 Hello, everyone. My name is Surya Sen. I am a program officer with the National Human Genome Research Institute. And I am very, very excited that you are here because we have a funding opportunity that I am spectacularly excited to tell you about because we believe this will bring things to your students that we have not been able to offer up to this point. So just a few procedural things before we get into the presentation. This webinar will be a little bit of slides from me. I'll try to keep it to 10 or 12 minutes. Hopefully that saves lots of time for questions and answers. This is a webinar. The Q&A will happen through chat. Please feel free to put your questions in the Q&A box. Sarah Hutchison, who is our program analyst, will call out those questions. We will make sure every one of them gets answered. You do not have to identify yourself. Anonymous submissions are allowed. We are not putting Zoom chat on for this webinar that lets us focus on the questions that come in using the Q&A. Once we are done with the webinar, we will collect everything that got asked and together with questions from a previous webinar we did on the 1st of September. We will make a frequently asked questions page that will then go on our website. And we will also be recording this and sharing a copy of that recording as well. So you'll have something to go back to later on. I wanted to begin by pointing out that all of the funding announcements and relevant links are in the public space. On the top is the funding announcement for this webinar itself, which I'm pretty certain all of you have seen. Extremely important, I want to call your attention to the second bullet, which is a notice that we used to change a few things and make a couple of things more clear about this funding announcement. Other than that, things like the associated U24 hub, the FAQs that I mentioned and things that are strategic documents from the Genome Institute relevant to this funding opportunity are all listed on this slide. So this gives you somewhere to go back to if you need any of these for future reference. So to get right into the content then I will do a little bit of a background and purpose for what this work is about and then tell you how we propose to fund you to teach genomics and data science in your classrooms. I will cover a little bit of the application process. And then as I said, hopefully save at least three fourths of this hour for answering your questions. So moving in by telling you about the two parts of the genome Institute or an Agri that have joined forces for this funding opportunity. I belong with the Office of Genomic Data Science, which is a part of an Agri that funds anything to do with the use of computational tools or mathematical or statistical tools in a genomics context. We have tons of funding, not just this opportunity but things that are also research activities as a distinct activity from teaching. So if you are anywhere in the space of genomic data science I strongly recommend going to the link at the bottom of this page and checking out everything we have to offer because we have multiple active research funding opportunities that might be of interest to you. Together with the Office of Genomic Data Science, I am very excited that the training diversity and health equity office at NIGRI which we acronymized as the Tide Office is our partner for the work that I hope all of you will be excited to apply for. The Tide Office as with OGDS has a ton of things going on that aim to broaden and diversify the genomics workforce, not just in data science but genomics as a whole. So once again just as with OGDS if you are looking for things where you would bring more diverse students in, or you would bring more funding for teaching genomics at a minority serving institution. I really think the Tide Office is a group of people that would be happy to talk to you and tell you more about what's happening over there. So quickly our tool for all of the work that I propose to fund through this is really based upon the fact that cloud computing in many ways is completely changing how genomic data science happens. Many of you may be familiar with high performance computing and the fact that up to this point, institutions that teach data science and computing have historically been ones that had lots of money and were able to find computing infrastructure on their campuses. This is no longer the case with cloud computing pretty much anyone with a laptop and an internet connection now has access to all of the tools, all of the data, all of the compute resources that they would need not just for their own learning but also to teach their students how data science and genomics are linked to each other. So really with energy rise and build platform, which you see a link or a screenshot on the left of the page, but also with many other cloud platforms that NIH has put billions of dollars into such as the catalyst, the NCI data commons the all of us researcher workbench, really at this point NIH has a lot of money invested in cloud computing. And our hypothesis is that the cloud can also be a tool for teaching and for education, as much as a tool for high performance computing and large scale science in multimillion dollar consortia. So give us the context for all of this webinar and everything we bring to you is to take cloud computing and put it in your hands as faculty members who teach genomics, and hopefully we'll use the cloud to teach genomic data science. So the other aspect of this other than cloud computing is that NHGRI recognizes that over the next 10 years, one of the highest priorities for us is broadening and diversifying the genomics workforce. On the left you see a screenshot from the strategic vision document that we publish about once every decade where we say over the next 10 years. And these are things that are important. You see there that genomic data science is no longer something we feel could be optional for people that are trainees of the future, they will need to learn data science at the same time as genomics. And also on the right, what you see is our diversity action agenda, which is our plan for how to make genomics a more inclusive scientific community over the next 10 years. And one of the things we are saying there is that particularly for data science we need to start early undergraduates masters degree students are the communities of interest the specific populations that we want to engage and make the genomics investigators of the future. So that our way of tackling that problem of a lack of diversity in genomics is through a combination of two funding announcements, one of which has already been awarded and I'll tell you more about that in a couple of slides. So at the center of the slide you see what we call the U24 educational hub for computational genomics and data science that's CGDS. So think of a group that is sort of the central community organizer and as I said I'll describe them in just the next couple of slides. But together with this central organizing entity, what we want to do is to fund individual faculty, like many of yourselves to actually be partners of this hub, where the hub would help with organizing your material or organizing train the trainer but you would be the actual people going into classrooms designing genomics education content and bringing the students into the picture. While the hub would help you do that but you would get funds of your own to do that as a standalone activity within your institutions, the HBCUs, tribal colleges, community colleges and institutions that enroll students from a wide variety of programs. So that combination of a U24 hub and the UE5 partner sites which most of you have probably seen and which brought you to this webinar is our way of tackling the lack of diversity in the current genomics workforce. Let me first quickly talk about the hub as I mentioned this is a large multimillion dollar award, you award which is a cooperative agreement, NIH and the awardee together will act as a group of people who reach out to the different faculty members from different sorts of institutions, offer genomics training material workshops in cloud computing, workshops in computer programming really do some of the early work that is more foundational and help set the stage for everything that would come afterwards. I am happy to share that this award was just released a couple of weeks ago to North Carolina agricultural and technological university that is one of the nation's largest HBCUs. I really encast you the awardee at this point is already hitting the ground running in engaging faculty members like yourselves, and I encourage you as well to reach out to them information about how to contact them can be found either through this press release, or you're welcome to contact me, and I'm happy to put you in touch with them. But remember, this is a group that has a large NIH award to help you teach genomics and data science in your classroom so think of them as your partner in your educational missions. So together with the hub of course today all of us are here to talk about the sites, the UE5 funding announcement that probably brought you here. Our overarching purpose with the sites funding announcement is, as I said to support faculty members like you at institutions which have documented mission to enroll students from diverse backgrounds and help you be funded so that next semester or the semester afterwards, you are able to set a certain amount of time aside to say I would like to build genomics courses that I can then teach to my students and also introduce them to the cloud. So really this is all about empowering faculty members at diverse institutions to be funded to develop and deliver genomics educational content. I emphasize that the cloud is a big part of what we are looking to do here. So as we get deeper into this, please remember that whatever we are funding will need to be exercised and shared using the cloud computing platforms that I referred to earlier in this presentation. So quickly, let me cover what the approach is for the sites funding announcement we are looking specifically at undergraduate and master students that includes associates degree students so this does not have to be students in a four year degree program. The content that we have in mind is need is going to be a combination of classroom content together with hands on exercises using cloud platforms as a virtual computer room of sorts if you will. And the other NIH clouds that I mentioned will be helping with this you will not have to do this alone if you have never used the cloud before and bill and the other groups are here to help you learn about the cloud yourself as a way of introducing your students to it. We are also excited that the U24 Hub that I mentioned has money to offer $650,000 grants to faculty members like you so that your students can design genomics research projects. So this is not just about students in a classroom learning genomics or students using the cloud as a virtual lab. There are $650,000 awards for your students to actually get together with you and conduct a little project of their own. We believe that having them generate data will give them the organic ownership and excitement of why genomics could be a part of their future careers. And there is a huge focus on sharing content. We want anything that you build to be available to other institutions other faculty members who did not get an award through this funding announcement. And once again, we expect the cloud to be a wonderful way of sharing everything that that is developed through this funding opportunity. And here I expect to partner with quite a few other NIH institutes so that we can make a larger number of awards than our budget alone would permit. Okay, so, since we published the funding announcement itself, I want to make sure that all of you get to see this accompanying notice the notice number is on top and the link is in that slide at the beginning. I just wanted to clarify a few things that people asked a lot of questions about when we did the first webinar. We are happy that we managed to extend the receipt date so this was originally kept at October 8 which would have been very very short amount of time for someone to write an NIH application. We are happy that we were able to extend that to November 8 so you between us publishing this and the first receipt date is over two months. We have a lot of time to write your application. Many of you asked about whether your salary was an eligible cost. This notice is clarifying that you can put money in the budget to pay for your own salary and not just to develop and teach things while expecting your institution to cover your actual salary. There are some numbers in the funding announcement that give you a sense of the minimum commitment of how much time you have to devote to this and how much of your salary could be funded through this particular funding announcement. But once again, you are able to do that just so it's clear. And also, if you are teaching at a community college, I want you to know that you are very much in the scope of what we would like to see as applicants. In the initial funding announcement we have sort of hinted at undergraduate and master's degrees, and it was pointed out that associates degrees were not explicitly clarified as being eligible. This is about students in community colleges getting to your degree program degrees and does not have to be a four year degree or a master's degree. So I hope that makes it clear that you are encouraged to apply as well. So let me talk a little bit about what would make an institution eligible for this funding announcement. This seems to be one of the topics that I have been responding to the most emails for. There are three conditions or three criteria, all of which have to be met by your institution so I want to use this slide to really explain how someone would or would not become eligible for applying and being funded through this funding announcement. So as I mentioned, we are looking to reach the smaller institutions that right now have not been able to include genomics and data science and cloud computing in their course offering so your, your college or your university has to have received less than 25 million dollars per year of R01 funding. If you are a well funded, our one institution with many hundreds of millions of dollars of NIH funding. There are other things we have that are appropriate but this particular funding announcement is not for the large well funded institutions at this point. As I mentioned this is for undergraduates and master's degrees by undergraduate we do mean associates as well so do not plan on doctoral students as part of your target population for what you would teach over here this is for early career stages. The third and in some ways the most important one is that we expect this particular funding announcement to specifically be reaching colleges or universities that have a historical or current mission to educate students from minority backgrounds. The way to think about this is go to your institution's website to read the mission statement and see if the mission statement is written around students from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds. And that is just one of five or six things going on. You may not be eligible. I'm happy to clarify with you whether or not that would be the case, but really, ideally your institutions mission statement makes it clear that it is the specific mission of your college university to educate students from a population that by NSF criteria laid out on this slide have been defined as underrepresented in biological sciences. So I'm happy to help you get a yes no determination to this. But really this is not for any and all applicants this is for institutions that are particularly focusing on students that have been excluded up to this point from genomics and data science education. So let me also cover a couple of things that are important here. I've used the words educational content quite a bit. I've gotten a few questions as to what we mean by content. Really the definition is up to you educational content could mean classroom lectures with PowerPoint slides. It could mean virtual learning where students are receiving genomics education in a zoom setting for example. It could also mean things that are videos it could mean hands on cloud computing labs. We really want to hear from you what your ideas would be for how you would teach this it does not have to be just classroom content or just learning in a you know on a web server. This is really getting left to you to come up with new ideas for what content would mean. There is a list of things that would make something not responsive to this funding announcement responsive is our term for what is what is considered in scope for for the money being offered. There has to be a focus on computational topics computational genomics and data science. This is not for just teaching genomics unless there is a substantial focus on the bioinformatics or computational aspects of genomics. This has to be about the cloud. If you are teaching genomics and data science, but you have no plans for using the cloud as a tool. This is not the funding opportunity to apply to. And there's a few other things there that are more or less self explanatory but as always I'm happy to answer questions. Remember there has to be genomic data science, and it has to use the cloud in terms of what you teach. As I mentioned this is also going to give your students the chance to be funded for research project genomics and particularly data science are ideally learned by doing rather than learn for receiving information in instructor student setting. So we have these opportunity funds, whereas part of your application you are invited to propose how you would organize your students into a group and do something like a summer project or project as part of one of their courses where they collect the data they designed the experiment they collect the data. And then that data comes back to the cloud and they learn how to use the cloud to analyze their own data we believe that this is the best way to make them invested in genomics and sustain their interest in the long term. Quickly, let me cover how the application works. I very, very, very strongly recommend that you schedule a quick chat with me so that we can go over your plans I can hopefully give you something useful in terms of what would be considered responsive, maybe exchange ideas that have worked for similar applications before NIH has the SF 424 application guide which is a huge body of information likely any question that you have the answer is somewhere in there sometimes it can be a little hard to find but that is the omnibus list of instructions for how to apply to NIH funding opportunities. The main body of the application is called the research plan I'll talk about that in a minute, but please go ahead and first read the funding announcement from top to bottom. Pretty much every part of it has some information that you will need as you get into the application process. Let's first discuss the research plan, the biggest part of the research plan is called the research strategy. It has sections within it that I will cover. So first of all, we want to hear your idea like what are you thinking of when you want to teach genomics and data science to undergraduates or masters or associate students. What are the overview of the courses and the content that you would like to develop, discuss how you plan to use the cloud in that context, describe how you want to share things assuming that NIH gives you the funds. How would you make things available to other institutions that are not getting one of these awards. The great thing here is how you would apply to the hub for those student research projects. So give us a plan for how you would organize your students and develop a research proposal that the hub would then review and hand out those $50,000 awards for. And finally, these are three year awards. We would like to hear from you what you would do in year one year two year three, give us something of a timeline for how this work would happen at your institution. There are a few parts of this that are mandatory inclusions. Please remember to include a research sharing plan templates for this are available through NIH. As I mentioned the plan for how you want to apply to the hub for those student projects, these are separate pieces of the application so each of these has a text allocated within the page limits. The application plan, and then letters of support are institutional as well as personal if you are doing this with collaborators you can get letters of support from them. But equally important you need to include a letter of support from your department chair or from your dean of research that makes it clear that your institution is behind the work that you propose and will be supporting you in the administrative sense. Your review is interesting over here because this is going to be reviewed not by CSR the central NIH review office. These applications will get reviewed at the genome institute in what we call a special emphasis panel. They will then go to energy areas council who can comment on the individual review that was done by the special emphasis panel. And finally program officers like myself and Lucia together with colleagues will be able to make funding decisions based on a combination of your course, how well what you propose aligns with what we would like to see happen through this funding opportunity, and also quite frankly what NIH's budget looks like and how much money we have available in future award years and starting with next year. As I said the deadlines are letter of intent, which is optional you do not have to send us a letter of intent you can just choose to go ahead and apply. But if you want to send us a letter of intent the deadline is the eighth of October, the application itself is due a month after on the eighth of November. The first single piece of advice is to not wait until that date if you plan on applying said yourself internal deadline of at least a week before sometimes your college or university will have their own deadlines, but chances are high that if you wait till November eight to start submitting this something goes wrong and that can lead to some pretty unfortunate circumstances so once again, don't wait until the last minute. With that I'm going to stop and take my slides of the screen and turn this over to Sarah said I see a few things in the chat. What can I help answer. Thank you sure Joe. Hi everyone my name is Sarah I'll be helping with the Q&A today. So we do have a few questions to start us off with regards to the NIH cloud computing resources, what are the costs for those and can they be integrated with other platforms, like xc, etc. Yes, so of course, whatever costs you would incur for using the cloud are very much allowed to be made a part of the budget in this application. And we are actively looking into ways that can support your cloud costs so and do include them in your budget. And if we end up having other money then we might be able to pump those funds in and save you some of the budget for this funding but definitely this is designed so that you can be you can be including cloud costs for educational purposes. Integrating with other platforms is of course something that I would love to see happen but this is in many ways a reviewer question. Give us the proposal or give NIH the proposal. If the reviewers feel like that is a useful activity for the students and ends up being something that NIH should be looking at in a bigger context. I feel that could go down very well. It is not a requirement from our end we do not need anything other than using and will the NCI cloud or all of us cloud all we need from our end is a commitment to using one or more of the NIH clouds as they exist. If you want to integrate them with other platforms that could be an interesting idea but that's a reviewer decision as to whether they see it as being useful. And there's a follow up regarding costs and if they're easy to calculate or if cost calculations might be a bit difficult. Yes, so cloud cost calculations, you know at best in exact science at this point, I will in a second try to put a link, or I will. We do have a cost calculator tool that we just built into the angle. So we are giving a resource to you to help get you at least a ballpark estimate of what it would need in terms of the budget allocation so talk. Send me an email or if I can I will put it into the chat here. There's something that will at least help you get a head start on it but we understand that the number may be quite a bit different from what it actually ends up costing. If your students get into it in a big way for example. So we have a question about designation as a Hispanic serving institution and if that serves as eligibility. It does, it would come along with those other two criteria where are you a Hispanic serving institution and doing work at the undergraduate and masters levels and receiving less than $25 million of one funding per year. That's a good starting point but it cannot be Hispanic serving institution that already has many hundreds of millions of dollars on NIH funding, which is uncommon but just to make sure, make it clear that the eligibility are logical and operators that have to include all three of those conditions, and not just the minority serving institution status. The next question asks if there will be additional submission dates recognizing that November 8 is pretty close. There is at least one more submission date that is in June of next. Thank you for us to tell because this is going to need more approvals on our side but if the program itself turns out to be a success then usually NIH or NHGRI try to keep things going, of course, pending approval from our council and senior leadership, but there's at least one more receipt date so you're all set even if this November is too close for you. And we also have a question asking if you're aware of NSF ETE, which stands for Advanced Technological Education. I was not and I am curious about it so if you can put a link to that or send me an email with where I can find it that would be fabulous. All right, and our next question asks if there is a minimum number of courses that needs to be developed as part of the curriculum as recommended by NHGRI. No minimum. It's completely your call to propose something. The viewers who in most cases are very experienced professionals in their own right will probably know how to tell the difference between something that is bare minimum in terms of the student offering versus something that is too ambitious. But we are not defining what a minimum number of courses would be as part of this. Thank you. Looks like we're waiting for a few more questions to enter the chat so please take your time and send in any other questions. Okay, we have a question as a community college. It is difficult for us to create a new course. Can we modify existing courses to add the CGDS components. Yes, absolutely. Remember, there needs to be a modification that would involve the cloud. We specifically wrote in, I forget the exact language but I'm happy to pull it out and put it in an email. There is absolutely no need to think of this as something where everything has to be developed from scratch. But if you modify an existing course, make sure that the modifications are in the general direction of adding computational genomics and data science, it could be either data science or it could be computational genomics or it could be both. But that's the general vector for how the modification would work or you could have a programming course and you could decide to add genomics to it so you could decide to modify from either angle to make this fit what we are trying to fund. But the cloud is the biggest piece if you modify an existing course to add a cloud computing component I feel just my personal opinion is that the reviewers might be quite positive about that. Great. Next we have a question is there additional information on what specific assistance they can get from the hub. Maria fabulous question I think the first thing to do would be to read the funding announcement for the hub. It's of course a closed funding announcement of the application deadline close long ago. But if you read that you should be able to see what NIH asked from the hub applicants. The next thing to do would be to contact the hub awardee directly and explain what would help be helpful for you and see to what extent they have existing resources or to what extent they have time and bandwidth to engage with you. This is a really deep question that will get answered in some ways by the hub and NIH together with you. I'm hoping that something or the other is valuable but that might take a slightly different shape for every inquiry to the hub in some cases the hub may say sure here's a web server that we built with easy to teach student exercise. In each case is the hub may say sure we next semester we can come do a two day workshop for your faculty on cloud computing so it'll be I'm hoping slightly different in each case. And of course NIH has not given them infinite funds, but within the world that they have I'm hoping that they will be able to work with you and others to design how to best help you, depending on what you need. So NIH and energy and I really are getting into this in a big way between the tide office and GDS expect to see a lot more from us in terms of education in genomics and data science. Next question is what should be the likely duration of the research projects described. Next question, these are $50,000 awards right so we can expect your students to spend a full year working for that amount of money. My master length would be my ballpark concert, but I do want to draw the distinction between my role as a program officer, and the eventual reviewers of your application so design something so that it is rational and you know as I said the reviewers usually have a pretty good idea of objective realities and what is a week would be too short a year would be maybe a year is too long or depending on how you design it it could be a small amount of work done over multiple years. This is really NIH should not be telling you how to design that research project it's your idea to design and the reviewers who are not at NIH, they make the call on whether they find the idea feasible or not. Okay great just waiting for some more questions to come in. Okay let's wait another minute or so and as I mentioned at any point between now and the submission deadline. I'm happy to get if a shutdown happens we may not be able to but let's be optimistic and if a shutdown does not happen then you should be very very comfortable reaching out to me by email, and we can set up a time to talk. Okay, if we don't see anything else in the next 30 seconds or so thank you all for joining, I hope all of you decide to apply. Remember, if you apply to this round, you get a review score and if the score is a little short of what would get funded. So one more chance to revise and we submit in June of next year so this is not a one and only chance sort of funding opportunity. I encourage you to go ahead and if you have not written an NIH application before I should have mentioned this before we designed this one so that it is as short and as simple as possible to write and submit this is about the easiest designed, other proteins and you know small $10,000 grants that would be to not appropriate here. We really wrote this one so that it is the least possible burden on you to apply if you're a first time applicant. Okay, thank you everyone you know where to find me and we will share the recording and these questions on the website.