Neuro-friends, have I got a grant for you! If you thought the BRAINS RFA demonstrated the epitome of acronymical dexterity, I invite you to feast your eyes on EUREKA. This FOA--for Exceptional Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (for Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System)--is basically the Cadillac of award notices. No longer is it enough to be significant, innovative, or even transformative! You must be exceptionally unconventional, and you must change the velocity of knowledge itself!
There's lots of juicy goodness in the description, too. A few highlights:
"Reviewers...will be reminded that risk is a hallmark of exceptionally innovative research and, in most cases, should not detract from the merit of an application."
"A PD/PI’s record of overcoming difficult scientific hurdles, appropriate to his/her career stage, may also be useful in assessing the likelihood of success."
Also of note--Research Strategy is limited to 6 pages, with a mere 3 dedicated to Approach. Moreover, you must include a statement within those 6 pages on "Likelihood of Success," in which you must address the following: "If ...you have not yet made a paradigm-shifting discovery or solved a very difficult problem, which aspect of the logic of the experimental approach suggests that there is some probability that the proposed research will be successful."
It's also worth noting that there's a discrepancy amongst ICs in terms of how many awards, as well of the size of each, are available:
-NINDS, $1,500,000, 4-6 awards
-NIMH, $1,500,000, 4-6 awards
-NIDA, $1,000,000, 2-4 awards
-NIA, $500,000, 1-2 awards
There's a bunch of other stuff that's different about the period of funding, renewability (non) and whatnot, so much so that it almost doesn't even sound like an R01 anymore! I encourage you to go read the whole FOA, it's pretty fascinating.
So, are we all going to apply? I'm not sure--I feel like this may not be the kind of thing that a new investigator would do well on, despite the lip service to "appropriate to his/her career stage." How do we prove that we've overcome difficult hurdles? Do I talk about the time that my PI handed me a box of 30 year-old Stoelting parts and I jerry-rigged a stereotax?
Very curious what your initial thoughts are on this, folks. I'm just waiting for NIH to just come out and name the next FOA "PARADIGM SHIFT," and come up with some amazing acronym for that. Feel free to have a go in the comments!
Dr Becca has a new job (NJ) as a tenure-track assistant professor in the neurosciences at New Job University (NJU), located in New Job City (NJC). She is still fumbling, just making a little more money doing it.
I don't know what the big deal is about all the acronym stuff. NIH has been doing this for years. For example, R01 stands for Real awes0me project!!!1!
"We want to fund risky research that has a very strong probability of success." Dillholes.
(Sorry for the two comments) How about instead: research that is risky but has a big upside, but where the downside, the negative result, is still interesting?
Someone has to stop these people and their acronyms.
They actually said "paradigm-shifting discovery"? I can see it now ...
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/asplos98/dilbert.html
And here I had thought that knowledge was limited to the same damn 3 x 10^8 m/s that the rest of us were. I'M NOT WORTHY!
The real title of this FOA is "Hey! Let's give some extra money to a few BSDs!" Because if you've shifted one paradigm, surely you can shift another.
This EUREKA mechanism has existed for some time, one of the junior PI's in my department received one. While the reaserch was cool, it wasn't scifi-ish or anything like that.
So for sure don't be discouraged from applying.
I just wish congresspeople had to apply for their pork funding to the same standards whilst they cut NIH funding to the bone . . . you know, the Absolutely Positively Beyond Necessary Supercalifragilisticexpealodocious Bridge To Nowhere (PRK-1000).
This Centers of "Excellence," "Paradigm-Shifting," "Exceptional" stuff is a laugh when U.S. science funding is heading in a direction that is conducive to anything but.