NIH Seeks Proposals for 2009 Director's Pioneer and New Innovator Awards

NIH welcomes proposals for 2009 NIH Director's Pioneer Awards and New Innovator Awards. Both programs are part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research and support exceptionally creative scientists who take highly innovative, potentially high-impact approaches to major challenges in biomedical or behavioral research.

Pioneer Awards provide up to $2.5 million in direct costs over 5 years and are open to scientists at any career stage. New Innovator Awards provide up to $1.5 million in direct costs over the same period and are for early career investigators who have not received an NIH regular research (R01) or similar NIH grant.

NIH expects to make 5 to 10 Pioneer Awards and up to 24 New Innovator Awards in September 2009.

To continue its strong record of diversity in these programs, NIH especially encourages women and members of groups that are underrepresented in NIH research to apply.

Starting this year, both the Pioneer Award and the New Innovator Award competitions will begin with a pre-application phase:

The Pioneer Award competition begins with a proposal submission period from November 17 to December 17, 2008. See http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-09-012.html for instructions and http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/pioneer for more information. Send questions to pioneer@nih.gov.

The New Innovator Award competition begins with a proposal submission period from December 15, 2008 to January 15, 2009. See http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-09-013.html for instructions and http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/newinnovator for more information. Send questions to newinnovator@nih.gov.


New! Transformative R01 Program
The NIH’s new Transformative R01 Program (T-R01s) will allow highly creative, “out-of-the-box” projects to be supported. The T-R01 Program represents a High Risk/High Reward Demonstration Project in which novel approaches to peer review and program management are to be piloted.

The application submission period is from December 29, 2008 to January 29, 2009. See http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/T-R01/ for more information. Send questions to T_R01@mail.nih.gov.