Research Education Programs

Purpose

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Education Program supports research education activities in the mission areas of the NIH. The overarching goal of the Research Education program is to:

• Support educational activities that complement and/or enhance training of a workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research needs;
• Help recruit individuals with specific specialty or disciplinary backgrounds to research careers in biomedical, behavioral, and clinical sciences; and
• Foster a better understanding of biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research and its implications.

To advance these objectives, NIH Research Education Programs support one or more of the following educational activities:

• mentoring activities,
• courses for skills development,
• curriculum or methods development, and
• outreach.

These programs are intended to complement and enhance research training rather than support a specific research project. Depending on the funding opportunity and NIH ICO, R25/UE5 programs may support activities such as, but not limited to, summer research experiences, workshops, short courses, mentoring networks, and curriculum development

Program directors and principal investigators (PD/PI) that can provide administrative and scientific leadership to the development and implementation of the proposed program are eligible to apply for these grants.

The PD/PI of the awarded grant selects participants in research education programs. Program participants may span a broad range of career stages and backgrounds, including high school students, science teachers, undergraduates, postbaccalaureates, graduate students, predoctoral and health professional students, clinical and health professionals, postdoctoral scholars, individuals in clinical residency or specialty training, early-career and established investigators, and members of the lay community.

How these differ from other NIH training and career development opportunities

Research Education Programs are distinct from:

• T awards (institutional training grants), which support formal research training programs for cohorts of undergraduate, predoctoral, and postdoctoral trainees.
• F awards (fellowships), which provide mentored research training to individual predoctoral, postdoctoral, and established investigators.
• K awards (Individual or Institutional career development awards), which support investigators in the earlier stages of their research careers by providing protected time for research.