Funding, News and Announcements

Dear colleagues,

The results of the Project Scheme competition released by CIHR on July 15 – while not overly surprisingly given the issues that had been brought to the fore during the peer review process – were nevertheless frustrating for many and undoubtedly devastating for some with much invested in ongoing research programs. The 6.4% success rate achieved in this competition (relative to the ~13% national success rate) is certainly not a reflection of the quality of the research taking place here and in our affiliated hospitals. These disappointments aside, my congratulations go out to the recipients of our 7 Project grants (Bal Chauhan; Alon Friedman; Janice Graham; Craig McCormick; Chris McMaster; and Victor Rafuse) and to our two Foundation Grant recipients (Rudolf Uher and Patrick McGrath).

To address the fallout from this last competition, and to better position ourselves to be successful in this evolving CIHR landscape, the VPR office will be working with Faculties over the next few months to develop a bridge funding strategy and process, and to strengthen our internal peer review processes.

As indicated in my last communiqué, the Minister-mandated working group meeting held last week to address in particular the peer review process yielded a number of recommendations, some of which were approved that day and others that required some additional refinement involving the working group. The outcomes of this meeting have now been finalized and are summarized here. Some key changes to note:

• Applicants will be permitted to submit a maximum of two applications to each Project Grant competition.
• The existing page limits for applications will be expanded to 10 pages (including figures and tables) and applicants will be able to attach additional unlimited supporting material, such as references and letters of support.
• Stage 1 will NOT involve any asynchronous virtual review; each application will receive 4-5 reviews, managed by clusters of Virtual Chairs, paired with Scientific Officers.
• The current alpha scoring system will be revert back to a numerical scoring system
• ~40% of applications reviewed at Stage 1 (those that are highly ranked or with large scoring discrepancies) will move to Stage 2 for face-to-face review 

I had indicated in this earlier email that there would be a focus in particular on improving success rates for early and mid-career investigators; this will be left for further discussion by the Peer Review working group (PRWG) that will be established under the leadership of the College of Reviewers` Executive Chair (Dr. Paul Kubes) along with representative participants drawn from those who attended the Working Group meeting; this PRWG will also be advising CIHR in the implementation of the above changes. Also, please note that in this earlier communication, CIHR had indicated its intention to maintain the original application deadline dates for the Project Grant and Foundation Grant competitions this Fall. However, in order to give the PRWG adequate time to meet, and given the changes to the peer review process outlined in the Outcomes Statement, CIHR has now indicated these dates will be changed and is currently examining the anticipated impacts on competition timelines.

CIHR will share additional details concerning the revised launch dates and deadlines as soon as possible, but have confirmed at this time that registration will not open before September 1, 2016 for either competition.

As University Delegate, I encourage you to reach out to me with any constructive comments or suggestions you may have so that I can feed them into our larger University Delegate network and Executive Committee that interfaces regularly with CIHR. I am also aware of a number of advocacy groups looking to accumulate feedback, including the Association of Canadian Early Career Health Researchers (ACECHR), the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC), and NSHRF.  

In addition, we will be looking to bring the health research community together for a “Town Hall” in late August / early September to provide key updates for pending competitions and to gather additional feedback on proposed course corrections for these CIHR reforms.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Mark Filiaggi, Ph.D.
CIHR Delegate
Associate Vice-President, Research
filiaggi@dal.ca
Ph: (902) 494-7102