UC San Diego just locked in a fresh $5 million to keep one of its marquee faculty recruitment efforts alive, giving the campus more runway on a high‑profile experiment in cluster hiring and mentoring in the biosciences.
The NIH‑backed Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, launched in 2022, is designed to bring early‑career researchers into medicine, engineering and the life sciences. So far, it has helped UC San Diego recruit a dozen new faculty members and build out the lab infrastructure they need to get started. Campus leaders say the renewed funding will keep mentorship networks, grant‑writing workshops and centralized hiring searches running while they work to make those supports permanent.
The renewal "totals $5 million," and university officials told reporters the FIRST hires have already pulled in about $16 million in new grants since they arrived on campus, according to the Times of San Diego. The outlet reports that FIRST relies on a centralized search process and cohort mentoring to help junior faculty feel less isolated. Campus statements cited in the coverage also highlight a grant‑writing course and programming intended to "build a more respectful scientific culture."
How FIRST Works On Campus
UC San Diego first secured a five‑year, $16 million FIRST cohort award in 2022 to hire 12 diverse, early‑career biomedical faculty, according to a university news release. The NIH Common Fund created FIRST to test whether cohort hiring and institution‑level reforms in mentoring, evaluation and recruitment can move the needle on inclusive excellence at biomedical research institutions.
Campus leaders say bringing in faculty as a group, then wrapping them in structured career development, makes it easier for them to launch labs, land major grants and collaborate across traditional departmental lines.
Funding Cut, Court Fight And A Partial Reprieve
The FIRST awards were swept up in a broader wave of NIH and HHS grant terminations and reviews in early 2025, a shake‑up that triggered legal challenges and multi‑state litigation. A federal judge later labeled aspects of those terminations "arbitrary and capricious" and ordered that some grants be restored, a ruling detailed by ProPublica. The legal fight slowed disbursements and left universities guessing about what money would actually arrive while they tried to keep cohort programs intact.
Officials Say They’ll Institutionalize The Gains
"Despite the challenges we’ve faced in the last year related to federal funding, the FIRST program has been a great success," said JoAnn Trejo, the program’s principal investigator and a professor of pharmacology at UC San Diego, in a campus statement. "This cohort model of faculty recruitment provides a strong foundation of mentorship and early career development for faculty," Trejo told Times of San Diego, adding that she wants those efforts woven into normal campus operations once the initial NIH award ends in 2027.
Vice Chancellor John Carethers also emphasized, according to the outlet, that tackling complex health problems requires a wide range of experience, perspective and creative solutions, an argument that underpins the program’s focus on more inclusive hiring.
What This Means For San Diego
UC San Diego officials note that the cohort hires are spread across medicine, pharmacy, engineering, biology, the physical and social sciences and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a campus‑wide reach the university highlighted when it first accepted the FIRST award. Administrators argue that cluster hiring paired with coordinated mentoring can speed up lab launches and attract follow‑on funding that supports students, postdocs and local research collaborations.
If the renewal stays in place, campus leaders say they plan to push FIRST‑style mentoring and search practices into standard hiring policies, so the model outlives the grant that started it.
