Previous reports have described worsening inequalities of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. We analyzed Research Project Grant data through the end of Fiscal Year 2020, confirming worsening inequalities beginning at the time of the NIH budget doubling (1998–2003), while finding that trends in recent years have reversed for both investigators and institutions, but only to a modest degree. We also find that career-stage trends have stabilized, with equivalent proportions of early-, mid-, and late-career investigators funded from 2017 to 2020. The fraction of women among funded PIs continues to increase, but they are still not at parity. Analyses of funding inequalities show that inequalities for investigators, and to a lesser degree for institutions, have consistently been greater within groups (i.e. within groups by career stage, gender, race, and degree) than between groups.

Human mobility is a core component of human behavior and its quantification is critical for understanding its impact on infectious disease transmission, traffic forecasting, access to resources and care, intervention strategies, and migratory flows. When mobility data are limited, spatial interaction models have been widely used to estimate human travel, but have not been extensively validated in low- and middle-income settings. Geographic, sociodemographic, and infrastructure differences may impact the ability for models to capture these patterns, particularly in rural settings. Here, we analyzed mobility patterns inferred from mobile phone data in four Sub-Saharan African countries to investigate the ability for variants on gravity and radiation models to estimate travel. Adjusting the gravity model such that parameters were fit to different trip types, including travel between more or less populated areas and/or different regions, improved model fit in all four countries. This suggests that alternative models may be more useful in these settings and better able to capture the range of mobility patterns observed.