Last month, NIH published three notices of special interest (NOSIs) that each offer administrative supplements for ongoing research projects to further explore priority topics. If your interest has been piqued, continue reading for a synopsis of each NOSI. For complete details, e.g., Purpose, Research Objective, and Application and Submission Information, carefully read the corresponding NOSI in its entirety.
Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): Climate Change and Health Administrative Supplements
NIAID, along with several other NIH institutes and centers (ICs), is involved in the NIH-wide Climate Change and Health Initiative (CCHI). CCHI’s goals include reducing the health threats posed by climate change across the lifespan; improving the health equity of people who are at increased risk from or disparately affected by climate change impacts; and building health resilience among individuals, communities, and nations around the world.
Through this NOSI, the participating ICs invite applications to seed active NIH awards with new activities and partnerships in climate change and health (CCH) research and research training. You may submit an application for supplements to a grant that is not currently focused on CCH but could include CCH measures and outcomes within the scope of the current research and training Specific Aims, e.g., by extending CCH metrics to existing cohorts and studies or by supporting additional CCH areas within broadly defined research center grants.
NIAID’s specific areas of research interest include the following examples:
- Elucidating the effects of climate change-associated variations on the exposure of populations to allergens and on physiologic and pathologic responses to such allergen.
- Supporting epidemiological studies to evaluate the likely effects of climate change on the burden of zoonotic, food-, water-, and vector-borne diseases.
- Modeling the likely effects of climate adaptations in infrastructure on zoonotic, food-, water-, and vector-borne disease incidence and prevalence.
Read the NOSI for additional examples of NIAID’s climate health research priorities.
As administrative supplements, the activities proposed must be within the scope of the parent grant award’s Specific Aims. Applicants are encouraged to bring in new partners, as needed, to provide climate science and related expertise and begin to build multidisciplinary teams for future research in this area.
Requests may be for 1 year of support only and the project and budget periods must be within the currently approved project period for the existing parent award, excluding a no-cost extension period. Individual requests can be no more than $375,000 in direct costs. In addition, requested direct costs cannot exceed the direct costs for the parent grant in the fiscal year (FY) 2023 budget.
You must submit your administrative supplement application using the following opportunity or its subsequent reissued equivalent:
- PA-20-272, Administrative Supplements to Existing NIH Grants and Cooperative Agreements (Parent Admin Supp, Clinical Trial Optional)
The due date is May 8, 2023, by 5 p.m. local time of the applicant organization. For funding consideration, you must include “NOT-HD-23-006” (without quotation marks) in the Agency Routing Identifier field (box 4B) of the SF 424 R&R form. Applications without this information in box 4B will not be considered for this initiative.
Direct inquiries to NIAID’s scientific/research contact Dr. Adriana Costero-Saint Denis at acostero@niaid.nih.gov or 240-292-4184. However, to confirm eligibility, you should confer with the program officer and grants management specialist assigned to your active award.
This second NOSI announces the continuing availability of administrative supplements to active awards that have a significant software development component or key role in maintaining software tools of recognized value in biomedical and behavioral research.
The goal of this NOSI is to encourage and enable researchers to engage in new types of collaborations that focus on improving the quality and sustainability of research software from a software engineering perspective. Supplements will support efforts that address robustness, sustainability, reusability, portability, and scalability of existing biomedical research software tools and workflows of recognized scientific value.
To be eligible, the parent award must be able to receive funds in FY 2023 (October 1, 2022, to September 30, 2023) and not be in the final year or in a no-cost extension period as of September 30, 2023. The proposed project period cannot extend beyond the parent award. Confer with the program officer and grants management specialist assigned to your active award to verify eligibility.
You must submit your application using the following opportunity or its subsequent reissued equivalent:
- PA-20-272, Administrative Supplements to Existing NIH Grants and Cooperative Agreements (Parent Admin Supp, Clinical Trial Optional)
The application due date is May 9, 2023, by 5 p.m. local time of the applicant organization. For funding consideration, applicants must include "NOT-OD-23-073" (without quotation marks) in the Agency Routing Identifier field (Box 4B) of the SF 424 R&R form. Applications without this information in box 4B will not be considered for this initiative.
Direct all inquiries to NIH’s Office of Data Science Strategy at softwaresupplements@nih.gov.
This third NOSI announces the availability of supplements to active grants to support collaborations bringing together expertise in biomedicine, data management, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to make NIH-supported data useful and usable for AI/ML analytics.
This initiative is aligned with the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science, which describes actions aimed at modernizing the biomedical research data ecosystem and making data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) with high impact for open science. For the purposes of this Notice, AI/ML is inclusive of machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and neural networks (NN).
NIH is particularly interested in proposals that will advance the ethical development of AI-ready data, and transparent practices that enhance the ethical re-use of data for AI/ML applications.
These supplements may be used to support a variety of activities including, but not limited to, the following:
- Identifying existing shortfalls in AI/ML-readiness and informing the preparation of data for AI/ML through, for example, AI/ML hackathons, mini AI/ML applications, citizen science challenges, or other engagements with the AI/ML community to better understand current gaps in AI/ML-readiness.
- Activities for making data AI/ML-ready that are responsive to the gaps identified. These may include, for example, cleaning or filtering data; imputing missing metadata; data pre-processing; finding data representations to improve the computational efficiency of machine learning; removing spurious artifacts, for example, from heterogeneous data sources that affect learning or inference; data cleaning, wrangling, or filtering to provide a benchmark version of the data; adoption of ontologies or other standards to improve interoperability with other data; removing or characterizing biases and structures that may affect any AI/ML model trained on the data.
- Discovering and identifying imbalances in the data, biases in data labels or metadata, or other attributes of the dataset that would help researchers make better, more ethical decisions when using the data for AI/ML.
To be eligible, the parent award must be able to receive funds in FY 2023. You are strongly encouraged to contact the program officer and grants management specialist of your parent award to confirm eligibility.
You must submit your application using the following opportunity or its subsequent reissued equivalent:
- PA-20-272, Administrative Supplements to Existing NIH Grants and Cooperative Agreements (Parent Admin Supp, Clinical Trial Optional)
The application due date is May 16, 2023, by 5 p.m. local time of the applicant organization.
For funding consideration, you must include "NOT-OD-23-082” (without quotation marks) in the Agency Routing Identifier field (box 4B) of the SF 424 R&R form. Applications without this information in box 4B will not be considered for this initiative.
Direct questions about the NOSI’s research priorities to Dr. Fenglou Mao at AI-readiness@nih.gov.