Funding, News and Announcements

Hi everyone,

Following are highlights from the January CIHR University Delegates teleconference:

Project Scheme 2016 Pilot Update

As a reminder, the closing date for registration to the Project Scheme competition is January 18, 2016; no applications will be accepted that do not adhere to this deadline. Complete registration instructions can still be found here.

Supporting materials for the 2016 Project Grant 1^st live pilot are finally available on CIHR’s website. Note that CIHR will be hosting a series of Question and Answer webinars beginning this month to provide applicants and research administrators an opportunity to ask questions about the Project Grant application. You may register for a webinar on CIHR’s website.

Several issues were clarified with UDs during Q&A. CIHR confirmed that “tables” were not allowed in the 2-page attachment, in part from past pilot experience that saw researchers “writing a bunch of text and putting a box around it”; they will re-visit this restriction after this Pilot. It was confirmed as well that there is no cap on funds requested in this competition, though they would anticipate these projects applications to “typically” be up to $750k. You can ask for equipment in this competition (this was not possible in the former OOGP), but there should be solid justification; budgets will be reviewed, so it is possible that the equipment portion may not be funded.

CIHR is concerned that researchers are being encouraged to submit multiple applications to the 2016 Project Grant live pilot competition and is asking each applicant to submit only their most competitive application(s). After considering the feedback received from the community throughout 2014-15, and weighing the risks and benefits of making changes through the transition period, CIHR decided on June 22, 2015 to remove the limits on the number of applications that could be submitted by an individual principal applicant to the Project Scheme.

However, as they announced back in June, they are monitoring the application pressure for this pilot and balancing application pressure against reviewer burden for the competition timelines planned. If the total number of registrations received presents an unreasonable burden on peer reviewers, which in turn could compromise their ability to produce high quality reviews in a short time period, CIHR may be required to re-implement restrictions to the number of applications or change aspects of the competition timelines. For example, once registration numbers are known, CIHR may be required to ask principal applicants who have registered multiple proposals to defer one or more of them to a subsequent competition, and/or modify the competition timelines (e.g., extend the Notice of Decision date).

CIHR Foundation Scheme 2015 Updates

CIHR has yet to do any analysis of the Stage 1 results from the second Pilot. UDs requested further clarification (and demonstrable examples) of how the criteria were used to determine which applications moved on to Stage 2, as confusion remains concerning with respect to a researchers’ “percentile” ranking (“at least two reviewers ranked the application above the 80^th percentile in their ranked list”); percent rank was reported to applicants. Stay tuned on this front.

CIHR confirmed that the next Foundation scheme competition will be “open” (i.e. without the restrictions regarding of the date of CIHR operating grants held). CIHR also reiterated that Project grants WILL NOT get cancelled if the co-PI is awarded a Foundation grant; however, this investigator would need to be removed from the Project grant as co-PI were this grant to get funded.

Institute Advisory Boards

CIHR currently has a call out to fill up to 75 positions within the five new Institutes Advisory Boards (IABs). These IABs will serve all 13 CIHR Institutes, with the expectation that this new structure will boost collaboration across Institutes and within the multitude of stakeholder communities. These five new IABs are:

• IAB on Research Excellence, Policy and Ethics

• IAB on Health Innovation

• IAB on Indigenous Peoples' Health

• IAB on Health Promotion and Prevention

• IAB on Chronic Conditions                                                                                                          

Online applications can be submitted before February 3. Please click here to apply to become an IAB member.

As always, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,

Mark Filiaggi
CIHR University Delegate
Associate Vice-President Research
filiaggi@dal.ca
(902) 494-7102