NIAID Offers New Awards for ID Researchers

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) recently announced two new funding opportunities (FOAs) for dissemination and implementation research in health.

Dissemination research aims to understand how best to communicate and integrate knowledge and the associated evidence-based interventions. Implementation science studies strategies to adopt and integrate evidence-based health interventions into clinical and community settings to improve individual outcomes and benefit population health. These approaches can enrich infectious diseases research and clinical practice, particularly in the areas of antimicrobial resistance, diagnostics, surveillance, and treatment.

Study topics may include:

• Strategies to implement health promotion, prevention, screening, early detection, and diagnostic interventions, as well as effective treatments, clinical procedures or guidelines into existing care systems;
• Implementing multiple evidence-based practices within community or clinical settings to meet the needs of complex patients and diverse systems of care;
• Adapting evidence-based practices in the context of implementation;
• Studies on reducing or stopping ("de-implementing") the use of clinical and community practices that are ineffective, unproven, low-value, or harmful; and
• Developing and strengthening tools and techniques for conducting rapid yet rigorous qualitative data collection and analysis.

NIAID has also announced the DP2 New Innovators Awards to support post-doctoral investigators of exceptional creativity who propose highly innovative bold new research with the potential to produce a major impact on broad, important problems in biomedical research of priority to NIAID.

The purpose of this new program is to encourage shorter post-doctoral fellowships and provide the opportunity for creative scientists with little to no preliminary data to start their independent careers earlier.

IDSA commented on the proposed funding mechanism following a NIAID request for information in December and shared our support for the Institute’s continued dedication to supporting the ID physician-scientist workforce and the timely transition to independent research. 

For additional NIAID funding questions, please contact deaweb@niaid.nih.gov.