NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Institutes of Health is seeking submissions for the upcoming year through its Pioneer awards and the New Innovator awards programs.
Under the Roadmap for Medical Research Program, NIH plans to fund between five and ten Pioneer award winners with up to $5 million, and it will grant up to $55.7 million over five years to as many as 24 New Innovator awardees in 2009.
Applications for these high-risk research initiatives will undergo two review phases. In a pre-application phase, submissions will be evaluated by a group of external reviewers, and submissions deemed by the panel to be most outstanding will be asked to submit full applications.
The New Innovator program will fund scientists who have not received NIH funding before. The goal is to support a small number of new investigators “of exceptional creativity who propose bold and highly innovative new research approaches that have the potential to produce a major impact on broad, important problems in biomedical and behavioral research,” NIH said.
The Pioneer program seeks to support potentially transformative research focused on addressing “major biomedical challenges” that reflects novel ideas that are not being pursued already, and it was created to complement other NIH funding programs.
In September, NIH granted a total of $138 million to 47 scientists under the 2008 Pioneer and New Innovator award programs.
“These highly creative researchers are tackling important scientific challenges with bold ideas and inventive technologies that promise to break through barriers and radically shift our understanding,” NIH Director Elias Zerhouni said in a statement in September.