You're offering competitive comp and the position has been open.
The grant that just got renewed
The National Institutes of Health approved a $2.5 million grant renewal for NC State's College of Veterinary Medicine to continue its Comparative Molecular Medicine Training Program. The program awards fellowships to Ph.D. students in the university's Comparative Medicine Institute, nearly $30,000 annual stipends plus full tuition and benefits for two-year fellowships. Since NIH first funded the program in 2021, more than 20 students have benefited from the fellowships. Six more fellows started this month with the renewal.
The training prepares students to lead interdisciplinary biomedical research teams. Fellows work across four graduate programs, Comparative Biomedical Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Biomathematics, with access to more than 40 faculty mentors at NC State and collaborators at UNC and Duke medical schools. The degree includes a minor in Teamwork in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research.
Dr. Caroline Laplante, associate professor of quantitative and computational biology and one of three principal investigators on the grant, said the renewal is "a vote of confidence in something we believe in deeply: that the best biomedical scientists aren't trained in isolation, but through collaborations across disciplines and across mentors."
The pipeline this actually fills
Alexis Johnson, one of the six new fellows, said the program "provides a crucial pathway to careers in industry, where interdisciplinary teams work together to solve biological problems." She's working on host-virus interactions that regulate HIV entry and membrane fusion. Alexandra Dwulit, who completed the two-year fellowship, said it allowed her to develop a research niche bridging disciplines and species, "providing a strong foundation for a career in comparative neuroscience and behavioral genetics."
Dr. Grant Scull, who earned his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at NC State in 2024 as one of the first fellows, said the program gave him "the tools and mindset required to thrive in today's era of translational science."
University faculty positions. Industry R&D roles. Translational research careers. The practice associate track doesn't appear in what the fellows describe.
What the vet school funding model actually rewards
Research grants bring prestige, attract faculty, and show up in rankings. Practice training capacity doesn't generate the same institutional visibility.
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NC State already runs the Young Scholars Program and the Summer Interdisciplinary Research Initiative for undergraduate scientists through the Comparative Medicine Institute, whose mission is to "translate basic research and scientific discovery into clinical or societal applications to improve the health of animals and humans." The applications the institute names in its mission statement are real, comparative medicine research has produced clinical advances. But the career path it's building with this $2.5 million is not the one that puts an associate in your second exam room.
The structural mismatch you can't fix
This grant funds research training. The associate shortage you're living with is a different pipeline.
You're competing on different value propositions entirely. The Ph.D. candidate choosing between your associate offer and a fellowship isn't your hiring pool, they left that pool when they applied to graduate school instead of looking for a practice job after their DVM.
The vet school funding model rewards research output and NIH grants, not production of practice-ready DVMs.
The cost of being wrong about this: waiting for vet schools to solve your staffing problem when their incentives point elsewhere. The academic pipeline and the practice pipeline split at the point of career decision, and this $2.5 million follows the academic branch.
What actually changes Monday
Nothing about your associate search. The Ph.D. fellows starting at NC State this month aren't your hiring pool. The $2.5 million NIH just committed trains researchers for academic and industry careers, not general practice associates.
What does change: the clarity about where the structural bottleneck actually is. It's not that vet schools don't care about practice workforce needs, it's that this grant rewards different outputs. Research grants, faculty publications, interdisciplinary training programs that produce Ph.D.s who go on to academic or industry careers. This particular federal investment in veterinary education flows to that side of the house.
If you're an owner-veterinarian trying to staff a practice, the implication is straightforward: this funding stream won't solve it for you. The solutions that will work, practice-based training models, associate development tracks that don't depend on university infrastructure, are the ones practices build themselves or negotiate directly with new graduates. Your comp offer is you competing in a market this grant isn't addressing.