Key Dates

RFA-NS-19-003 - BRAIN Initiative: Team-Research BRAIN Circuit Programs - TeamBCP (U19 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

NOT-MH-19-010 - Notice of Data Sharing Policy for the BRAIN Initiative

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)

National Eye Institute (NEI)

National Institute on Aging (NIA)

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)

All applications to this funding opportunity announcement should fall within the mission of the Institutes/Centers. The following NIH Offices may co-fund applications assigned to those Institutes/Centers.

Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR)

This Notice informs the research community that the NIH BRAIN Initiative intends to reissue Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) RFA-NS-19-003 BRAIN Initiative: Team-Research BRAIN Circuit Programs - TeamBCP (U19 Clinical Trial Not Allowed).

This Notice is being provided to allow potential applicants sufficient time to develop meaningful collaborations and responsive projects.

The FOA is expected to be published in Fall 2021 with an expected application due date in Fall 2022.

This FOA will utilize the U19 activity code. Details of the planned FOA are provided below.

This RFA will support integrated, interdisciplinary research teams from prior BRAIN technology and/or integrated approaches teams, and/or new projects from the research community that focus on examining circuit functions related to behavior, using advanced and innovative technologies. The goal will be to support programs with a team science approach that can realize meaningful outcomes within 5-plus years. Awards will be made for 5 years, with a possibility of one renewal. Projects will incorporate overarching principles of circuit function in the context of specific neural systems underlying sensation, perception, emotion, motivation, cognition, decision-making, motor control, communication, or homeostasis. Applications should incorporate theory-/model-driven experimental design and should offer predictive models as deliverables. Applications should seek to understand circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating relevant dynamic patterns of neural activity and by measuring the resulting behaviors and/or perceptions. Applications are expected to employ approaches guided by specified theoretical constructs, and are encouraged to employ quantitative, mechanistic models where appropriate. Applications will be required to manage their data and analysis methods in a prototype framework that will be developed and used in the proposed U19 project and exchanged with other BRAIN U19 recipients for further refinement and development. Model systems, including the possibility of multiple species ranging from invertebrates to humans, can be employed and should be appropriately justified. Programs should employ multi-component teams of research expertise – including neurobiologists, statisticians, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and data scientists, as appropriate - that seek to cross boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Recipients will join a consortium work group, coordinated by the NIH, to identify consensus standards of practice, to collect and provide data for ancillary studies, and to aggregate and standardize data for dissemination among the wider scientific community.

This RFA will require that applications include a Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP) in the proposed research. When a PEDP is required, applications submitted without such a plan will be considered incomplete and will be withdrawn prior to peer review. Evaluation of the applicant’s PEDP will be made during the peer review stages as part of the scorable criteria and during programmatic reviews, and will be used to inform funding decisions. For more information on the PEDP, please visit https://braininitiative.nih.gov/about/plan-enhancing-diverse-perspectives-pedp.

This RFA will also require that the Resource Sharing Plan complies with the policy outlined in NOT-MH-19-010.

Applications are not being solicited at this time. 

Please direct all inquiries to:

James Gnadt, PhD

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)

301-496-9964

[email protected]