National Centers for Biomedical Computing

The summary for the National Centers for Biomedical Computing grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

National Centers for Biomedical Computing: The Institutes and Centers (ICs) of the National Institutes of Health invite applications for specialized centers in the area of biomedical computing. The U54 mechanism will be used to create NIH National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NIH NCBCs). These centers, in conjunction with individual investigator awards, will create a networked national effort to build the computational infrastructure for biomedical computing in the nation, the National Program of Excellence in Biomedical Computing (NPEBC). The establishment of the NIH NCBC was called for in the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative report in 1999 (http://www.nih.gov/about/director/060399.htm), and their need has been reaffirmed by more recent workshops. The NIH NCBC will be devoted to all facets of biomedical computing, from basic research in computational science to providing the tools and resources that biomedical and behavioral researchers need to do their work. In addition to carrying out fundamental research, it is expected that the NIH NCBC will play a major role in educating and training researchers to engage in biomedical computing. To build the computational infrastructure for biomedical computing in the nation, the National Program will use a combination of NIH funding mechanisms that will be supported by multiple NIH Institutes and Centers. The central constituent of the NPBEC, the NIH NCBC, is the focus of this RFA. The NIH NCBC will provide tools and resources that biomedical and behavioral researchers can use at a variety of levels. The NIH NCBCs will be partnerships bringing together three types of scientists: 1) computational scientists, who invent and develop efficient and powerful languages, data structures, software architectures, hardware, and algorithms for solving biomedically significant computing problems; 2) biomedical computational scientists, who adapt and deploy resources from computational science to solve significant biomedical problems; and 3) experimental and clinical biomedical and behavioral researchers, who generate data that can be transformed into knowledge by computational simulation, analysis, modeling, data mining, and visualization. These partnerships will be designed to produce, validate, and disseminate tools and computational environments that will be useful to a broad spectrum of biomedical researchers across the nation. It is expected that the partnerships will be highly interactive. Computational scientists should work with biomedical or behavioral researchers to develop the tools while the biologists validate these tools and provide feedback for the next generation of tools. In some cases, the NIH NCBCs will enhance and extend existing tools; in other cases they will develop new tools and computational environments de novo. Individual biomedical or behavioral investigators will make use of the NIH NCBCs in different ways. Some investigators will simply use the on-line tools and services that the NIH NCBCs provide. These investigators might never have direct contact with any researchers at the NIH NCBC, but they will download software or go to the NIH NCBC web site to make use of resources found there. Biomedical and behavioral investigators for whom a greater level of interaction with the NIH NCBC is appropriate could follow two pathways. 1) After the initial NIH NCBCs have been funded, NIH anticipates releasing a new program announcement that will support partnerships between individual investigators and the centers. As an example, a biomedical research laboratory with software that is useful in modeling the function of the heart might seek to use the expertise of the NIH NCBC to modify the software to run on a computational grid. Alternatively, the biomedical researchers might seek support from the NIH NCBC to design and build hardware that would be well suited to solve their problems. Individual investigators should monitor the BISTI web site (http://www.bisti.nih.gov) for relevant program announcements. It is anticipated that the announcements for partnering projects will include both new RO1's and R21's and as well as competitively reviewed supplements to existing projects. 2) Individual investigators could be part of a Driving Biological Project (DBP) funded within the NIH NCBC. These projects will be described in core 3 below. An investigator who interacts with the center in this fashion will help the NIH NCBC focus its computational research on challenging biomedical problems selected for their broad biomedical significance and compatibility with the core computational expertise of the NIH NCBC. Investigators involved in a DBP will have substantial interactions with researchers at the NIH NCBC.