NIH Loan Repayment Program

The NIH Loan Repayment Programs (LRPs) are a set of programs established by Congress, designed to recruit and retain highly qualified health professionals into biomedical or biobehavioral research careers. The escalating costs of advanced education and training in medicine and clinical specialties are forcing some scientists to abandon their research careers for higher-paying private industry or private practice careers.

The LRPs counteract that financial pressure by repaying up to $35,000 annually of a researcher's qualified educational debt in return for a commitment to engage in NIH mission-relevant research. Awardees can receive up to $70,000 of qualified educational debt repayment with a two-year contract. This year's application cycle opens on Friday, September 1st. See the LRP website for more information: lrp.nih.gov.

Grants.gov will phase out PDF-based application packages on 12/31/17

Grants.gov has announced that as of the end of 2017, they will no longer make available or accept the PDF-based application packages, now known as "legacy packages". Instead, Grants.gov offers their online application preparation and submission website, Workspace. You can learn more about how to use this new tool here: Grants.gov Workspace Overview. Additionally, many of the Federal sponsors already have, or have recently created their own online submission tools, such as NSF's Fastlane and NIH's ASSIST, that you may also have the option to submit through.

If your proposal must go through Grants.gov for submission, get familiar with Workspace early and give it a go -- pretty soon you won't have a choice anymore!

Do you do research with human subjects?

Under the NIH's new definition of "clinical trial", your study might become one, soon.

Due to upcoming policy changes in the definition which broaden the requirements that qualify a study as a clinical trial, you may have to start checking "yes" to clinical trial on the Notice of Intent to Submit form and registering your studies on ClinicalTrials.gov, when you did not have to do so previously.

The NIH has created a helpful page at https://grants.nih.gov/policy/clinical-trials.htm that provides more information about the changes in policy, and the four questions which, if you answer "yes" to all, will define your human-subject study as a clinical trial.