…and awaaaaaay we go….
March 4, 2009
Get writing people. The NIH Omnibus Challenge in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is available in pdf form.
The application due date is April 27, 2009.
This is only part of the stimulus but it may be most of the newly-solicited stuff.
As part of the Recovery Act, NIH has designated at least $200 million in FYs 2009 – 2010 for a new initiative called the NIH Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research, to fund 200 or more grants, contingent upon the submission of a sufficient number of scientifically meritorious applications.
To get you quickly up to speed in your buzz-wording:
The NIH has identified a range of Challenge Areas that focus on specific knowledge gaps, scientific opportunities, new technologies, data generation, or research methods that would benefit from an influx of funds to quickly advance the area in significant ways. Within each broad Challenge Area the NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices have specified particular Challenge Topics that address their missions. These broad Challenge Areas are provided below. Click on the Challenge Area for the detailed description of the specific Challenge Topics within that area that have been accorded the highest priority by the NIH Institute, Center or Office indicated.
and those would be:
Links to High Priority Topics Within Broad Challenge Areas (PDF – 556 KB):
(01) Behavior, Behavioral Change, and Prevention
(02) Bioethics
(03) Biomarker Discovery and Validation
(04) Clinical Research
(05) Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER)
(06) Enabling Technologies
(07) Enhancing Clinical Trials
(08) Genomics
(09) Health Disparities
(10) Information Technology for Processing Health Care Data
(11) Regenerative Medicine
(12) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education (STEM)
(13) Smart Biomaterials – Theranostics
(14) Stem Cells
(15) Translational Science
NIDA’s website page here overviews their areas of specific interest.
oh, and about that title…
You might want to put some o dis on your iPod
DrugMonkey 
March 4, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Just moving this comment to a more appropriate location…
Sure, EVERYONE will be writing (me too). The administrators here have practically wet themselves with excitement.
All this money is going to be wasted. 80% of grants goes to salary… who’s salary can you pay for two years? A post-doc? Where are all these post-docs going to suddenly materialize from? Last I checked there wasn’t a huge line of unemployed post-docs waiting for this to happen. The NIH should have given the money back to congress and said, “Sorry, we can’t operate this way. Take your $10B back and increase our year-on-year budget by $1B instead. That saves congress $8B! What a deal!”
I am just amazed and dismayed at this display of concentrated stupid from the people in charge.
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March 4, 2009 at 7:44 pm
200 awards….that doesn’t seem like that many.
And if you are lucky enough to win the ARRA jackpot and you happen to be a new investigator…BAM! new investigator no more!
hmmmmmmmmm
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March 4, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Two immediate thoughts:
(1) Basic sciences are fucked.
(2) All they did was take blurbs from eleventy fucktillion existing PAs and RFAs and string them together.
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March 4, 2009 at 8:35 pm
CPP
1) I agree, a bit scary
2) In looking them over I see a remarkable amount of similarity with the eventual goal of making health care more efficient, reliable and cutting overall costs (mainly all this biomarker stuff). I have no problem with enlisting the nation’s scientists and NIH to help us move toward a sustainable health care system. Maybe we can actually make alot of progress on this in two years with a concerted effort.
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March 4, 2009 at 8:46 pm
OK. Looking over some of the specific Web pages of the ICs, it does look like there are some basic science emphases.
Am I reading this correctly that modular budgets are not allowed??
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March 4, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Thanks, but the link to topic number 12 doesn’t work.
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March 4, 2009 at 9:19 pm
whifflepoofs theasarus fiddlesticks?
Am I just an idiot or is NIAID’s website awfully hard to find this info on?
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March 4, 2009 at 9:25 pm
PP: Most of them are targeted towards either developing new technologies or advancing clinical work but after going through the topics with a fine toothed comb I found a couple that sound like they would be a good fit for two of my basic science proposals … I’ll be calling the POs tomorrow to make sure. And my brief look at the RFA this afternoon didn’t find any specific info about the budget requirements … another job for tomorrow.
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March 4, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I just downloaded the Adobe Forms thingie, and there is no modular budget option. Fucknagle!
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March 4, 2009 at 10:22 pm
thank you for the nida link- i was reading the announcement earlier tonight wondering wtf i do that’s halfway relevant to the pdf list i was reading through. it was hugely helpful to see what nida is looking for.
since everyone’s all pissing themselves over this, i imagine competition will be fairly intense.
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March 4, 2009 at 11:12 pm
I just downloaded the Adobe Forms thingie, and there is no modular budget option. Fucknagle!
Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrgh … shit.
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March 4, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Re Becca above. I still haven’t found this on NIAID. Did you find it? My first reading finds very little focus on infectious disease (except HIV and some immunology).
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March 4, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Also, just a request for opinions here. If my lab is not in danger of closing down in the very near future, is it worth losing ESI status for this?
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March 5, 2009 at 2:09 am
I suppose these awards are only available to researchers within the USA, not even to those that might move there if they got an award…? Just kidding. I sometimes think that researchers like the smell of money more than thieves! 🙂
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March 5, 2009 at 3:11 am
Heraclides – Regular NIH grants are open to foreign applications, but this stimulus-funded mechanism is not. See http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-OD-09-003.html#SectionIII
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March 5, 2009 at 4:05 am
Thanks, Mike_F.
Must learn how the regular ones work some time.
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March 5, 2009 at 8:41 am
@Sciencegirl
I am debating the same thing. I talked to my program officer about this, and he said that if one was to get one of those, it could serve as a catalyst to really get your work going. My post-doc mentor thinks it is worth trying for it, because money is money, and it is always better to have more.
On the other hand…there is going to be a shitload of people trying to renew their stimulus funded work all at the same time…so part of me is thinking that it may be best to just work up a great R01 for submission in the next year..in an attempt to beat the crush. I do have the advantage of having another 3 year source of funding (beyond startup) that will accomplish the same thing.
But….I saw two particular ‘RFAs’ associated with the stimulus that would be perfect…they are kind of risky though…that coupled with being a NI spells no grant to me, unless I have critical prelim data…which I don’t quite have yet.
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March 5, 2009 at 9:10 am
@ Becca: Yes, NIAID isn’t moving so fast these days!
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/ncn/recovery/default.htm
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March 5, 2009 at 9:35 am
I think it is. Money now is better than money later. And just because you have this money now doesn’t mean you have to wait until the 2011 “crush” to submit an R01.
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March 5, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Applications from foreign institutions are not permitted!
UGH! Why can’t they just make it like a regular R01.
This sucks because I have some ideas ready to fire off … ERC/FP7, here I come!
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March 5, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Ummm … HELP!
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March 5, 2009 at 3:01 pm
@epat postdoc
because this is not business as usual. This is designed to stimulate the US economy.
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March 5, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Sciencegirl: If I were you, I would save my early investigator virginity for a five year award.
Two observations:
1. 200 million dollars have been allocated and there are about 100 special topics. So unless you can outcompete the 1-3 people the topic was written for (with some snazzy preliminary data perhaps) you are probably wasting your time applying. I mention this because the one I could maybe jump in on is probably a lost cause because the NIH contact person is good buds with the person I know the topic was written for.
2. Who the hell is going to review all of these things? Should we all take our phones off the hook?
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March 5, 2009 at 5:02 pm
If there are 1000s of applications and only 200 funded, the funding rate will be stupidly low….
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March 7, 2009 at 7:42 am
re#23 actually there are 207 special topics. So fewer than 1 grant per topic. So you better have much much more than the lab the topic was written for.
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March 7, 2009 at 9:34 am
Actually,
(1) Since NIH-funded scientists don’t really know how to write anything but R01s, these are all going to look like pretty typical R01s if massaged to fit into the weird format.
(2) Since these challenge grants are written for specific labs, but everyone is applying for them, most of them are not going to be funded.
and
(3) R01s are now 12 pages [really],
then I suspect that there is going to be a lot of unfunded challenge grants being submitted as R01s in the very near future. I don’t think this is going to change the R01 mess either next cycle or the cycle after.
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March 7, 2009 at 9:51 am
qaz:
This is a good point. For the big-cheeses writing $500k/yr+ R01s, they won’t even have to change the budget. 🙂
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March 7, 2009 at 11:25 am
R01s are definitely not 12 pages yet. As far as I am aware, no date certain for transition to 12 pages has been decided on.
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March 7, 2009 at 12:51 pm
CPP #28 – Several of the current R01 RFAs explicitly say “12 pages”. See, for example, RFA-RM-08-017 and PAR-09-016 as two recent examples. I think the R01 12-page switch happened with this cycle. I didn’t have one in for this cycle, so I don’t know for sure, but it’s changing very soon.
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March 7, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I think the R01 12-page switch happened with this cycle.
No, it didn’t. The unsolicited parent R01 FOA is still 25 pages, and no date for the transition has been set.
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March 7, 2009 at 2:04 pm
http://enhancing-peer-review.nih.gov/
The timeline is at http://enhancing-peer-review.nih.gov/timelines.html
Shorter applications starting with the Jan 2010 submission date.
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March 7, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Cool! Thanks for pointing us to the timeline, Whimple.
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March 7, 2009 at 8:59 pm
@Nat- Thanks!!
*does the little going off to cure malaria dance*
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April 5, 2009 at 3:07 pm
RE #25: “re#23 actually there are 207 special topics” – actually that’s 207 HIGHEST Priority topics, but the total omniibus topics are over 1000!!! (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/funding/challenge_award/Omnibus.pdf) If each topic has 10 applications (I am not surpriced if there is 20-50 applications for each topic) it would be 10,000 competing for 200 winners, 1 in 50 or 2% lottery. I think we’ll all likely to waste our time.
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