Slots: 1
Deadlines
Internal Deadline: Friday, December 6th, 2024, 5pm PT Contact RII.
LOI: N/A
External Deadline: January 27, 2025
Recurring Deadlines: January 27, 2026; January 27, 2027
Award Information
Award Type: Cooperative Agreement
Estimated Number of Awards: The number of awards is contingent upon NIH appropriations and the number of meritorious applications submitted.
Anticipated Award Amount: Application budgets for direct costs should not exceed $500,000/year.
Who May Serve as PI: The contact PD/PI must be from the applicant organization. The contact PD/PI is expected to have a full-time appointment at the applicant organization unless extremely well-justified. If the full-time status of the contact PD/PI changes after the award, the applicant organization must obtain prior program approval to appoint a new PD/PI or request a deviation from the full-time rule.
Link to Award: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-24-268.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 Applicant Template
Materials to submit include:
- (1) Two-Page Proposal Summary (1” margins; single-spaced; standard font type, e.g. Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, 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#. Please have this material prepared before beginning this application.
Purpose
Background
Promoting broad participation in the extramural scientific workforce is critical to the success of the NIH mission and is consistent with the mandates of the 21st Century Cures Act . Benefits of a diverse scientific workforce include fostering scientific innovation, enhancing global competitiveness, building robust learning environments, improving research quality, advancing participation of underserved populations as research participants, and strengthening public trust.
Resource-limited institutions (RLIs) have lower research capacity, creating obstacles to research and research training for both faculty and students such as limited access to research facilities, equipment, and supplies as well as less time to engage in research because of competing professional or educational demands. The Biomedical Research Environment & Sponsored Program Administration Development (BRE-SPAD) program aims to promote broad participation in the biomedical research ecosystem by supporting RLIs with few to no biomedical research doctoral students to conduct research, enhance the research environment, and increase sponsored programs administration capacity. By supporting research capacity building at RLIs, the BRE-SPAD program will broaden the pool of faculty conducting biomedical research and the organizational settings where NIH-funded research is performed.
Program Considerations
The BRE-SPAD program is intended to support the development of biomedical research capacity. The biomedical research enterprise includes a range of research, including basic science, behavioral, social science, as well as translational and clinical research, and will be described hereafter as biomedical research. The BRE-SPAD program aims to support the needs of organizations that are in different stages of biomedical research capacity building. The BRE-SPAD program will support activities in the following areas (1-3). All applications should propose plans in at least two of the funding areas listed below:
- Sponsored Programs Administration Development: For activities to increase sponsored programs administration capabilities, including staff, resources, training, policy development and other activities related to grants, contracts, activities to increase organizational funds available for research, and technology transfer.
- Research Environment: For activities to cultivate growth in research and research education activities. Example activities include, but are not limited to, faculty grant writing training, student research training activities, course-based research development, research symposia, and research oversight policies and implementation.
- Pilot Research Project Program: For the development of a program to administer internal pilot research project funding to faculty conducting biomedical research with the goal of generating preliminary data to enhance the competitiveness of securing external research funding. For more information see Section VI.
Visit our Institutionally Limited Submission webpage for more updates and other announcements.