Category: Training/Fellowships/Career Development

As I discussed in an earlier post, the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program supports the development of infrastructure and capacity to enable investigators in IDeA-eligible states to become more competitive for NIH and other biomedical research funding opportunities.

While the program has led to significant progress in the basic sciences, clinical and translational research in IDeA states has, for the most part, remained underdeveloped. To spur greater clinical and translational research in these states, NIH issued the IDeA Program Infrastructure for Clinical and Translational Research (IDeA-CTR) funding opportunity announcement last year.

We have just awarded the first grants, to the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute (lead institution: West Virginia University) and the Louisiana Clinical and Translational Science Center (lead institution: Louisiana State University Pennington Biomedical Research Center).

Among the activities these centers will pursue are partnerships and collaborations within and across IDeA states; clinical and translational pilot grants; clinical research education, mentoring and career development; clinical research design, epidemiology and biostatistics; and projects related to the specific health and research needs of their states.

For more information on the IDeA-CTR initiative, please contact me by
e-mail or call 301-435-0832.

A national effort called PULSE (Partnership for Undergraduate Life Science Education) is under way to transform undergraduate biology education at the departmental level.

Along with the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, we will select 40 “Vision and Change Leadership Fellows” to devise prototypic solutions that facilitate the systemic changes outlined in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. These efforts will inform future investments by NSF, HHMI and NIGMS.

We expect fellows to be departmental chairs, former chairs, deans or faculty members at equivalent levels who demonstrate a passion for undergraduate biology education, concern for its future and a desire to act at the local and national levels. Other qualifications include:

• Awareness of the history and current thinking about undergraduate life science education reform.
• Undergraduate teaching experience as well as experience mentoring, motivating and evaluating other faculty.
• Active involvement in cultivating the mix of scholarship in teaching and life science research at their type of institution.

As fellows, their activities will include:

• Proposing thoughtful and creative approaches to implementing recommendations of the Vision and Change report.
• Engaging in open exchange and assessment of ideas.

If you’re interested in applying, go to http://PULSEcommunity.org for complete details, including a video, sample application, FAQs and more. The application deadline is July 9, 2012. For more information, e-mail me or Shiva Singh, in the Training, Workforce Development and Diversity Division.

As Judith Greenberg reported earlier this year, NIH has moved the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program to NIGMS from the now-dissolved National Center for Research Resources. For those who may not be familiar with this program, here’s an overview.

Established by Congressional mandate in 1993, the IDeA program’s goal is to broaden the geographic distribution of NIH funding. It supports faculty development and institutional research infrastructure enhancement in states that have historically received low levels of support from NIH. In addition to enhancing the competitiveness of investigators and the research capacities of institutions in these 23 states plus Puerto Rico, the program serves their unique populations, such as rural and medically underserved communities.

The IDeA program has two main components:

• Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE), thematic, multidisciplinary research centers that develop faculty and institutional research capabilities.
• IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), statewide systems of institutions that expand research capabilities and increase access to biomedical resources.

The IDeA program currently supports 87 COBREs and 24 INBREs.

An example of how the IDeA program has built competitive research capacity is the Rhode Island INBRE. Over the past 10 years of support, Rhode Island IDeA investigators have received 21 R- and K-series awards from NIH and 28 awards from NSF and other funding agencies.

Similarly, investigators at the Center for Evolutionary and Theoretical Immunology, a COBRE based at the University of New Mexico that has been supported for 8 years, submitted 20 grant applications to federal and non-federal agencies in the past year, 10 of which were funded.

The next submission date for NIGMS predoctoral T32 applications is May 25. If you plan on submitting an application, please see my earlier post with reminders about mandatory requirements related to recruitment and retention plans for students with disabilities, training in the responsible conduct of research and NIGMS-specific guidelines. Feel free to contact me with additional questions.

As we approach the next submission date for T32 applications on January 25, I’d like to remind applicants about several requirements:

Recruitment and Retention Plans for Students with Disabilities: The long-standing requirement for a recruitment and retention plan to enhance diversity must include students with disabilities as well as individuals from racial and ethnic groups that are underrepresented in the health-related sciences (see the current funding opportunity announcement). We’ve posted some ideas and approaches for this element on our Training Web page. For both new and renewal applications, the focus at this time for the recruitment and retention of students with disabilities is on plans and strategies, rather than on numerical outcomes. Applications lacking a plan for the recruitment and retention of individuals in either category will be considered unacceptable.

Training in the Responsible Conduct of Research: The responsible conduct of research (RCR) requirement was updated in an NIH Guide notice in 2010 to include five components: format, subject matter, faculty participation, duration of instruction and frequency of instruction. All components must be addressed in an application for it to be considered acceptable. We find that some applications fail to address the requirement that RCR instruction be taken at least once every 4 years. This “refresher” training can take many forms, but it must be substantive. For example, it can be a formal course given in the later years of graduate training, ongoing annual seminars or workshops, sessions at annual retreats, etc.

NIGMS Special Requirements: All applicants for NIGMS-funded predoctoral training grants are required to address six special requirements related to their training programs as listed in our NRSA Institutional Predoctoral Training Grants Program Description and Guidelines. This material should be inserted at the end of the background section of the application.

These requirements are mandatory. Any application with an unacceptable plan for diversity recruitment or RCR training will not be funded until the applicant provides an acceptable, revised plan.