Notice Number: NOT-OD-18-111

Key Dates
Release Date: December 7, 2017

Issued by
National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Purpose

Diversity Supplement requests are submitted as administrative supplements to awarded grants. The funds provided in response to Diversity Supplement requests are used to improve the diversity of the biomedical research workforce by recruiting and supporting students, postdoctorates, and eligible investigators from groups that have been shown to be underrepresented in health-related research.

Currently, NIH does not require that diversity supplements be submitted electronically, which results in a large number of these requests being submitted on paper. Paper submission poses a challenge to NIH staff when trying to identify and track diversity supplement awardees and their subsequent research careers. Therefore, to permit accurate tracking of diversity supplements and diversity awardees, NIH is requiring that all applications for (single and multi-project) diversity supplements must be submitted electronically as of January 25, 2018.

Application Submission Information:
There are several options available to electronically submit Diversity Supplement applications. These include NIH ASSIST, institutional system-to-system (S2S), and Grants.gov Workspace. NIH also offers a streamlined system through eRA Commons for submitting administrative supplements. A User’s Guide for submitting through this system is available at: https://era.nih.gov/commons/user_guide.cfm.

Additional application and submission information will be forthcoming with the publication of the revised Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research parent Funding Opportunity Announcement. (FOA).

Important reminder and upcoming system validation:
Candidates for this supplement support must have an eRA Commons account. In addition, within Section D.1 of the RPPR, recipients are required to identify whether an individual that has worked on the award is supported by a Diversity Supplement. Institutions with a non-competing continuation award (Type 5) that includes diversity supplement support (Type 3) will be required to identify at least one participant that is supported by the diversity supplement in Section D.1 of their RPPR. Institutions must reflect in the RPPR that a participant continues to be supported by the diversity supplement or an error message will appear and the RPPR will not be able to be submitted through the Commons.

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to:

Division of Grants Policy
Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration
Office of Extramural Research
grantspolicy@od.nih.gov