Reminder: NIH Will Continue to Accept Preliminary Data as Post-Submission Material Through January 2022 Council

In recognition of the fact that COVID-19 may still be adversely affecting the ability of applicants to generate preliminary data, NIH will continue to accept a one-page update with preliminary data as post-submission materials for applications submitted for the January 2022 Council (beginning with applications submitted for the May 25, 2021 due date for Fall 2021 review meetings), ONLY if the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) used for submission allowed preliminary data in the application.

Announcement of Childcare Costs for Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Supported Individual Fellows

As part of our on-going efforts to develop programs which support family-friendly research environments for the NIH-supported workforce, NIH will begin providing an option for NRSA fellows to request support for childcare costs in new and continuation applications or as administrative supplements to existing awards effective April 8, 2021. The NRSA childcare costs apply to full-time NIH-NRSA supported fellowship positions. Each fellow is eligible to receive $2,500 per budget period to defray childcare costs. The NRSA childcare costs are not tied to any payback obligations.

NIH Stands Against Structural Racism in Biomedical Research

I am proud to join my NIH colleagues today in reaffirming our commitment to fostering a diverse biomedical research workforce and ending structural racism at NIH, the institutions we support, and anywhere where NIH research activities take place. Working together, we can continue identifying and dismantling any policies, practices, or other impediments that may harm our supported workforce and science. We encourage you to join us in this effort. Please take a moment to read the statement below from the NIH Director on achieving racial equity in biomedical research and visit our new webpage, which includes more on the UNITE initiative. You are also welcome to share your thoughts and ideas to our Request for Information directly with us here.

Help Us Understand How You Use Common Data Elements in NIH-Supported Research

Common Data Elements foster rigor, facilitate data sharing, and allow multiple datasets to be integrated. They also help make data more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Many different CDEs are currently in use and can vary across research disciplines, so we would encourage researchers check out databases like the NIH CDE Repository for examples, tools, and other related resources. Through a recently released Request for Information (NOT-LM-21-005), we seek your thoughts on how you use CDEs, potential challenges to their adoption, and how NIH might facilitate and incentivize their use to help us plan future CDE-related efforts.

What You Read in 2020

Looking back on 2020 includes seeing how well we have done to capture your interest with our Open Mike blog posts.  Did we hit the mark?  Here we analyze page views on the Open Mike blog. Similar to what we did for 2018, below we show the top ten blog posts from 2020 based on overall page views. Posts on topics that are directly related to grant funding were the ones that were viewed the most.

Reminder: NIH Will Continue to Accept Preliminary Data as Post-Submission Material Through August/October 2021 Councils

In recognition of the fact that COVID-19 may still be adversely affecting the ability of applicants to generate preliminary data, NIH will continue to accept a one-page update with preliminary data as post-submission materials for applications submitted for the August/October 2021 council (beginning with applications submitted for the January 25, 2021 due date for Summer 2021 review meetings), ONLY if the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) used for submission allowed preliminary data in the application.

Reflections on 2020, Looking Towards 2021

From struggles to successes, 2020 deserves a look back. Right before the holidays, I sat down with Dr. David Kosub from the NIH Office of Extramural Research’s communication shop to reflect on 2020 and what may be in store for the year ahead. I invite you to watch our conversation and hope you have a happy, healthy, and safe new year!

Some Thoughts Following the NIH Inclusion Across the Lifespan 2 Workshop

“The [NIH Inclusion Across the Lifespan] policy, and the review and reporting requirements associated with it, should help ensure that children and older adults are not inappropriately excluded from clinical studies. The policy also has the potential to provide a more robust understanding of the full spectrum of participants recruited into clinical studies.”

Together with my NIH colleagues Drs. Marie Bernard and Janine Clayton, we made this point in a 2018 JAMA opinion piece following the inaugural NIH Inclusion Across the Lifespan workshop. Fast forward, we revisited this issue at the NIH’s Inclusion Across the Lifespan 2 workshop held this past September. You can watch the videocast here. The report covering the event was posted today, and I wanted to share some of my takeaways.

NIH Challenges Academia to Share Strategies to Strengthen Gender Diversity

On behalf of the NIH Working Group on Women in Biomedical Careers, the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health has launched a new challenge competition to promote the advancement of women in leadership roles in academia. It is called the NIH Prize for Enhancing Faculty Gender Diversity in Biomedical and Behavioral Science. Dr. Janine Clayton, Director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health, described the competition as one that will recognize institutions that have successfully and systemically addressed gender diversity and equity issues among faculty members in biomedical and behavioral sciences (see her full post here.)