My App Received a Good Score. Do I Need to Talk to My Program Officer?

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So you’ve received your scores back from your NIH study section, and the numbers are looking pretty good. Is this a good time to contact your program officer?

You probably don’t need to. Someone at NIH will contact you if they need “Just-in-Time” information or if they intend to fund your work. Contacting your program officer will not change your chances of getting funding. If you have questions, however, feel free to contact them. They are your connection to NIH, so don’t be afraid to use them as a resource.

*If you have questions about your score and your chance of getting funded, contact your program official. They are your connection to NIH, so don’t be afraid to use them as a resource. If you received a fundable score, you can still call, but rest assured that someone at NIH will take the initiative to contact you to get “Just-in-Time” information to move forward with the funding process.

*We reworded this answer to be more clear based on feedback from both investigators and program officials. Our apologies for the confusion!

9 Comments

  1. This is absolutely ludicrous advice. Applicants should definitely contact their program officers after they receive their scores and summary statements to discuss the probability of funding, the outcome of review, whether resubmission is advisable, and (if so) strategies for resubmission. Any applicant that doesn’t have questions after receiving their scores and summary statement needs serious mentoring.

  2. Good piece of advice. However, most POs don’t even have the decency to answer an email to fix a date and time for discussion.

  3. Please do not assume that someone at NIH will contact you requesting JIT in a a timely manner. Most JIT requests require one week turn-around and IRB/IACUC approvals often take one to two months to obtain. If you believe that you may have a fundable score and your project proposes either human subject or vertebrate animal research either contact your Program Officer to clarify if you have a chance of funding or just submit to your compliance committee/s.

  4. We’d like to know why the JIT link shows up in the eRA Commons as active, however, when you contact the GMS, they say that until we receive the official requeset from NIH, to not submit the JIT. This is causing some confusion — the link looks like a request to submit the JIT. Why does the link show up?

    1. The Just in Time link appears for all grant applications within a particular criterion score range and percentile to ensure its availability should the institute request the Just in Time information.

      This question is answered in our eRA Commons FAQs. Check out the link for answers to other frequent Commons questions.

  5. Agree with Rita. There are some terrible POs around who are quite incompetent and have no interest in responding to repeated requests to discuss scores and resubmission strategies. Does the NIH even have a mechanism to weed them out?

  6. Well, I can only say from my experience that it was a waste of time trying to get information out of my program officer. Mine did not find time to talk to me for weeks and then I got the impression that I was on a clock set to 5 minutes. During the 5 minute “audience” per application I would only hear repeatedly the phrases that did not help me*”write succinct” and “make sure you answer the questions”). These interactions then fortified what I already knew prior to the conversation: I was just wasting their time and money and the best thing was to go away. What is still a mistery to me is the fact that with having so many capable people out there in the work force NIH tends to find officers that do not have a firm grasp on the English language or scientific intellect. So what is the role of a program officer then if they do not want or are capable of guiding research? NIH should do what many other industrial and academical institutions are doing: performance rating. Give me a form that allows me to rate my interactions with the officers and that will help to sort out those that are not willing to do their job and still get paid way more than us in active research busting our chops.

    1. Neither the NIH nor CSR is interested in performance reviews by their constituents. Exposing abuses and incompetencies perpertrated by SROs, POs, and even reviewers would foster an atmosphere of trasnparency….not a Pandora’s box the NIH/CSR wants to open.

      The NIH/CSR is smart enough to allow us to vent our frustrations on this anonymous (I think it’s anonymous, though I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it weren’t) blog, sapping our energies and closing avenues to real reform.

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