Slots: 1
Deadlines
Internal Deadline: Contact RII.
LOI: 30 days prior.
External Deadline: May 25, 2023
Award Information
Award Type: Grant
Estimated Number of Awards: The number of awards is contingent upon NHGRI appropriations and the receipt of a sufficient number of meritorious applications.
Anticipated Award Amount: Application budgets are limited to $250,000 direct cost per year. The project period is limited to five years.
Who May Serve as PI: The PD/PI must be an established investigator with significant research funding from NIH (e.g. multiple research grants, a large center grant, or cooperative agreement, etc.) in genomics data science and capable of providing both administrative and scientific leadership to the development and implementation of the proposed program. The PD/PI will be expected to monitor and assess the program and submit all documents and reports as required.
Link to Award: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-21-075.html
Process for Limited Submissions
PIs must submit their application as a Limited Submission through the Research Initiatives and Infrastructure (RII) Application Portal: https://rii.usc.edu/oor-portal/. Use the template provided here:
RII-Limited-Submission-Application-Template.
Materials to submit include:
- (1) Two-Page Proposal Summary (0.5” margins; single-spaced; font type: Arial, Helvetica, or Georgia typeface; font size: 11 pt). Page limit includes references and illustrations. Pages that exceed the 2-page limit will be excluded from review. You must use the template linked above.
- (2) CV – (5 pages maximum)
Note: The portal requires information about the PIs in addition to department and contact information, including the 10-digit USC ID#, Gender, and Ethnicity. Please have this material prepared before beginning this application.
Purpose
The NIH Research Education Program (R25) supports research educational activities that complement other formal training programs in the mission areas of the NIH Institutes and Centers. The overarching goals of the NIH R25 program are to: (1) complement and/or enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs; (2) encourage individuals from diverse backgrounds, including those from groups underrepresented in the biomedical and behavioral sciences, to pursue further studies or careers in research; (3) help recruit individuals with specific specialty or disciplinary backgrounds to research careers in biomedical, behavioral and clinical sciences; and (4) foster a better understanding of biomedical, behavioral and clinical research and its implications.
The over-arching goal of this NHGRI R25 program is to support educational activities that encourage individuals from diverse backgrounds, including those from groups underrepresented in the biomedical and behavioral sciences, to pursue further studies or careers in research. To accomplish the stated over-arching goal, this FOA will support creative educational activities with a primary focus on:
- Research Experiences: For students currently enrolled in master’s degree programs in data science (including programs in statistics/biostatistics, mathematics, computer science or equivalent fields) to provide hands-on exposure to genomics data sets as a substrate for their analytical skills. Through this announcement, NHGRI hopes to attract such students to the genomics workforce. NHGRI also seeks to both encourage data scientists who plan to opt for a terminal master’s degree to join genomics research, as well as reinforce the intent of current master’s degree students who are considering entering a doctoral program with an eventual dissertation focused on genomic data science.
This FOA is explicitly intended to support the entry of master’s degree students in data science into the genomics workforce. Undergraduate or doctoral students will not be supported under this FOA. The following groups explicitly cannot be supported under this announcement:
- Data scientists who have completed an undergraduate degree but are not enrolled in a data science master’s degree.
- Data scientists currently with extensive genomics research experience.
- Master’s degree students currently enrolled in genomics programs who are interested in gaining exposure to data science.
For this FOA, “genomics research” is defined as biological investigation at the scale of the complete genome without having a focus on a single gene, a group of genes, a particular genomic locus, or a specific disease or organ system. “Genomics programs” are defined as research or educational programs that have a complete or substantial focus on genomics research, including both experimental and computational approaches towards genomics. Programs that focus on biological research or education with genetics topics included without a specific focus on genome-scale topics will ordinarily be considered outside the scope of “genomics programs”.
“Data science programs” are defined as those training students to obtain master’s degrees in statistics, mathematics, computer science or equivalent quantitative or analytical fields, but without an existing genomics component. Existing master’s degree programs which focus on bioinformatics (or more specifically, genome informatics) are outside the scope of this funding opportunity announcement, which is intended to bring more data scientists into the genomics community who have very little or no previous experience working with genomics data sets.
Research education programs may complement ongoing research training and education occurring at the applicant institution, but the proposed educational experiences must be distinct from those training and education programs currently receiving Federal support. R25 programs may augment institutional research training programs (e.g., T32, T90) but cannot be used to replace or circumvent Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) programs.
Visit our Institutionally Limited Submission webpage for more updates and other announcements.