an $11.6 million or 1.4 percent increase over FY2020 (with the Department of Defense also funding its Vision Research Program at $20 million). Although the  stimulus provides $1.25 billion to NIH for long-term COVID-19 studies and the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics program, it does not provide research relief for NIH grantees. In light of its challenges, NAEVR has thanked Congress for this funding, urging lawmakers to continue the pre-COVID pathway of robust funding increases in the 117th Congress, as well as to provide research relief. NAEVR has also joined with the research advocacy community in requesting the same from the incoming Biden administration.

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With the end of 2020, AEVR is retiring its Decade of Vision 2010-2020 Initiative educational campaign, launching the new Research Saving Sight, Restoring Vision Initiative under which AEVR education will be branded this decade. The new Initiative’s title recognizes the enormous strides that past federally funded vision research at the NEI and other agencies has made in terms of new diagnostics and therapies to treat vision conditions, as well the as tools that support these new approaches (e.g., imaging, “Big Data”, and Artificial Intelligence), and the promise that future robust funding holds for even more dramatic scientific and quality-of-life advances. As with past years, in 2021 AEVR will hold a series of Congressional Briefings (mostly virtual) and, hopefully, host its Seventh Emerging Vision Scientists Day on Capitol Hill on-site in Washington, D.C., this Fall.

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Looking ahead in 2021, the Boards want to recognize that Executive Director James Jorkasky plans to retire at year’s end, having served more than 18 years in that position. The Boards have already begun a process for a new ED recruitment, and I’ll be informing members of that process throughout the year. While we will have a more formal recognition of Jim’s accomplishments for the Alliances later this year, please join the Boards in acknowledging the pivotal contributions he has made towards vision research during his tenure – bravo!