ULM Sponsored Programs and Research

15 Agencies Seeking Grant Reviewers

Would you like to increase your chances of getting funded by 30%? That’s what the research says will happen if you first become a federal grant reviewer, then rotate off the review panel and submit your proposal to that grant program at the next funding cycle.

You can easily become a grant reviewer by tweaking your resume to match the priorities of the grantmaking agency and then applying online. Below you will find a list of 15 federal agencies currently seeking grant reviewers, along with a broad description of the type of expertise they seek.

Administration for Children and Family Services. Expertise: broad range of issues involve children, youth, and families

Administration on Developmental Disabilities. Expertise: developmental disabilities

Corporate for National and Community Service. Expertise: service at multiple levels

Department of Labor. Expertise: delivering workforce services

Health Resources and Services Administration. Expertise: health professions training, HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, organ transplantation, primary care for underserved people, rural health

Institute of Museum and Library Services. Expertise: museums, libraries

National Endowment for the Humanities. Expertise: One or more of the humanities fields

National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Expertise: Agricultural systems, biotechnology and genomics, food and nutrition and health

National Institutes of Health. Expertise: broad range of biomedical health topics

National Science Foundation. Expertise: a broad range of basic science, technology, engineering and mathematics topics

Office of Community Services and Office of Public Health and Science. Expertise: community services, public health

Office of Justice Programs. Expertise: broad range of law enforcement issues

Office of Post Secondary Education. Expertise: a broad range of information involving higher education

Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. Expertise: alcohol, tobacco, and other drug prevention; character education; civic education; emergency management, disaster response, and school security; school-based mental health services; school-based health and wellness; and violence prevention

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. Expertise: substance abuse, mental health

More about this information available on Miner and Associates blog

AUTM announces the 6th edition of the Better World Report, AUTM’s annual compilation of the stories behind successful transfers of academic technologies to the marketplace.

Entitled, The Better World Report - Respond, Recover, Restructure: Technologies Helping the World in the Face of Adversity, this year's publication takes into consideration recent disasters — both natural and human-made — and the importance of working with the environment to provide a sustainable, good life for all. The publication presents more than 20 technology development success stories of inventions that are making their way through the often-arduous journey from scientist’s lab to the marketplace. From the Corn Belt of the Midwest to a Canadian metropolis to the heart of South Africa, these stories represent the amazing range of needs and innovations to address them.

Examples of some of the stories covered in this year's publication include the following:

Find out how a chance meeting over a neighbor’s fence led to a skateboard made from leftover corn stalks.

Wonder at the ingenuity of a group of people using a teabag, activated carbon and a hair straightener to make the prototype of an inexpensive water filter that could mean the difference between life and death.

Discover how years of anonymous, often-repetitive lab work built the foundation for a DNA microarray to monitor microbial populations — a scientific breakthrough that could help detect a number of threats, from bioweapons to pathogens in the food supply.

Marvel at the creativity and cooperation of a group of students and their teachers as they use their architectural skills and sweat equity to build affordable, green modular homes and donate them to the community.

AUTM will begin soliciting stories for the 2012 report in the coming weeks. Download a free pdf copy of the 2011 report HERE.

Renewing Its Vows: NIH Revises AREA Solicitation

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has released a new program announcement (PA) for the Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA), the agency’s tailor-made mechanism for supporting excellent, smaller-scale research projects at colleges and universities that receive comparatively little NIH funding. Applications are due by February 25, June 25, and October 25 annually.

The most significant revisions to the PA involve the ways proposals will be reviewed, a shift that bodes well for most PUIs. AREA program director Erika Brown reports that the new PA will more explicitly drive “reviewers to focus on the goals of the program and the unique constraints of the applicants.” The following changes and clarifications are included in the new PA:

More focus on inclusion of students in meritorious research. Applications should include plans to expose undergraduate or graduate students to hands-on research (but should not include training plans);

All program directors and principle investigators involved with the proposed project must have a primary faculty appointment at an AREA-eligible institution;

The total budget for all years of the proposed project must be requested in Budget Period 1. Do not complete Budget Periods 2 or 3. They are not required and will not be accepted with the application;

There is more emphasis on the opportunities for AREA awardees to apply for administrative supplements to support and recruit high school, undergraduate, and graduate students from groups that have been shown to be underrepresented in behavioral and biomedical sciences; and

Reviewers will be asked to provide an overall impact/priority score to reflect their assessment of the likelihood for the project to make an important scientific contribution to the research fields involved, to provide research opportunities to students, and to strengthen the research environment of the institution.

ED Proposes Office of Early Learning

On November 4, 2011, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) announced plans to create an Office of Early Learning within the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. The new office would be led by Jacqueline Jones, ED’s current senior advisor for early learning, who would oversee early learning programs across the department, including the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, Promise Neighborhoods, the Investing in Innovation Fund, and related programs authorized under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

As proposed, the office would also serve as a “central resource” to coordinate early learning programs across federal agencies and manage outreach to the early learning community.

Patent Reform Gets Congressional OK

By a vote of 89-9, the Senate has passed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. The bill was passed by the House on June 23, 2011, and the president is expected to sign it into law this week.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), housed within the U.S. Department of Commerce, has developed an implementation website that includes background documents, analysis, summaries of key changes, and instructions for submitting comments related to the reforms.

Some intellectual property experts, retired federal appeals court judge Paul Michel, fear that the legislation’s “ambiguities” may reduce the amount of venture capital available to innovative researchers, at least in the short term. In a Corporate Counsel article analyzing three provisions of the bill — the shift from “first-to-invent” to “first-to-file” patent rights, changes to the disclosures inventors can make if they take advantage of a one-year grace period to test their ideas without waiving their patent rights, and the establishment of a new process for inventors to request a review of a patent that’s already been granted — Michel concludes, "There will be greater uncertainty […] than ever before.”

Nonetheless, the Association of University Technology Managers and other higher education groups believe the bill “will clarify and simplify the patent application process […and] enable U.S. inventors at universities and elsewhere to compete more effectively in the global marketplace.”

Researchers Face Tighter Conflict of Interest Rules

On August 25, 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final rule that amends the 1995 Public Health Service (PHS) regulations on applicant responsibilities for promoting research objectivity. The new ruling establishes standards to ensure that the design, conduct, and reporting of research funded under PHS grants and cooperative agreements will be free from bias resulting from investigator financial conflicts of interest (FCOI). Institutions have until August 24, 2012 to be in full compliance with the new requirements.

The reasons for the amendments are twofold. First, the growing complexity of biomedical and behavioral research and the increased interaction among the government, research institutions, and the private sector, especially drug companies, suggest that a more rigorous approach to investigator disclosure, institutional management of financial conflicts, and federal oversight is required. Second, the promises of translational research, the challenges of technology transfer, and intense expectations at all levels of government that universities function as engines of socio-economic development generate new pressures on institutions and their faculty members to expand their relationships and deepen their engagement with industry.

The amended regulations include a number of changes with which PHS applicants must comply:

Designating institutional officials to solicit and review disclosures of significant financial interests (SFI) from each investigator participating in the PHS-funded research. Each investigator planning to participate in the PHS-funded research must disclose to the institution's designated official the investigator's SFIs (and those of the investigator's spouse and dependent children) no later than the time of application for PHS-funded research;

Lowering the SFI threshold from $10,000 to $5,000 for payments, equity interests, and any equity interest in non-publicly traded entities;

Excluding income from seminars, lectures, teaching, or service on advisory or review panels;

Expanding investigator disclosure requirements to include SFIs that are related to an investigator's institutional responsibilities, with institutions responsible for determining whether a disclosed SFI relates to the research for which PHS funding is sought and constitutes a FCOI.

Requiring that institutions maintain an up-to-date, written, enforced policy on FCOIs that is available via a publicly accessible website;

Requiring FCOI training for each investigator on any PHS-funded grant or contract prior to engaging in research, and at least every four years thereafter

Requiring PHS-funded awardee institutions to take reasonable steps to ensure that any subrecipient investigator complies with the institutional policy;

Expanding the scope of the regulations to include Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) Phase I applications; and

Requiring each investigator who is participating in the PHS-funded research to submit an updated disclosure of SFIs at least annually.

Additional details are available online.

How NIH Decides What to Fund

The latest article in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' (NIAID) new investigator series focuses on demystifying the funding decision processes at the various National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutes and centers (IC).

ICs use different policies and different paylines, or funding cutoff points, to identify successful grant applications, so a percentile or overall impact score that is not fundable in one institute may be fundable in another. The payline is set each fiscal year by balancing projected grant numbers, grant budgets, and money in the IC's budget. Because paylines evolve throughout the fiscal year, ICs may be able to fund more applications toward the end of the year than initially anticipated.

The following information is particular to NIAID. Contact other ICs directly to learn what to expect. NIAID takes two approaches to funding decisions: 1) using a score-based cutoff point (payline); or 2) funding in overall impact score order until the program's funding is expended. NIAID awards most of its grants through "unsolicited" applications, funding in percentile or overall impact score order until a payline is reached. Each major grant type (e.g., R01, R03, R21, R15) has its own payline, which NIAID posts online. For requests for applications and some program announcements (called PAS, where the "S" stands for set-aside), NIAID typically funds by overall impact score until all funding is expended. The level is stated in the initiative's NIH Guide announcement. In some cases, the institute decides to skip over some applications to fund others that better meet a priority or programmatic need.

If an R01 application misses the payline, the principal investigator (PI) should call the program officer to discuss options. NIAID has two small funding pools that can support highly-ranked applications that miss the payline: selective pay and R56 Bridge awards. PIs do not apply for either option; instead, NIAID program officers nominate promising R01 applications, based on scientific merit and relevance to NIAID's programmatic priorities, giving some priority to new investigators.

When declined by any IC, not just NIAID, applicants should always consider resubmitting, as soon as they can effectively improve their applications and address the reviewers' concerns. Note that there is now only one opportunity to resubmit.

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