NIH Extramural Nexus (News)

What does scientific impact look like today? For decades, measures such as publication counts, citation rates, and grant funding have been primarily used to assess the success of researchers. Yet biomedical research has become increasingly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and data-intensive. Progress often depends on teams of investigators, shared datasets and software, rigorous validation of findings, and sustained mentorship and training efforts.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., announced the selection of Raymond H. Jacobson, Ph.D., as the director of NIH’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR), which ensures expert and fair review of the tens of thousands of grant applications received by the agency each year. 

We are seeking your feedback on whether distributing Research Project Grants (RPGs) funding across more investigators could increase overall scientific productivity and innovation (see NOT-OD-26-086). Through this Request for Information (RFI), NIH is presenting a proposal as one possible approach to advance stewardship, workforce sustainability, and the goals of the NIH Unified Funding Strategy. Comments may be sent electronically here by August 3, 2026.

NIH’s Seed Fund is back, with new Small Business program funding available and several upcoming opportunities to help applicants develop strong applications. We also encourage you join us for a live event on June 9 to hear from NIH experts and become familiar with the new opportunities and more.

NIH supports international scientific collaboration when conducted transparently and in accordance with NIH requirements. The key expectation is timely and accurate disclosure of foreign components and related activities. Here we share reminders about how to properly acknowledge foreign components in NIH grant applications, progress reports, and manuscripts resulting from NIH awards.

NIH has released its first Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) under the new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) SimplerNOFO initiative, which aims to make funding opportunities more accessible, understandable, and actionable for applicants.

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to powerful new advances in biomedical research. Alongside these NIH-supported scientific advances and priority research areas involving AI, we have also occasionally observed challenges with the use of these tools that affect the integrity of the science we support. Today, we are sharing some helpful reminders on the appropriate use of AI tools when applying, managing awards, and conducting the research process itself.

NIH has advanced initiatives to strengthen transparency and ensure disclosure of other support. These actions build on prior work to address risks associated with foreign interference while reinforcing that honesty, transparency, and funding‑overlap prevention remain non‑negotiable requirements.

We are sharing upcoming NIH National Advisory Council or Board (NAC) meetings for your awareness.  

The reliability of biomedical research is foundational to public trust in science and to ensuring that findings can benefit patients and communities. NIH’s Gold Standard Science plan advances this commitment by encouraging a culture that values replication and reproducibility. In support of this plan, NIH has launched a new Replication and Reproducibility Initiative to drive, incentivize and institutionalize replication and reproducibility efforts across the biomedical research enterprise.