With the one-year anniversary of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) approaching, the impact and importance of the recovery act is ever present. The second quarter reporting closed and the NIH released an initial set of recovery act investment reports, the important scientific work being done daily by our grantees, as well as the benefit brought to the economy continues to impress me.
Over the past year, the NIH has issued more than 30 ARRA funding opportunity announcements resulting in more than 12,000 grants that have been awarded through ARRA. Recently, I was very pleased with the second quarter recipient reporting. We had a compliance rate of 99.84% of NIH’s grant recipients submitting reports to FederalReporting.gov. Thanks to everyone for all their hard work.
The support and advancement of scientific research has been and will continue to be an important priority of ARRA and the current administration. As such, it is essential for everyone to understand and appreciate the significant research being conducted by ARRA grantees. In conjunction with the President’s goal for transparency, the NIH has released a collection of Recovery Act Investment Reports. These reports highlight investments in biomedical research topics all made possible by select ARRA grants. They describe, in plain language, the needs for research on specific diseases or other health-related topics and how ARRA-funded projects are addressing these needs. NIH Institutes and Centers involved in awarding ARRA grants, coordinated by the NIH Office of Science Policy, created a total of 166 such reports. Additional Recovery Act reports and data can be found at http://report.nih.gov/recovery/arragrants.cfm.
Although we awarded much of the ARRA money in FY 2009, we have recently released multiple opportunities focusing on:
- Comparative Effectiveness Research, which evaluates the usefulness–or “effectiveness”–of different treatments for the same illness.
- NIH Basic Behavioral and Social Science Opportunity Network (OppNet), a trans-NIH initiative to expand the agency’s funding of basic behavioral and social sciences research (b-BSSR).
- NIH Directors Opportunity for Research in Five Thematic Areas (RC4), which will support research directly related to Dr. Collins’ five themes for NIH that were outlined during an August town hall meeting.
These and other funding opportunities are listed at the following site: http://grants.nih.gov/recovery/.
Congratulations, once again, on your outstanding second quarter reporting rate. I am confident that the research produced by these new funding announcements will be influential not only to the scientific community at large, but also to the U.S. economy with the number of jobs they will produce.
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