Funding, News and Announcements

Dear Project Grant applicants,

Several weeks ago, we sent you a link  to a survey regarding the peer review committee mandates for the Project Grant program

Please note that the deadline to complete this survey has been extended to December 15^th. (To those of you who have already completed the survey, we thank you for your time!)

Why did we extend the deadline?
Unfortunately, the survey participation rate was less than 30%. We are concerned that the sample size of the survey analysis might not be representative of the Fall 2017 Project Grant applicants, so we need your help.

Why is CIHR doing this?
As you know, substantial changes to the OOGP-based peer review committee mandates were not possible in the time CIHR has had to deliver this Fall 2017 competition. And yet, we know that those mandates need to be updated to ensure that they cover the breadth of research areas within CIHR's mandate and that the peer review needs of multidisciplinary applications can be met. The best way for us to figure out which research areas are being underserved is for the applicants themselves to tell us whether or not they felt they had a home with one of the committees.

Why did you ask for my application number?
The survey is—and will remain—confidential, and your feedback will not have any impact on the assessment of the application(s) that you submitted to the competition. We have asked for your application numbers strictly for the purposes of stronger analysis, such as linking the feedback data to demographics data (pillar, institution, region, etc).

What will CIHR do with all this feedback?
In addition to using the feedback to shape the evolution of the peer review committee mandates, we plan to share the anonymized survey data with the research community. This analysis will be posted on CIHR’s website and shared through social media.

Please take 10 minutes to fill out the applicant survey, if you haven’t done so already. We would appreciate receiving your responses by December 15^th.

If you have any questions or concerns about this survey, please contact the Funding Analytics team (Funding-analytics@cihr-irsc.gc.ca).

Thanks again for your time.

Sincerely,
Adrian Mota

Director General / Operations Support
Canadian Institutes of Health Research / Government of Canada