NIH has extended the deadline for your organization to respond to NIH’s Request for Information (RFI) to receive feedback on our effort to end structural racism in biomedical research through the UNITE initiative. Comments can be submitted through the submission website and must be received by 11:59 pm on Friday, April 23, 2021.
In this NIH All About Grants episode, Dr. Paula Goodwin with the NIH Office of Extramural Research discusses the Diversity Plan, why it is required for conference grant applications, some things to consider when putting a plan together, how reviewers will assess it, and more.
On March 1, NIH Director Francis Collins announced NIH’s broad-based initiative, UNITE, to end structural racism and racial inequities in biomedical science. This is a recognition of the need for urgent, sustained effort on many fronts across the research enterprise, including in all parts of the NIH’s extramural processes, to change culture. While the NIH Institutes and Centers will examine their programmatic priorities and discretionary funding practices, here at CSR, we are committed to pushing ahead with efforts to protect the peer review process from the systemic biases that exist in all areas of the scientific community.
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.
Applications for conference grants now require a diversity plan. A recent Guide Notice announced that reviewers will be asked to evaluate the plan and factor it into the overall impact score.
At NIH, we have and continue to focus not just on gender equity but on ensuring greater diversity in all aspects of the biomedical workforce. This means, that along with women, members of racial and/or ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds are also included. To help ensure that the nation remains a global leader in scientific discovery and innovation, NIH needs the richness and breadth of varied perspectives that comes from having a pool of highly talented scientists from diverse backgrounds.
In that spirit, today we released a guide notice (NOT-OD-21-053) that updates guidance for NIH R13/U13 Conference Grant applicants and recipients.
An automatically generated Trainee Diversity Report will replace the manual report that signing officials are required to submit with RPPRs for most institutional training, career development awards and research education grants, effective October 30, 2020. The automated report will leverage existing electronic demographic data entered by trainees in the Personal Profile of eRA Commons to minimize the need for manual data entry by recipients and reduce their burden.
NIH is seeking applications for the 2021 Transformative Research awards through a new funding opportunity (RFA-RM-20-013) recently released on Friday, May 21, 2020. And, as a way to address concerns about bias in peer review while also enhancing diversity, this High Risk, High Reward program is going to anonymize the review of Transformative Research Award applications.
NIH offers an aggregated listing of diversity related announcements on our Diversity in Extramural Programs page. Browse the list, or filter by participating organization and/or grant type (aka activity code).
In our next installment of the NIH’s All About Grants podcast series we sit down with the Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Dr. Jon Lorsch, to chat about diversity.
