Through you, Madam Chair, thank you for the question.
I think you point at issues or shifts in the potential way peer review is done at grant panels. I would agree with your suggestion. I think having blinded peer review at these committees could help address some of these issues, and then selecting for excellence in the second phase where perhaps it's not blinded.
I would encourage the committee to consider making peer review more open, generally speaking. While we may have blinded peer review initially, at the end phase, once selection is done, I think it would be of extreme value to open up the black box that is the peer review process in this country for federal funding and make those peer review reports as available and as open as possible. Sometimes there are trade secrets or things that need to be closed, but to me, in order to improve the system, we need to know how the system is working and we need to do active research, or metaresearch, on peer review to improve it. We don't want to go from one system that's clearly not working to another system that we think might be working better without actually having the evidence. As a researcher, I think we need research, metaresearch, to show that the goals for how we'd like to change peer review and select for excellence are actually being changed and achieved. Right now, across the board, I would say there's very little implementation in monitoring our policies and practices.