 Right. Well, welcome to this exciting webinar. Hopefully it doesn't get any more exciting than that. About the Genomic Innovator RFA, that's RFA HG18-006. Thanks for coming to our webinar today. You're all muted and you can't unmute yourself, but you can ask questions through the Q&A box. And at the end of my presentation, we'll go through those and answer your questions. I'm not going to cover today's specific questions about scientific fit. A lot of you may have very specific questions that relate to your project. My cat is going to come up here through this entire webinar. But you should email me and we can set up a time for a separate phone call to talk about your specific project. Okay. So I just wanted to introduce some of the contacts for this RFA. There are three program contacts. I'm the primary contact. Ron Ling Lee is from the Division of Genomic Medicine. She's also on this call. And Nicole Lockhart is from our Division of Genomics in Society. There's Ron Ling. And then the review and grants management contacts for this RFA. Ken Nakamura is on the call. He's the scientific review officer that's going to be running this review. And Deanna Ingersoll is our grants management, grants administration branch chief. So if you have questions that are more related to those topics, those are the people that you would contact. So just, I know you've all read the RFA, but I just want to give you some overviews about the genomic innovator program and the goals. So we recognize that so much of the work that goes on in genomics happens in the context of large consortium or other sort of team science settings. And those have a lot of great advantages for the people that work in those groups. But it can also provide some challenges as you start to start to establish your independent research career. So what we're trying to do here is provide people who have worked in that kind of a situation with some flexible funding that's going to allow you to sort of establish your own individual research program and establish yourself as an independent research investigator. I put up here some of my favorite consortia, but of course it's not limited to people who are involved in these. This is really open to people who have been involved in any sort of large consortium type effort or team science effort, regardless of whether it's something that's primarily funded through NHGRI. So there are some specific eligibility criteria for this RFA that you need to be aware of. The first is that we are targeting early career researchers. So to be eligible to apply for this, you need to have new investigator or early stage investigator status. You should check your commons account to make sure that that is indicated appropriately in your profile, especially early stage investigator status is something that you need to put in your graduation date in order for that to come up. So you need to make sure that that shows in your profile. We also, as I mentioned, need you to have been involved in some sort of consortium or team science research setting, either as a trainee or currently in your independent role right now. You will talk about that in your bio sketch, and you'll also be required to have recommendation letters from people that you've worked with in that setting. We'll touch on the recommendation letters again in a couple of slides, but they're going to talk about all the important and exciting things that you did that were so important for that team science program. And then, of course, we're interested in research that is relevant to the mission of NHGRI. So at NHGRI, we fund all kinds of different areas of genomics research, but one of the key features is that the work that you're doing is generalizable. So you're not just studying a single or a few diseases, or the methods that you're developing are not only going to help us understand a single or a few diseases, or a limited set of genes or a low size. So we are really looking for things that can look at the genome more broadly. And if you're not sure whether what you are thinking about proposing is within the mission of NHGRI. So that is one of the kinds of things that you can set up a phone call with me, and we can talk about. So the Genomic Innovator Award uses the R35 grant mechanism. This is different from probably what you're used to. It is a grant mechanism that does not use specific aims. Really, for real, there are no specific aims. You will not upload a specific aims page. There are instructions in the research strategy section of the RFA, and so I encourage you to read that carefully. In general, I wanted to give you some sort of ideas of how you might think about putting together this research strategy section. What you're really trying to describe in this application is what you see as a critical challenge in the field and some of the ways that you're going to approach that problem. Now, remember that you only have six pages to do all of this in, so we're not expecting you to go into a great amount of experimental detail. So you might think about first, you know, providing the rationale, give some background information about the problem and tell the reviewers why this is an important thing for you to study. And then you can just describe the broad approach that you're going to take to address this problem. What is your vision for sort of addressing this challenge, and what are some of the strategies that you might take as you do that. You want to describe to the reviewers what the impact of this will be. Here's where you can talk about the generalizability of your approach, how this is going to help us learn about the genomic basis of a lot of things and not just one specific disease or set of genes. And if you're successful in achieving the goals of your project, you know, what is the impact going to be on the field, what kinds of studies are now going to be possible, because you did this work. And then you're also going to want to talk about yourself as an investigator. You know, how are you the one who is the one who should be doing this, what have you contributed to this field so far, and how is the work that you're proposing in this application going to build upon those accomplishments to advance your career. Some of you may also be preparing resubmission applications. This is actually the third round of the genomic innovator award, and we do allow resubmissions for this RFA. I generally would say unless the new project that you're proposing is very different from what you proposed previously you should submit this as a resubmission. You can include a one page introduction to the revised application. You should revise your application in response to the previous review. And I would encourage you, in this case, as well as for any grant application that you submit to call the assigned program officer for guidance, they can help you sort of figure out how to approach the resubmission. There are a couple of other unique features to this RFA that I wanted to run through. So the first is the budget your budget is limited to 300,000 in direct costs per year, and you can request five years of budget for this grant. This also has an effort requirement. So you need to devote six months of effort to this project. In subsequent years, we will allow you to negotiate that down, but don't put that in your application. Write your application with six months of effort. Then if you get the award, you can ask for approval to negotiate it down. If you get additional grants and you need that effort for that. And then we mentioned that we are requesting recommendation letters for this RFA. So you're required to submit for recommendation letters. This is where you can get people to talk about all the wonderful critical things you did in the consortium or team science work that you've done. You need at least some of these recommendation letters to come from people who have worked with you in that setting. They can also talk about how great your project is going to be, but you, they need to cover that consortium aspect in their letters to you can also get letters from previous mentors or other colleagues who you think are appropriate. What you will do is bundle that all together in a single PDF and you'll upload that in the letters of support section of the application. And I would say that other than these recommendation letters you should try to limit the letters that you get you might have some important letters from key collaborators that you need to include. But sometimes people want to include a ton of letters and that just actually creates more problems. So please try to limit it to the four recommendation letters and only the most really critical collaborator sorts of letters. Each URI is really values data sharing and resource sharing and so we are requiring a resource sharing plan for all applications for this RFA sometimes they're only just for applications under a specific budget amount but for this one we want you to submit that for everything. This includes sharing plans for data model organisms that you may be generating software protocols or reagents that come out of this project. If you, if it's appropriate you should include the genomic data sharing plan. This RFA is a link to a page that says that it describes the NHGRI implementation of the genetic data sharing, which is a little bit different from how some of the other institutes approach it and it's a little bit more broad in scope. But we've redone our website since this RFA was released and so that link is broken but if you go to genome.gov and search in the search bar for NHGRI genomic data sharing you can find that information about what NHGRI is looking for in terms of what requires a genomic data sharing plan. A couple of other tips I wanted to touch on so for this RFA preliminary data is not required but you can include it. You should expect that it will be reviewed if you do include it. We're not expecting you or intending that you would submit a very detailed experimental plan like if you were submitting an R01 application but you do want to convince the reviewers that you have really thought about this. If you understand sort of the aspects of your project that might be risky you've thought about alternate approaches so you even though you're not giving them a very detailed experimental plan you do want them to know that you know what you're talking about that you've really thought about it and you're going to be able to work through the problems. I also want them to believe that you're going to do your research in a robust and rigorous manner so you can talk about if you're developing new approaches how are you going to validate them. You can give some estimates of sample size that they know that you have thought about how you're going to do this. Another thing that I wanted to mention is as I said earlier people can submit applications to this RFA that are relevant to all aspects of the NHGRI mission. That's really broad that's like computational genomics, very basic sort of technology development, genomic medicine and implementation of genomic medicine, and of course the LC sort of issues related to genomics. So the reviewers are going to come in from all those different backgrounds and be reviewing these applications. This is true for many reviews but especially this one, you shouldn't necessarily expect that the reviewer who's looking at your application is going to be a very specific subject matter expert in the work that you're proposing. So you want to be able to make it easy for reviewers of varied backgrounds relevant to genomic genomics research to understand why what you're proposing is important. So don't use a lot of jargon like make sure you're explaining things clearly just keep that broad audience in mind when you're writing your application. I also want to remind you to carefully read the RFA. There are specific review criteria and selection criteria and they're spelled out in the RFA so if you go down to this section application review information. You'll see the specific review criteria. There are sorts of boilerplate review criteria that we apply to everything but there are also specific review criteria for this particular funding announcement so you should read those and make sure that those things are in in your application so reviewers will be able to evaluate them. And then this this other section is about the selection process. This tells you a little bit of information about how NHGRI will decide which applications will be funded. I just wanted to touch briefly on how the review is going to work so first when you submit your application. You're going to review them for responsiveness and what I'm going to be looking for is whether you meet those eligibility criteria that I laid out earlier. You are an early career researcher you have the appropriate new investigator early stage investigator status and the work that you're proposing falls within the mission of NHGRI. These are going to be reviewed in a special panel that's convened by the NHGRI scientific review branch and as I mentioned earlier Ken Nakamura is going to be the scientific review officer who puts that review together. And another reminder that they are going to have a very diverse range of expertise so you really want your work, your proposal to be understandable to people from a broad range of genomics backgrounds. So the review for this is going to take place sometime in the spring after the review happens, you'll get your scores, and you'll get a summary statement. If your application was discussed, you'll see the summary of the discussion, but even if it's not discussed you'll get the written comments from all the assigned reviewers. After you get that, you should contact the program officer that has been assigned to your application for any additional feedback and advice. This is a good idea for you to do anytime you submit a grant application. That program officer that is assigned to your application will be listed on your summary statement so you'll know who to contact. Those are the, that's the end of the slides that I had prepared. We'll take some of these questions that have come up in the chat but if you find that after this webinar you still have questions, please contact me by email. Don't call me because I probably won't answer the phone, but if you contact me by email I would be more than happy to set up a phone call to talk to you. So that's where we can talk about things like making sure that you are actually eligible for this, this RFA. I can help put you in touch with a program director who has the scientific expertise that's more appropriate for your project because it may not be me. And I can answer any other questions that you might have about this funding opportunity. We have a couple of questions in the chat and Gigi is going to go through those for me and I will do my very best to answer them. Can everybody hear me okay. I can hear you. Okay, great. The first question is will be slides be available. Yes. I'm going to post the recording of this somewhere on the NHGRI website and you can go back and watch it again and again if you would like. Okay, great. The second question is does the applicant need to be a permanent resident or US citizen. So this does not have that sort of citizenship requirement. But the only thing that relates to foreign things is that there are not for foreign institutions so it's only for US institutions but you don't have to be a US resident. Okay, our next question is what if I currently don't have 50% time available, but can if necessary remove myself from existing larger grants do I need to show availability by submission. I don't know how that works. I think that you probably do need to, well, I don't know the answer to that. So first of all people should know that we will be posting in addition to the recording of this and the slides we will also be posting FAQs and these will be linked to the genomic innovator web page. And that will be linked to the NHGRI site. But what you need to do is propose 50% time in your application and show how you would propose adjusting your additional support to have it fit as but the real question about the time will be just in time determination so you don't need to be changing your time ahead of the award but the question about how to remove yourself from existing larger grants will really be addressed at the just in time but at the time of proposal you need to be proposing how you would make the 50% time available. Okay, thank you. Okay, our next question is does the impact of this work need to go back into consortium work. No, it does not. The consortium part of this I view more as an eligibility criteria, but what we're really trying to do is help you sort of establish your independent research direction so some people do propose work that relates to the goals of the consortium or at least relates to things that are happening in the consortium, but you do not have to do that that is not a requirement of this. The next question is, does an application for a DP to an August 2020 effect eligibility for this award or vice versa. So, in order to get a genomic innovator award, you have to have that new investigator or early stage investigator status. I cannot remember off the top of my head what the DP to is, but there are lists of the kinds of grant mechanisms that would affect that status. And so that's what you would need to check. If you submitted that DP to already and if that is one of those grant mechanisms which again I'm not totally sure you would then not be eligible to accept the genomic innovator award if you had already been awarded that. Your status would change in common so you would not be have that new investigator or early stage investigator status. There are some grants that you can have like an R 21 that don't affect those statuses but usually the major sorts of research grants do. So I will, I can get back to you all and look for the web page that tells you specifically or you can Google about early stage investigator or new investigator status and there's, they will tell you the list of kinds of grant mechanisms that will affect that status. Lisa, can I chime in as well. So the DP to you have to have early in early stage investigator status to receive a DP to having applied for a DP to in August 2020 doesn't affect your eligibility for this award, although you shouldn't submit the same. So you can't submit the same award twice so you can if you have a DP to you can submit a different recent plan for this award, whether or not you can get both of them. I don't think you would be able to get both of them I think if you scored well on both of them, a determination would have to be made in terms of which one to get because you would become ineligible for the DP to if you've got the genomic innovator and vice versa. By the way, this is Carolyn Hutter, my division director who's chiming in here and she was not here when we did introduction. Okay. Okay, our next question is, for computational applications, is it recommended to include lab work and how much does it need to be described in the grants. So that's really going to depend on what you're proposing and that's going to be different for each project. That's the kind of thing that I would tell you to set up a phone call with me and we can discuss. There's certainly no restriction on doing that, but you just need to propose the work that's appropriate for the question that you're trying to answer. Okay, our next question is, are ESIs with other funding eligible. For example, does ROO funding disqualify the PI. No, so an R00 is not one of the kinds of grants that removes your ESI status. So as long as you still have ESI status you are eligible to apply for this award. All right, our next question is, can I submit overlapping material for the October R01 grant application and this RFA later in October. So generally, you can kind of do that when you submit an application to an RFA because RFA's are kind of special, they often have special criteria, and you can do that, but we're not going to pay you twice to do the same work. So let's say you get great scores for both of these, we're not going to pay you to do that in an R01 as well as for this. So you should be clear about the differences between those two applications. And that's another question that you could set up a phone call with me and we could talk about that in more detail. All right, our next question is I joined a bit late. How important is prior NHGRI or other NIH consortium experience in terms of eligibility. So the consortium or team science thing is a requirement of the RFA. It doesn't have to be an NHGRI consortium. There are people who have applied who have come from lots of other sorts of consortia or team science backgrounds, including people who have done things like run a poor facility. That's something that we see as sort of a team science type thing too. If you're not sure about your specific circumstances, this is the kind of thing that I would encourage you to set up a call with me and we can discuss that. Our next question is, is the RFA going to be renewed for next year? So NHGRI will remain committed to early stage and early career investigators. This particular RFA does expire. This is the last receipt date for this particular RFA. Something will come. We don't know what that will look like exactly yet, but these are the kinds of things that you can watch our council meetings. That's where you see concepts be presented about RFA's that are going to be coming in the future. So I can't give you a real answer yet, but this specific iteration of it is you're right ending at the end of this year. All right, the next question is what is your definition of consortium? Does it have to be in a list of approved consortia? Does it have to be a very large one? Oh, and again, that's going to kind of be dependent on your individual circumstances. There aren't a list of approved consortia. I mentioned a couple of them, but that's not at all saying that that's all that we're looking for. Again, like I think you should contact me and we can talk about your specific consortium or team science roles and things that you were involved in and determine whether that's going to meet our criteria. Lisa and Gigi, I'm going to interrupt for a second because some people have also been putting questions in the chat. Yes, I was going to go through the ones on the Q&A box first and then the chat ones as well. Thank you. Of course. The next question is, does the applicant need to have a faculty position at the time of application submission? So you don't need to have a faculty position. You do need to have a position that your institution sees as eligible to apply for grants like these. So that is something that you need to talk to your actual institution about. Our next question is how many applications are you expected to fund? So you can see in the RFA text that we have $1 million set aside and because you're all very good at math, you know that that's probably two applications, but you also probably saw last year we funded six applications. We're about to announce the grants that we're funding from the last round of the Genomic Innovator, and that is also more than two. So I can't give you a real answer of how many applications we're expecting to fund, but I will say it is going to be very likely to be more than $1 million covers. Okay, that is the last of the questions in the Q&A box. I'm going to move to the chat now and I apologize if you sent a message earlier in the chat and I'm just getting into it now. The first question I see here in the chat is, can I introduce concepts to reverse engineering genomics data from patients? Let me pull up the chat too so that I can read this. This sounds like a very specific scientific question and I think this is something that I would ask you to contact me and give me some more of a description of what you're proposing and we can talk about that in more detail. All right, our next chat question is, I learned about this via the CSER consortium. I know that CSER will be discontinued after CSER 2 ends. I'm wondering if it would be discouraged to build off a successful aspect of a CSER project given that there will not be a CSER 3? So, no, I don't think so. So, again, your role in CSER is really only to make you eligible for this. You can build off of the work that you've done in CSER with no problem. I think the kinds of things that you'll want to think about is like, am I still going to have access to this data? Am I still going to have access to the things that I need to make the project that I'm proposing successful? But there's no real issue with the fact that your consortium is not going to be continuing to go on. The next question is, how much space should I devote in a proposal to find past projects and background and experience in consortia versus the particular project? So that is really up to you. When we go back to this slide that talks about the different things that you want to include in your research strategies section, that sort of falls into this bottom one. How are you qualified to lead this? What have you done so far? What have your contributions been? And how are you going to build upon those accomplishments? It's really up to each applicant how they decide to break out all of these things that we've asked you to cover in the research strategy. You do want to make sure that people are aware of work that you've done in the consortium. That stuff will also be in your biosketch and in the recommendation letters that you get from people who work with you in that role. So you want to leave enough room to speak about all of these things in that very small six pages. Okay. Our next question is, if awarded this, would this award remove ESI status? Yes. This is a major research grant mechanism. So this would remove your ESI status. Yes. Okay. And that is the last question I see in the chat. Moving back to the Q&A box, we have another question. If I have another training K grant, do I need a letter from the other IC proving that I can reduce my other grant effort to make the six months effort requirement for this application? I think this kind of falls into the range of the answer that Carolyn gave before, which is that this is something that we could handle in the just in time stage of this. Okay. I am not currently seeing any other questions in the chat box or in the Q&A box, but we can give it just a couple of minutes in case somebody else thinks of something that they would like to ask. Okay. But again, I want to encourage every one of you to reach out to me or the other program contacts to talk about your idea, even if I'm not the right person to talk to you scientifically. I can help put you in touch with that person. And I can definitely talk to you about a lot of these questions that have come up like, is this relevant to the mission of NHGRI? Because my consortium experience fit the eligibility criteria. I'm happy to talk to any of you on a one-to-one basis about that. We have another question in the Q&A box. Is there any sample R35 application available? There are not. So, no, although I do know that people have found it helpful to talk to other people who have gotten them in the past. There are also a lot of other mechanisms at the NIH that are kind of like this where it's more a person discussing an overall broad research program. Any of those kinds of things, you could talk to people who have gotten those awards and hear about how they put their applications together. But no, we don't have any sample applications posted anywhere. And just to follow up on that, as Lisa noted, we did announce the award, the people who received these awards last year, and we will in the coming weeks be announcing the next role. So if you wanted to reach out to people who should you be reaching out to, you can find those, the names of the people who have received this via those press releases. Yes. Or through a reporter. Yeah, you can search NIH reporter to find those two. All right, we've got another question. Yep. How should we relate relate our proposed aims to the big goal of the consortia. Do we have to avoid overlapping aims and focus more on complimentary goals. So, okay, so you can propose things that have nothing to do with the consortium. We can also propose things that build off of the work that you've been doing in this consortium setting. We do not want you to be doing the work of the consortium with this are 35 so that's, yes, we do want you to avoid overlapping aims and focus on more complimentary things that again comes back to that thing where the NIH only pays somebody wants to do a specific research project. Remember to that the goal of this is to help you establish yourself as an independent investigator as an independent voice in your field. And so that, you know, kind of stepping away a little bit from the goals of the consortium is I think could be beneficial to you in that respect, but not required. All right, we've got another question. What needs to be covered in letters of recommendation would they be different from letters of support required for other grants. So in the letters of recommendation some of what you want them to talk about is all of the great things that you have done in these team science roles, the reviewers. So partly that involvement in team science or consortium science is one of the eligibility criteria that I'm going to be looking at when the applications come in to make sure that they're responsive but the reviewers are also going to be looking at it. So they are going to be looking at those recommendation letters and looking to see whether they think that you really were playing an involved role in the consortium or or not. So that's the kind of thing that they can talk about in the recommendation letters. They can also talk about what a great scientist you are, how important and this research program that you have is going to be for the field. And really cover a whole lot of stuff but they do need to talk about at least the ones that you choose that are reflective of your consortium or team science work, do need to talk about you in that role. All right, our next question. For the computational grants if we use some experimental data from a collaborator as a preliminary result, should we obtain a collaboration letter or another type of letter. So usually, I think in a case like this, you want reviewers to understand that you actually have access to all the things that you have said that you plan to use in your in your project. And there's something like that where it's a specific data set that you would not normally have access to and you need to have a collaborator to work with that data. It probably would be beneficial for you to include a letter of support or collaboration in that because reviewers know that yes you actually are going to be able to have access to the data that you need to achieve the goals of your project. But remember that you're going to have to share the data that comes out of your project broadly so make sure you're able to do that. Okay, I am not seeing any more questions at this time in the chat box or in the Q&A box. Well, that's great. Well, thank you all for joining us today. I will look forward to hearing from each and every one of you about scheduling a phone call to talk about your proposed project and your team science and consortium experience and working with you as you put your applications together. Again, if you have any other questions, feel free to send an email.