Funding, News and Announcements

Hi all,

Following are brief highlights from the May CIHR University Delegates teleconference, including some select comments from the University Delegates’ face-to-face meeting in Ottawa at the end of April:

CIHR Updates

Still no news on who the next CIHR President will be. CIHR did report, however, that our own Dr. Chris McMaster will be assuming the Scientific Director role for the Institute of Genetics starting July 1. Congratulations Chris!

CIHR has launched its Equity and Diversity Questionnaire. As of May 15^th, application participants for all CIHR programs must complete this questionnaire. More information may be found here. 

Project Grant Update

Panels for the Spring 2018 competition will be commencing face-to-face discussions May 15^th, with the final panel meetings to be complete by June 15^th. Approximately 2,800 applications are under review, with Panels having been assigned anywhere from 20 to 80 applications. The Notice of Decision (NOD) will be July 10^th, with an October 1^st funding start date. Note that the budget for this competition has been increased from $225M to $275M, which will likely help maintain success rates at (or maybe even slightly above?) 15%. The Fall competition will be posted soon, with expected registration and application deadlines of August 15^th and September 12^th, respectively. NOD is anticipated to be January 23^rd, 2019 with April 1, 2019 funding start date.

CIHR did indicate that they still intend to revisit the topics and mandates for the current Panels, though we only briefly discussed at the face-to-face meeting last month where the focus was more on the process to review and update the Panels. The Funding Policy and Analytics unit at CIHR has recently undertaken two analyses focused on applications to the Project program and their fit within the PRC mandates, one involving surveys to applicants and reviewers from the Fall 2017 Project competition and a second looking at application transfers within the Fall 2017 Project competition. During discussions, UDs suggested that it might be useful as well to have a high-level profile of the reviewers on the Panel to help inform applicant selection. What’s clear is that CIHR will need to change mandates carefully given some of the complexities involved; expect these changes to look very incremental for the next few competitions.

More broadly, we discussed the current success rates in the Project grants and what one might consider to be an “acceptable” success rate. CIHR believes that 20-25% is where we should aim, though how we get there (even with the increased federal funding) is up for a lot of debate. Options on the table include limiting budgets (i.e. budget caps; as it stands across the board budget cuts are the norm, so much so that some PIs routinely account for these cuts in project budgeting) or limiting the number of grants per competition. PIs with 2 or more applications represent ~20% of the intake (notably, the chance that a second application gets funded is 3%); if you restricted these folks to one application, you would reduce the denominator and the success rate would be 20%.

Foundation Grant Update

The Stage 2 results are out; of the 163 applications still active at Stage 2, 58 are moving on to the Final Assessment Stage (Stage 3). Deliberations will be taking place June 12^th and 13^th, with an NOD of July 17^th (but likely sooner). CIHR expects 30 or so Foundation grants to be funded.

CIHR is still awaiting finalization of the working group report before announcing the date for the next competition. I can tell you that we had quite a substantial discussion regarding the Foundation program at our University Delegates meeting on April 27^th. It remains still too early to know if the Foundation program is “successful” – i.e, whether we are seeing bang for the buck. The Working Group headed by Terry Snutch has put forward a number of recommendations, including (i) limiting the program to mid- to late-career researchers, (ii) reducing the adjudication process to a single stage in the Fall with face-to-face committees, (iii) fixing the Foundation portion of the investigator-initiated budget at 25%, and (iv) building in specific guidelines for transitioning Foundation holders back into Project grants or for Foundation renewal sufficiently in advance of the end of the Foundation grant. For ECIs specifically, the working group recommended that they be immediately eligible for future grant competitions without any penalties to current Foundation grant funding levels (with consideration to the fact that their budgets were set fairly low from the outset). Importantly, none of these recommendations have yet been reviewed or sanctioned by the Governing Council, so stay tuned!

Strategic Updates

There were not many opportunities to report on for May/June. The next round of the Collaborative Health Research Project (CHRP) Grants competition has officially been launched. In addition, there are competition deadlines coming up around “rare diseases”, “chronic fatigue syndrome”, and “active and assisted living”; please visit ResearchNet for links to these programs. CIHR will also prepare a slidedeck for UDs describing available European initiatives to share with our constituents. The April 2018 Strategic competition results, including those from the 2017 CHRP competition and Team Grant in HIV/AIDS Comorbidities Prevention and Health Living competition can be found here.  

Odds and Sods

CIHR, and in particular Adrian Mota – the new Associate Vice-President, Research, Knowledge Translation and Ethics – discussed briefly with UDs the idea of building a grants management system that would take us into the next decade. Currently, each agency has its own system and the technology is old (data doesn’t get shared despite us being in the “Google era”). CIHR wants to explore how much the agencies can work together (eg., do the CVs have to be that different in terms of the data that is asked?), and will be looking for some meaningful engagement from the research community.

The new “Tri-Council Fund” that was included in the last federal budget analysis ($275M over 5 years, and $65M per year ongoing) and intended for international, interdisciplinary and high-risk projects is still “under development”, with discussions underway in the Canada Research Coordinating Committee (CRCC). The granting agencies are conducting an internal review of existing programs to help inform the development of the Tri-Council Fund. The allocation for 2018-19 is $35M.

As always, please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Regards,

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