NIH Grants Can Go for I.T. Projects

HDM Breaking News, March 13, 2009

The National Institutes of Health is accepting applications for $1.5 billion in economic stimulus grant funds available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Some of the funds can be used for information technology purposes. For instance, $1 billion is available for construction grants to build new research facilities or improve existing ones. The funds can be used to implement "cyber infrastructure," or an I.T. network, but not servers, applications or other "movable equipment," says Louise Ramm, PhD, deputy director at the National Center for Research Resources. Part of NIH, the center provides laboratory scientists and clinical researchers with a variety of resources and training services.

Another $300 million in grant funds are available to facilitate the purchase of "shared instrumentation," which could include large computational and data storage systems. And at least $200 million are available in what are known as Challenge Grants to address specific challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. Specific information technology functions, such as the processing of health care data, could be funded via Challenge Grants.

The new funds significantly increase NIH's support for a variety of research activities, Ramm says. For instance, grants previously capped at $600,000 for "high-end instrumentation," now can go as high as $8 million.

The $1.5 billion grant round starts the doling out of $8 billion appropriated in the stimulus law for NIH, which is the nation's medical research agency and includes 27 institutes and centers.

More information is available at http://grants.nih.gov/recovery.

--Joseph Goedert

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