After You Hit Submit: The National Institutes of Health Grant Review Process and Tips for Beginner Applicants (Research Committee Sponsored)

Getting a federally funded award (such as an NIH grant) submitted is fraught with its own challenges. Understanding what to expect thereafter, after one hits “submit”, can be equally difficult to understand, anxiety-provoking, and catch an unsuspecting applicant off guard if they are not prepared to respond or act proactively during this key, albeit often forgotten or discredited, part of the grant application process. In this didactic, the panel will seek to demystify this process, go over the steps of NIH review, while providing on-the ground experience as applicants and reviewers. This set of panelists has experience successfully submitting and securing NIH grants, and will bring lessons from this perspective; they will also provide objective perspectives from having served as NIH grant reviewers/ study section members such as highlighting the makeup of study sections that are available to applicants, understanding the scope of what a study section accomplishes, and highlighting what your score might mean and who to talk to about it. Moreover, we will highlight changes to the review process affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In providing this in-depth overview of the process after a grant submission is made, we anticipate that attendants will be better equipped to respond appropriately after submission, decrease frustration with the process, and maximize their likelihood of obtaining NIH funding. Finally, we will provide information on becoming an NIH reviewer for attendants, particularly highlighting the NIH early career reviewer program.

Presenters:

  • Christine Ngaruiya, MD, MSc, DTM&H
  • Stephanie Carreiro, MD, PhD
  • Peter R. Chai, MD MMS
Authors

  • Christine Ngaruiya, MD, MSc, DTM&H

    Stanford University

    Dr. Ngaruiya is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM) at Stanford University, and the Population and Global Health Research Director for the Department. She completed fellowship in Global Health in the Yale Department of Emergency Medicine in 2015, matriculating with an MSc in Tropical Medicine and International Health, and DTM&H from LSHTM, then joined the faculty at Yale for several years prior to joining the Stanford faculty. She is also a graduate of the NIH Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health (TIDIRH) program, which she was competitively selected for from a national pool of applicants for the 2019-2020 cohort. Her research centers on: Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs), barriers to care, and community-based interventions with a particular focus on Africa. Her past professional work focused on health disparities among underserved populations in the U.S. and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). This work has been funded by Yale University, NIH, USAID, the World Bank, Gates Foundation, and others. In 2021 and 2022, she was among the top 100 federally funded researchers in EM.

    Some past honors include: the Emergency Medicine Resident’s Association (EMRA) Augustine D’Orta Award for outstanding community and grassroots involvement, Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance Associate and the 2014 Harambe Pfizer Fellow Award for social entrepreneurship, the 2016 University of Nebraska Outstanding International Alumnus award, the 2018 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Global Emergency Medicine Academy Young Physician award, and the 2019 Yale School of Medicine Leonard Tow Humanism award. In 2020, she was selected as 1 of 24 women nationally as part of the Stanford-affiliated, Gates Foundation funded WomenLift Health Leadership Cohort.

    She has held several national and international leadership positions including with: the SAEM Global Emergency Medicine Academy, the Women Leaders in Global Health (WLGH) conference committee and the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) Research Committee. She was also a founding member of the Yale Network for Global Noncommunicable Disease (NGN), which acts as a hub for global NCD work involving the Yale community. Additionally, she served on the research pre-symposium committee for the African Conference on Emergency Medicine in 2014, on the Scientific Committee in 2016, and as the chair for the research pre-symposium committee in 2020. She has sat on a number of NIH panels related to global NCD topics, and has lectured both nationally and internationally on the same.

  • Stephanie Carreiro, MD, PhD

    University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School

    Dr. Stephanie Carreiro is an emergency medicine physician, medical toxicologist and digital health researcher. She is a 2009 graduate of New York Medical College, and completed her emergency medicine residency in 2013 at Brown University. She completed a medical toxicology fellowship in 2015, and received a PhD in Biomedical Sciences in 2022, both at the University of Massachusetts. She is currently an Associate Professor, Director of the Tox(In)novation Lab, and Research Director in the Department of Emergency Medicine at University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. Her current research program focuses on developing digital therapeutics for substance use disorder, understanding how patients use and engage with technology, and leveraging digital technology to promote health equity. She is the principal investigator multiple industry and federally funded research grants, including several awards from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

  • Peter R. Chai, MD, MMS

    Brigham and Women's Hospital

    Dr. Peter R Chai is an associate professor of emergency medicine and medical toxicology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and affiliate research scholar at the Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and The Fenway Institute. He is also research faculty at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Chai’s lab conducts translational research surrounding the development and implementation of technological solutions that detect and respond to changes in disease. He has been primarily interested in leveraging ingestible, injectable and smartphone-based sensors to understand medication adherence in HIV research as well as substance use disorders. These body sensor systems function as an architecture upon with Dr. Chai and his team develop context-aware, personalized behavioral support tools to improve engagement in care and medication adherence.

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