 Okay, let's do this. Good afternoon, everyone. Nice and bright Friday here in the DC area. My name is Surya Sen. I am a program officer with the National Human Genome Research Institute. I am happy to welcome you all to this webinar about a very recently released notice of funding opportunity for faculty members who are teaching undergraduate and master students genomics and data science. We are very, very excited to tell you what we have in mind for you over here. So going right into this, I want to lay out a little bit of the structure of this webinar. The first piece of this will be me presenting information on the funding opportunity, and then we will open it up for questions and answers. This is a Zoom webinar, which means that we don't have a voice function for the questions, please type them into the Q&A box. Tell us where you are. We don't have chat on this because that sort of distracts us from answering questions that are coming in in real time. But if you want to send in your questions using the Q&A box, we will definitely make sure that we answer these and put a FAQ section on the website for this opportunity. Finally, this webinar is also being recorded, and we will post a recording later on to catch any pieces that you missed. I want to start with sharing these links. Once again, these slides, along with any other information from today will also go on their website. So you don't have to be taking screenshots at this point. All of these links will be available later. The first link is this funding opportunity itself that I just mentioned. The second one is a U24 hub that is a close companion to this funding opportunity, along with other things that I'll talk about such as energy rise strategic vision, which lays out a map for genomics in the next decade, and our diversity action plan which sort of describes how we want to broaden the genomics workforce. So once again, let me start by giving you a little bit of an outline. I will do a little bit of background and purpose, telling you why we decided to do this funding opportunity as well as the other one I mentioned in the hub. So a little bit about the approach, what sort of work are we looking to solicit through these applications, and then maybe many of you are familiar with the NIH funding process but maybe some of you are first time applicants. So I will cover bits and pieces of the application process, although I should emphasize that the funding opportunity itself is the place where you have all of the information needed so not everything will get covered on this webinar so go back and read that a couple more times. And then if I do this quickly enough then we will have tons of time left over for questions and answers. So quickly I want to give you the local landscape here at NIH and the Human Genome Research Institute. Within our institute we have two offices that work very closely together for education in genomics and education in data science. Along in the NIH office of genomic data science or OGDS, my colleague Lucia Hindorf and others are in our close cousin the NIH tight office that's training diversity and health equity office, which is the home for all of the activity that is educational or career development or training funding through our institute. So everything you see today will be a collaborator is a collaboration between these two offices, and these websites have lots of information about other things we are doing in our offices for education so I encourage you to go back and look at these websites at your leisure. So the other thing is that at this point NIH has heavily invested in cloud computing across multiple institutes. I am part of the anvil platform at the genome institute which I strongly recommend if you are anywhere in the genomic space as a source of data and tools and teaching resources, but it's not just anvil at this point NIH has a broad spectrum of cloud platforms by data catalyst, the NCI data commons and the LEM has its own clouds. And really we think that together these clouds democratize access to computing resources, make it easy for people to access data and tools that would otherwise get siloed in institutional computers. And more importantly than ever before, they enable teaching and collaboration in a virtual space, even if your institutions are widely apart in the physical space. So with all of that, the work in this one announcement has its root in energy rise 2020 strategic vision. These strategic visions are published once every decade or so from our institute sort of laying out a map for the next 10 years, and where genomics could go. And in the last one we specifically said that data science is now inextricably linked to genomics. So there is no genomics over the next 10 years unless we are also including data science. And that also means that we have to train people genomic data science is not something that this one gets taught in any massive commonplace way. So energy ideally is committed to increasing our training and workforce development activity in the intersection of data science and genomics together with the strategic vision we published what we refer to as the diversity action agenda. So again these links are all in that slide towards the beginning, and among other things the action agenda is saying that we need to broaden and diversify our genomics workforce, starting early on starting at the undergraduate masters or graduate levels, so that future is coming from all sections of society, and also getting access to genomics early on in their careers, and hopefully getting excited about what it can do for healthcare in their research careers moving forward so these are the two documents that are sort of the intellectual platform for which all of the future work are described is built upon. So in the particular context of genomic data science, our approach to this is through a mix of two funding opportunities to improve support for teaching and education and student research in this context. So what we're going to talk about today, two funding announcements one of course the one that I, we just released but another one that was released last year, and is about to be awarded. These will be referred to as the hub, and the sites, you are probably here because you saw the sites funding announcement that is RFA AG 23002 released a few days ago, but the U24 educational hub, which I will also talk about is another funding that was released last year that we are just about to announce who the awardee is, and let it be very clear from our perspective that we expect the sites and the hub to be partners in this educational and teaching space for genomics and data science so think of everything as being a network coming out of energy right, the educational hub and the sites. So quickly talk about the hub we funded this group and will in a day or so we should be able to also tell you who they are to be sort of the community organizers and the people that would lay the groundwork for teaching genomics and data science in smaller institutions or institutions with students from under represented backgrounds, really taking genomics into classrooms and taking data science into classrooms where it was not being supported. Otherwise, this is what we call a U24 cooperative agreement, which means that NIH and the awardee of the hub will be working very closely together to do this sort of community outreach and support for anyone curious to use the cloud in a genomics education One second, as I mentioned, the primary activity here will be to engage stakeholders in education that essentially means you, the faculty members that actually teach these topics, and then do things like hosting cloud computing seminars and genomic seminars data science seminars, collecting feedback on the challenges that you face as you teach these topics, potentially training many of you if you would like to be given material to teach genomics if you're, for example, a biology faculty member but not a genomics person or a computer science teacher who is not a biology person, so really the hub is also a trainer entity in that context. Also, we are very excited that the hub award includes money for faculty members like you to be funded for student research projects in your institutions and I'll talk about that in more detail over the next few slides. To be transparent, the hub is a partnership between NHGRI and others who are co-funding it. This is in a sense coming from many different parts of NIH, which of course speaks to the enthusiasm that NIH as a whole is generating in this educational area. So now let's talk about the particular funding announcement that I think most of you saw and are here about. This is RFA AG 23002, it has a long name which I won't talk about except to say that we internally refer to this funding announcement as the sites. So once again there's a theme, the hub and the sites. The overarching purpose of the sites program is to support faculty members at institutions which are historically educating students from URM or underrepresented minority backgrounds in the topics of genomics and data science and cloud computing. And really we are focusing on undergraduates and master's degree students here because there are other funding opportunities that target doctoral students. So this is specifically once again for institutions that are historically serving URM students and also there is a very, very targeted focus on using cloud platforms, not just then bill but other NIH clouds as well as tools for education. So please keep in mind these two top level priorities for anything that we expect to come in as an application for this particular sites funding announcement. So what is the scope of work, we are hoping to support faculty members themselves so rather than supporting student research or rather than supporting the creation of resources or institutional facilities. This funding announcement is designed to support faculty members to create educational content using the cloud for teaching these topics computational genomics and data science which we economize as CGDS. Once again there is a focus on the undergraduate and master's degree levels here. We are also including within that concept the idea of associate degrees so community colleges as I'll talk about later are extremely welcome and encouraged. And even if your institution is not awarding undergraduate degrees but is awarding associate degrees, you are absolutely in the space of what we hope to attract through this funding announcement. The content that I just mentioned will include not just classroom teaching material but also hands on labs in genomics and data science that will use the cloud as a classroom so imagine the cloud being a virtual lab here so we encourage you to use or not encourage we almost require that the cloud be used as a way of doing hands on labs for your students in genomic data science. The sites awardees will receive support from the hub in the second and third years of their awards to do student research projects so not everything in here is about teaching alone there is an opportunity we shall describe in a future slide for you to be funded through the hub to design a student research project that data will be collected at your institution your students will do that work. And once again we expect that that data will go on the cloud as a way for them to learn how to use cloud computing in a genomic data science context. There is a huge expectation that anything that comes out of this will get shared NIH will make us number of awards but we hope that data sharing and sharing of educational tools means that anything that gets built through this funding opportunity will get used by a much much larger number of teaching faculty across many more institutions. So with that let me talk about eligibility there is a very very specific purpose to this this funding opportunity is targeted at a particular kind of institution. And we wrote these eligibility criteria to hopefully make it clear who is and who is not eligible to apply for this. So number one, your institution must have received less than $25 million per year of R01 funding over the last three years. Your institution must be awarding associates undergraduate or master's degrees in biomedical sciences and and I use the logical and operators it's not your institution has to qualify for all three of these bullets and not just one or two there has to be a virtual concurrence with all three. And the third bullet of course is that the institution itself has to have a documented historical or current mission to educate students from the populations that have been identified as underrepresented in research and I use as a particular definition of this which is up in the funding announcement itself. But really this is targeting what historically would have been called minority serving institutions and in current NIH language we use a longer definition which you see on the screen, but this is not open to any and all applicants this is limited to institutions that have a historical mission to educate your students of any different variety of your students. Let me talk a little bit about what we mean when we talk about content, the funding itself is for faculty to create educational content that includes classroom lectures instructional videos, interactive demonstration demonstrations as well as hands on cloud exercises. So content is defined in a fairly broad way here it's not just using sticking to things like popcorn slides, or traditional ways of teaching once again the cloud has to be a big part of whatever gets built here. It's also a fairly wide range of scenarios that would not be considered responsive responsive in NIH language means something that is in a lot is aligned with what we want to happen through this funding announcement. So please take time to go through what we list as the non responsive applications, because there are particular things that are genomics and data science but still not going to be considered eligible for this particular funding announcement if something does not use the cloud as a teaching tool, it should not be applied for through this funding announcement, if something is going to propose just a research project but not teaching that should not be considered responsive to this. So I won't read through this year but please pay attention to what we would consider non responsive, and end up not even sending out to review if it gets submitted as an application. Once again I mentioned that it's not just the educational content itself there is opportunity funds piece of this opportunity funds in our world means a competitive opportunity for awardees to get additional funds. So if someone applies to the sites and gets an award. What that means is above and beyond the money that the faculty members themselves received or the institution received the u24 hub that I mentioned will also be awarding six $50,000 student research project awards, and that money will go to the sites institution for the faculty to design a genomics or data science project that their students will conduct the data will get collected by that institution, and we hope that this gives a sense of ownership and participation to your students and makes it more than a classroom exercise or something that they are doing on the cloud, without getting their hands on an actual experiment or an actual scientific research project of source. All this would happen is up to you to design and make part of your applications, except for us to say that there has to be a plan for the cloud and will or other clouds to be used as the place where you would analyze any data coming out of these student research projects. So with that let me convert the application process because as I mentioned many of you may be familiar but I don't want to take it for granted that anyone on this call has applied for NIH funding before the single biggest take on message is that if this application this funding seems attractive to you, please reach out to me so we can discuss your plans or how you want to use the money or how you want to design your application. Program officers like me love hearing early from our applicants, rather than hearing a few days before the deadline, about an idea that I could have told you before would either be really good or probably not as good a response to this one. So if you're intending to apply, send me an email and let's get on the zoom call and let me give you some feedback on your idea we love doing that. Okay, so the bulk of what you would end up writing is in what is called the PHS 398 research plan that is a big part of the application itself. This is once again in that funding announcement so I want to read through it except to tell you that the page limits are also linked in there I believe it's 25 pages for this one but please go back and check exact regulations which NIH person I think it is broken up into a number of sections that you've seen these bullets. The biggest of these is actually the research program that sort of describes the bulk of what you would plan or what you would propose to the reviewers for this. This once again has five sections within it overview of the content plans for how you would utilize NIH clouds plans for how you would share this content as I mentioned this is very very much intended to be available to the broader educational community. So your plans for sharing will be a big part of the review process. Once again also strategies for how you would use those $50,000 parts of money from the U24 hub for your student projects and also a timeline describing how you would do this within the three year award period for this funding announcement. Please make sure to include these things. These are also listed out in the funding announcement but I just wanted to emphasize a research sharing plan that's a standard NIH inclusion formats are available in the funding format. A plan for how you would apply to the opportunity funds announcement from the hub a plan for how you would disseminate and share everything coming out of this and the letter of support here is at least an institutional letter of support that your institution in your department are behind this. Also you may choose to collaborate with people and include individual letters of support as well from your collaborators. And then we'll get into how this gets reviewed the initial level of review is classical NIH peer review which many of you may know that process. This will happen at a review panel that NHGRI convenes later this year in late fall or early winter or that review then gets condensed into something that we present to NHGRI advisory council. And they do a second level of review and tell us what they think of our funding plans. And finally the funding decisions themselves are actually based upon a combination of these reviews as well as what program officers decide is high priority from a program point of view, how much money Congress gave us that year, as well as the scientific and technical merit itself which comes out of the review scores. So relevant deadlines, the letter of intent is non binding, you can completely choose to skip that because it's just a few, we can a couple of days away from today it's it gives us a sense of how many people are interested but it's certainly not a mandatory part of this. The application view date itself is October 10 so we recognize that that is a short window of time, we are working to see if we can make any changes and extend that a little bit so keep, keep an eye out for that space. But otherwise the biggest piece of advice I have is that do not wait until the day before that deadline to submit we see all the time people that spend months writing an application, only for a computer glitch or an internet outage to spoil their hard work and the application not make it in by the deadline so if you want to apply, don't think of October 9 as being the day you want to do this, let's see if we can help you do it much earlier than that. So with that I'm going to wrap this up and open it up for questions. Generally you tell me if I should keep my screen up or we can take the screen off and go to the chat. Sela Hutchison, who is our fantastic program analyst will call out your questions. If you have any please use the chat function to start putting those in. Thank you for that great presentation Rachel. I'll be helping facilitate this Q&A. It looks like we're still waiting for some questions to come in, but please, hopefully if you have any please submit through the Q&A. So I see something that I'll grab while you round out the others so do anonymous attendees asking do we need to budget cloud computing cost in the budget that is encouraged it can be estimates. It doesn't have to be exact, but definitely there is a piece of this that we are expecting to see how much money you would propose to use in the cloud educational context. Not completely linked to this funding announcement but we are, we have done historically and maybe we will do again. Funding opportunities that are just giving out pieces of money to use the cloud. So put it in the budget and if later on we can find ways to take that off your budget and maybe use that money for student projects or something else we will do that. But definitely the short answer is yes please include in your applications, a budget line item for cloud computing costs. Our next question is asking about if the project should be master's level or undergraduate level. Yeah, that's a good question sort of happy to see you here the projects can be at undergraduate or master's level they don't have to be masters if you're teaching undergraduate class in genomic data science and you want to design a project. Which your undergraduate students as a group do together. That's fine as well. Of course you know master students quite commonly do research projects but in this case we encourage undergraduates just as much. Great, we also have a question at the program supports or has any limitations on collaborations with international partners. The application itself is limited to us institutions. I have to go back and check whether foreign components are allowed. I doubt that for UE five applications we allow foreign components. But feel free to send me an email with that question and one thing I'm nice to see you here too. I will give you a more definite answer to that but I somehow think that this is limited to us institutions educational funding announcements quite commonly have a US institution limitation on. Okay, and our next question is if the grant would support the creation of non credit courses, for example, they're interested in creating an online intensive that will train undergraduates and bioinformatics and cloud computing. The answer to that is just as it stands in the chat here. I feel that that may not end up being responsive. But we have had some discussions on things like summer courses that students would sign up for. Let's take that offline and see if I can get you a more definitive answer but in general this is designed for classical for credit. This is the semester traditional instruction that they would then use towards a degree associates undergraduate or masters. Great, our next question is if you expect that the soon to be identified of leader will have members of their team available whom they can reach out to and develop ideas in advance of submitting the site application. Wonderful question the hub awardee will be starting their work in a matter of days but on the other hand this funding announcement is also going to have a deadline within the next couple of months. My hunch is that they would otherwise be excited to talk and discuss but just because of the timing of this, they may not be in a position to put substantial time and effort, given that they will just have received that award and barely be getting involved in the next month or so. So feel free to connect with them or energy and I will be doing a press release with the awardee name and contact information. So feel free to reach out and you know let's see where it goes but they're very new at this point themselves to so I can't say that everything in the next couple of months will make sense to them in terms of how much time they can put us. My next question asks if any of the platforms on the Anvil site are considered to qualify as cloud resources like Terra, Galaxy, Jupiter, Seeker, etc. Yes to all of those as long as they're getting used on the Anvil and we know that Galaxy can be used as a web server as well as can Jupiter, Seeker and other things so the specific point here is that we are looking for Anvil to be that educational tools if you're proposing use of Galaxy on the Anvil, Jupiter on the Anvil, Seeker on the Anvil, absolutely yes but if you're proposing the use of Galaxy as a standalone tool that would not count as a cloud usage requirement here. The next question asks the faculty at the targeted institutions of this FOA usually have heavy teaching loads so they will need release time during the academic year and or summer to carry out the proposed project if funded. So they were wondering if it would be possible to consider personnel costs in the budget. Jennifer that's very much in the plan I mean I encourage you to read the budget piece of the funding announcement but we are writing it in a way where there will definitely be partial salary support of course it would be up to you to discuss with your institution, what their requirements would be to release you from that extremely heavy teaching load, which we know is a nearly universal situation for teaching faculty. But go ahead and go through the funding announcement and tell me by email if you will if it covers your question in terms of you reaching a financial agreement with your institution to do this work and teach one less course for example. And we have a follow up on the cloud resources question, can we expect Anvil to work with applicants on software support or should we expect focusing on existing data analysis pipelines. Oh yeah the answer that is the clear and resounding yes and will has absolutely stellar outreach and training team coming out of Johns Hopkins and the Hutch Fred Hutch Institute at Seattle and the Carnegie institution in Baltimore so feel free to reach out that and will outreach team should be very very willing to work with you will get included in your teaching activities. Next we have a question about the minimum number of courses and application needs to develop. That is completely up to the applicant to tell us what they have in mind. We don't want to be too constrictive in how an individual applicant would decide to structure their application. We want to combine two courses one in genomic data science and one in Python programming. It's completely up to you this is in the realm of reviewers to answer whether a particular applicant is proposing too much work or too little. It's really your decision to make. It's like we have a wall in the Q&A but please feel free to add any other questions. Once in my email is in the public domain and I'm happy to put it in the chat is disabled here but if you Google my name. I'm sure my energy and I website will come up program officers like me really really enjoy having conversations with potential applicants so this webinar is just to start. I'm happy to keep talking with any of you. Any more questions are any previous results needed. No, we have designed this application to say that, you know, first time applicants are very very welcome to apply. You can be completely new to the NIH application process or not have any results in terms of this is not another one where the reviewers are being asked to consider where there's preliminary data. And if you have a plan for using the cloud. That should be fine. Jennifer I see your answer let's take that offline I want to make sure that you and I are on the same page when we talk about personnel costs because there might be a difference between what we are saying is support for the faculty member themselves versus support for personnel. We have a classical sense of a team of you know, programmers or cloud web servers of people that are not the PI themselves. We have another question about the budget limit. Yes, so this is kept at $150,000 for individual awards. All of that is laid out in more, you know, NIH financial detail within the funding announcement itself. It lays out what would be covered in that budget what would be not. So, yeah, I don't know whether we had a name on that question but if you whoever is asking the budget question, I would advise going back and reading the funding announcement and then if specific things don't make sense. Me or one of my grants management colleagues here are happy to get back and give you more detail. I guess when a few more minutes to see others have questions on the webinar. If not, thank you everyone. We probably will also be trying to do a second webinar if we succeed that information will be on the website. You're not. It doesn't have to be that you're allowed to attend only one you can come back and join the second one if we managed to do that as well. But otherwise my email address is in the chat and as I said it really really makes me happy to answer any questions. We hope that if I leave any of you with the take home message. I would say that NIH funding is not just for labs that have already gotten previous awards or large institutions. If you have never ever applied for an NIH grant before we designed this funding opportunity, so that it is as simple as as possible for a first time applicant minimum additional attachments you know minimum requirements from an administrative point of view. So if you are a teaching faculty member who has not previously thought of NIH as the home for your work. This might be a good starting point. Okay, I will let you make a call on what we do in these cases. Yes, other questions coming I'm happy to stay online until the public time which I think is two to three. Or I don't know if in these cases, Office of Communications usually ends a webinar early. It's really up to you. Okay, let's so let's wait till at least 240 in case any of you have questions on your mind that you haven't put in the q amp a yet. So net here is something else from you. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. So we do want the work that we fund to be a meaningful part of the PIs workload. So what you see in there and it when it says 2.4 months of PI effort is that sometimes NIH will set a minimum on how much time the PI has to spend on this work. And one of 100 things that they have going on. So that sort of gives you an idea for how much of the salary money you could put on this. If you happen to have 50 different NIH awards, each of which is being a little part of your salad. So I'm sort of trying to explain that this is sort of our way of making sure that we stay on the radar of the PI for this work to be important in the context of everything else they have going on. In terms of restrictions for allowable costs, I think once again there are budget. Next lines in the funding announcement which gives you the official NIH position we can tell you what is allowed, you know, cloud computing costs costs for student research projects that would come out of the hub. But I think NIH also has language in the funding announcement that sort of makes it explicit what sort of costs are not allowed. Okay, this was extremely useful, we will hang around for another minute or so. Oh, you're on a roll here. Another question about research costs and if they can include support for students, or if they are considered to be participants. No, I'll take the second part first we are not considering students to be participants for this because at the end of the day, this is about students still being students and getting educational content. Other than the hands on research project where they would work together, but NIH uses the word participants in a classical sense of something like a workshop where someone registered and came for two weeks. So the students in this case are not considered to be participants and in that sense, the money, the funding could not be used to support student time for participating in this activity. One other thing, because we had so many good questions at some point over the next few days, Sarah and I will be making sort of a frequently asked questions document and putting that on the website. But at any point feel free to use email to send me additional questions we will sort of make a little resource here so that people can see if the question they had in their mind has already been asked and answered and that once again we'll go on the website. Okay, thank you everyone. One second, please keep an eye out on the website if any changes happen to either add a second webinar or change the due date, we will be using the website and NIH also will be sending out through official channels. If that information goes out. It will reach you through whatever ways you saw the initial notice of funding opportunity as well. Thank you. I hope many of you are curious and excited to apply. And, you know, I never tired of saying this but let's stop offline and let me help you put your application together is what the taxpayers fund me for. So thank you everyone. Thank you, general. I think we're good to close out today.