Key Dates

RFA-RM-21-025 - NIH Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) Program: FIRST Cohort (U54 Clinical Trial Optional)

NOT-RM-20-023 - Notice of Intent to Publish a Funding Opportunity Announcement for the NIH Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) Program: FIRST Cohort (U54 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

Office of Strategic Coordination (Common Fund)

The purpose of this Notice is to inform the research community that the NIH Common Fund, along with its partner NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices, is planning to issue a funding opportunity announcement (FOA) to support the NIH Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) Program: FIRST Coordination and Evaluation Center. This will be an open competition.

This Notice is being provided to allow potential applicants sufficient time to develop meaningful plans for robust applications to this opportunity.

The FOA is expected to be published in Fall, 2020 with an expected application due date in November 2020.

This FOA will utilize the U54 activity code. Details of the planned FOA are provided below.

The NIH supported biomedical research workforce is more likely to thrive in environments that support equity, diversity, and social justice. The overall program objective of Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) is to create cultures of inclusive excellence at NIH-funded institutions by implementing a set of well-integrated, evidence-based strategies and evaluating their impact on prespecified metrics of institutional culture, inclusion, and diversity. Inclusive excellence is a philosophical approach to higher education administration and processes that means attending to both the demographic diversity of faculty/students and the need for developing climates and cultures in institutions so that all have a chance to succeed in STEMM (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2019. The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM). STEMM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine.

The purpose of the FIRST Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC) is to coordinate and facilitate consortium-wide activities, lead the development of evaluation strategies, instruments, metrics, common data elements, and to assess the impact and outcomes of the FIRST initiative overall.

The FIRST CEC will work collaboratively with awardees to: (1) identify fundamental attributes of promoting inclusive excellence by successful faculty cluster and cohort hiring, development, and retention efforts; (2) identify metrics for site-specific sustainable institutional culture change goal; (3) coordinate data acquisition across sites and harmonize basic measures to be used; (4) evaluate the impact of approaches implemented by each site on the attainment of inclusive excellence, including diversity and equity measures; and (5) disseminate evidence-based practices implemented by each site and lessons learned to transform and adapt models nationwide. CEC functions will be operationalized through four cores: Administrative, Evaluation, Data Coordination, and Communication and Dissemination Cores.

The FIRST CEC will be responsible for evaluating the attainment of FIRST goals consortium wide, rather than evaluating individual FIRST Cohort awardees. The overall goals and specific measurable objectives that the program expects to accomplish are in the areas of: (1) sustainable institutional culture change;

(2) promote institutional inclusive excellence by hiring a diverse cohort of new faculty; and (3) faculty development, mentoring, sponsorship, and promotion.

Technical Assistance Webinars

Technical assistance workshops regarding application expectations and program goals will be convened after the FOA is published.

Applications are not being solicited at this time.

Please direct all inquiries to:

Rina Das, Ph.D.

National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)

301-496-3996

[email protected]