Concepts for proposed Requests for Applications (RFA) are reviewed during the Open Session of Council. These are the features of the process:

• A brief concept description, written by the program staff proposing a grant solicitation, is posted on the Council website.
  
  
• Dr. Alexander will present the concepts during the Open Session. Program staff will be available to answer questions if called upon but, in general, will not participate in the presentation.
  
  
• Following brief presentation and discussion, Council members will be asked to indicate their opinion of each concept.
  
  
• Comments, suggestions, and Council advice will be recorded by NICHD staff.

This approach to concept review:

• Meets the NIH requirement for public presentation of concepts and the opportunity for public comment.
  
  
• Provides a wide spectrum of expertise for the consideration of concepts, including scientific, policy, and advocacy perspectives. The process should encourage the presentation and evaluation of broad concepts, without detailed or in-depth discussion of the specific science. Such discussion, typical when concepts are reviewed by a group with more narrowly focused expertise, goes well beyond the purpose of this review. Indeed, it places those involved in a potential conflict of interest situation that would prevent them from responding to a resultant RFA should they choose to do so.
  
  
• Enables the full Council to consider individual initiatives within the broader context of many planned initiatives, giving us the benefit of multiple perspectives in the overall planning of an NICHD research agenda.
  

For this meeting, two concepts were reviewed:

Data Sharing for Demographic Research
Innovative Statistical and Computational Methodologies for the Design and Analysis of Multilevel Studies on Childhood Obesity

Data Sharing for Demographic Research

May 2008

A Request for Applications (RFA) for a limited competition using the U24 mechanism (cooperative infrastructure grant) entitled “Data Sharing for Demographic Research” is proposed.

Purpose

Demographic research depends on a complex system of data sharing that involves cooperation among researchers, research centers, and NICHD. Data sharing is necessary because demographic research is predicated on the analysis of large-scale, population based data. The collection of such data is expensive, but this arrangement is cost-efficient because these data sets are used by large numbers of researchers, including researchers outside the original data collection team. Also, demographic data is now routinely combined with health, geographic, behavioral, and qualitative data and such datasets often require a layered access system to protect the human subjects. This has made data sharing quite complicated. In 2003, NICHD established a cooperative research infrastructure program with several universities to anchor this system. This arrangement has worked very well and the DBSB long range plan calls for continuation of the program.

Objective

The program provides: 1) assistance to individual investigators in creating the technical capacity to share their data, 2) data dissemination once individual investigators cannot support data sharing activities on their own (for instance, when their grant ends), and 3) a conduit to evolving technology for data sharing in other fields, and 4) leadership in creating cooperative practices among individual investigators, population research centers and NICHD.

Scope

The DSDR program has succeeded in all of these objectives and has established working relationships with the investigators and research centers involved in the creation of 23 large scale, demographic studies, including most of the widely used non-government demographic and social science data sets. For example, because the NICHD grant that supported collection of the data has ended, the DSDR now disseminates the National Survey of Families and Households. In the future, similar arrangements will be made for the AddHealth survey, the Three Cities study, and others. In the continuation of this project, the DSDR program must continue to foster the development of data sharing activities and the spirit of cooperation among all stakeholders, sustaining and building on the valuable relationships among data providers, data users, and funders that were established in the first phase of the project.

Program Staff

V. Jeffery Evans, Ph.D. J.D.
Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch

Innovative Statistical and Computational Methodologies for the Design and Analysis of Multilevel Studies on Childhood Obesity

May 2008

A Request for Applications (RFA) for a limited competition using the R01 mechanism entitled “Innovative Statistical and Computational Methodologies for the Design and Analysis of Multilevel Studies on Childhood Obesity” is proposed.

Purpose

The need for new strategies to deal with the childhood obesity problem is critical, as prevalence rates continue to rise in the U.S. and globally. The NICHD has been taking the lead to develop a series of initiatives that will address childhood obesity from a complex systems perspective, linking macro-level drivers of diet and physical activity with biological processes that together, in turn, impact obesity-related behaviors. The goal of the multilevel research agenda is to quantify and qualify how socio-environmental factors interact with biology to enable or constrain food and physical activity behaviors and to shift the focus from attempting to change individual motivation of health behavior to making healthy eating and exercise behavior a natural way of life.

Objective

This multilevel approach has been determined as a top priority by the recently established NIH-RWJF-CDC Collaborative on Childhood Obesity. Three essential aspects of this multilevel childhood obesity research agenda require support: 1) observational and basic research bridging socio-environmental and biological variables that influence obesity-related behaviors, 2) interventions that impact on multiple levels, from individuals to communities and policy environments, and 3) training of a new generation of multilevel scientists who are equipped to solve complex public health problems such as obesity.

Scope

To accomplish these objectives, the NICHD plans to support an NHLBI-led initiative to create a childhood obesity prevention and treatment network in the U.S. that will involve multisite, multi-component, and multilevel interventions that strive to influence individuals, families, schools, and communities simultaneously. In addition, the NICHD plans to develop global multilevel research centers of excellence that will generate and test new cross-disciplinary hypotheses that connect macro- and micro-level drivers of childhood obesity, evaluate interventions that aim to modify the social, physical or policy environment, and comprehensively integrate systems nutrition/systems public health into pre- and post-doctoral training. These global centers will fund U.S. investigators teamed up with international partners and will highlight the contrast of either varying childhood obesity rates or socio-environmental characteristics across populations in different countries.

Program Staff

Terry T-K Huang, PhD, MPH
Endocrinology, Nutrition, and Growth Branch