Funding, News and Announcements

Hello everyone,

The November CIHR-UD meeting was held by webcast on November 1, 2018. Here are the highlights.

Dr. Michael Strong, the new president of CIHR was on the call and shared his vision for CIHR with the UD group. He met with the Executive Council of the CIHR-UD group (UDEC) on October 15 and delivered his vision as well. He indicated that he sees the role of the UD group to engage Deans and researchers at our institutions in the discussions around CIHR and to act as the conduit for researchers’ perspectives to CIHR. He wants more dynamic interactions with the UD group and is committed to meeting with UDEC face to face more frequently than in the past; aiming at 4 times per year. He will not be doing large road-trips to engage the broad research community, as has been done in the past. He will soon begin to develop a new strategic plan for CIHR, to be launched on June 7, 2020, which is the 20^th anniversary of the launch of CIHR. A process will need to be developed for individual researchers to get their concerns to the UDEC group through the UDs. He expects feedback from the CIHR-UD group as the plan is developed and only after this preliminary phase will he be visiting individual campuses for refinement via focused group discussions. Coalescence of institutions within regions will be used to better access regional issues and manage the number of individual engagements (in spring 2019). He will also consult with directors of the individual institutes during the initial phases. The goal will be to identify how to best deliver on the CIHR mission as outlined in the CIHR Act. He also plans to launch a series of podcasts where he will interview CIHR researchers to generate excitement around their work: “On the mike with Mike”. These will be casual and friendly conversations and UDs will be expected to provide suggestions for these events.

Dr. Strong fielded several questions from the group. He was asked why, with 1000 fewer applications received for the fall Project Scheme competition, that there was no anticipated increase in the success rate. He suggested that perhaps success rate was not a good measure of overall support of investigator-initiated research. This is a question for the research community to address going forward. Perhaps cuts to successful grants will be reduced? He was also asked if shifting funding from the Foundation Scheme to the Project Scheme was being considered. The answer was not at this time.

CIHR Update

Pierre Côté reported on changes to UD engagement that are meant to improve the conversation. As indicated by Dr. Strong, there will be more face to face opportunities for him with the UDEC group and potentially increasing the size of the group from its current membership of 5. It is anticipated that the UDEC group will generate the agenda for these meetings and will consult with the UDs on this.

The monthly UD group calls will also be more effective, in that the regular updates will be pre-distributed as a slide deck. This will allow more time to add late-breaking updates and for more in-depth discussion of some of the issues facing researchers. Topics for discussion on the call will be generated by UDEC and will accept input from the UD group, based in turn on input they receive from the community.

A new appointment was announced for Dr. Rick Glazier as Scientific Director of the CIHR Institute of Health Services and Policy Research.

There was a meeting of College Chairs on October 29-30. Topics of discussion included: best ways to measure success rates in grant competitions, low success rates of grants written in French, and improving access of peer review committees to members of the College of Reviewers. The future of the Foundation Scheme will be discussed at Governing Council in November.

The tri-agency fund is under review at the Treasury Board and that decision will be known in late November.

Demographics of the College of Reviewers was presented. The college currently has over 4000 members and 17 chairs. More than 60% of members are male and less than 40% are female. 53% of members are identify primarily in the Biomedical theme, 17% Clinical, 13% Social, cultural, environmental and population health, 9% Health systems/services, 8% uncategorized. CIHR remains committed to balancing representation in the College through targeted recruitment.

Project Grant Update

Martine Lafrance reported that peer review of the Fall Competition is in progress with committee meetings scheduled from November 19-December 12. Decisions will be released on January 23, 2019. Next round of Project Grants will have registration deadline of February 6, 2019 and application deadline of March 6, 2019.

Foundation Scheme Update

Reviewer assignments were completed on October 26 and online discussion will take place on November 27-29. Notice of decisions for Stage 1 will be released on December 18, 2018.

Scholarships and Awards Update

Banting PDFs (611 applicants) will be reviewed December 10-11, 2018. Vanier graduate scholarships will be reviewed January 29-30, 2019. CIHR Gold Leaf awards competition received 111 nominations.

Strategic Update

Application deadlines were announced for 7 funding opportunities between November 1 and December 11.

1. Operating Grant: IPPH Building Healthy Cities - Dragons' Den (2018-11-01)
2. Team Grant: HIV/AIDS Biomedical and Clinical Research (2018-11-06)
3. Indigenous Gender and Wellness: Idea Fair and Learning Circle (2018-11-08)
4. Catalyst Grant: SPOR Innovative Clinical Trials (2018-11-14)
5. Operating Grant: Geroscience Demonstration Grants (2018-11-15)
6. Team Grant: Canadian Microbiome Initiative 2: Research Teams (2018-11-20)
7. Centres for HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and other STBBIs Research (2018-12-11)

Funding results for 6 opportunities was announced:

1. Research Network: Rare Diseases (201805RCN) 1 application received/ 1 funded ($1.1M invested over 5 years)
2. Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) (201708CEC) 4 applications received/ 4 funded ($39M invested over 6 years)
3. Operating Grant: Network Environments for Indigenous Health Research (201806NEH) 28 applications received/ 24 funded ($1.8M invested over 1 year)
4. SPOR Summit Travel Awards (201809SST) 37 applications received/ 35 funded ($44k invested over 1 year)
5. Operating Grant: SickKids-CIHR-IHDCYH New Investigator Grants (201804SKF) 6 applications received/ 6 funded ($300k invested over 4 years)
6. Cannabis & PTSD Treatment in Military Personnel & Veterans (201809BIS) 1 application received, not funded.

If you have any items that you think should be discussed in more depth by the CIHR-UD group, please send me an email at rmcleod2@dal.ca. Next CIHR-UD meeting is on December 6, 2018. Bye for now!!

Roger McLeod
CIHR University Delegate
Associate Dean (Research)
Faculty of Medicine