The NIH Challenge Grant in Health and Science Research Program is a new initiative which will provide funding for approximately 200 or more two-year jump-start grants to support research that addresses specific scientific and health research challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. Challenge Areas and Topics, defined by the NIH, 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. Research in these areas should have a high impact in biomedical or behavioral science and/or public health. For more information go to: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/funding/challenge_award/#topics.
SPO anticipates a large volume of grant applications in response to this program. To ensure the successful submission of these applications, we are asking researchers to follow the following steps in submitting NIH Challenge Grant applications:
1. By Thursday, March 26th: Send a brief statement of your intent to apply to spoawards@berkeley.edu. No details about your project are required at this stage, but your statement will help us determine how many NIH Challenge Grant proposals to expect.
2. By Monday, April 20th at 5 p.m. submit an electronic and hard copy of your Grants.gov proposal including a signed Proposal Review Form and other required documents to SPO for review. The electronic copy should be submitted via the SPO Drop Box not as an email attachment: https://coeus.berkeley.edu/dropbox/. Submitting by this date will ensure you are submitting at least five days prior to the NIH deadline and in compliance with the VCRO’s “on-time” internal proposal submission policy.
3. If you anticipate that you will need to submit your proposal to SPO after the five day internal proposal deadline, follow the procedure for seeking an exception described on the SPO web site: http://spo.berkeley.edu/procedures/submission.html.
For more updated news on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, please see http://spo.berkeley.edu/Procedures/recovery.html on the SPO web site.
