Announcements

• Program Announcement: Decision Making in Cancer
• Dr. Xihong Lin Receives NCI MERIT Award
• Electronic Submission
• Relevant PA/RFA Announcement

Program Announcement: Decision Making in Cancer

The Program Announcement (PA) entitled "Decision Making in Cancer: Single-Event Decisions (R21)" invites applications for research projects that will enhance understanding of human decision-making processes so that individuals can make more informed and satisfying choices regarding their health. The NCI encourages collaborations between researchers studying the processes of basic judgment and decision-making and researchers conducting cancer control investigations that will elucidate single-event decision-making processes, at the level of either the individual patient or health care provider. These decision-making processes are pertinent to cancer prevention, detection, treatment, survivorship, or end-of-life care.

The extramural statistics research community is encouraged to submit applications in response to this PA to conduct studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to:

• development and testing of theoretical models of informed decision-making;
• development and testing of decision aids and decision-support systems;
• construction and stability of preferences for treatment or treatment outcomes;
• how the dynamics of real-world settings influence judgment and decision-making processes;
• the roles of heuristics and biases, counterfactual thinking, and risk perception in decision-making;
• the roles of personality, mood, and affective processes in decision-making;
• numeracy and decision-making (including conceptualization of numeracy, assessment of numeracy, and the relationship of numeracy to judgment and decision-making in health);
• development and validation of statistical methods related to decision-making (e.g., Bayesian methods and alternative methods to capture uncertainty, such as fuzzy logic); and
• decision-making studies that examine alternative approaches to expected utility theories, such as regret theory, prospect theory, contingency valuation, discrete choice models, and interdependent utility models.

For details, please visit:

• PA-08-063 (R01)
• PA-08-064 (R21)

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Dr. Xihong Lin Receives NCI MERIT Award

Surveillance Research Program grantee Xihong Lin, Ph.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, received an NCI MERIT Award in June 2007. In the research supported by this MERIT award, Dr. Lin will develop advanced statistical methods for analyzing correlated and high-dimensional data in cancer research, especially for analyzing longitudinal and familial data, and high-dimensional genomic and proteomic data in epidemiological studies and population sciences. MERIT Awards provide long-term support to investigators with impressive records of scientific achievement in research areas of special importance or promise. Less than 5 percent of NIH-funded investigators are selected to receive MERIT Awards.

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Electronic Submission

The National Institutes of Health is phasing out paper grant applications, and will soon require all applications to be submitted electronically via the Grants.gov Web portal. See the Office of Extramural Research's Web site on Electronic Submission of Grant Applications.

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Relevant PA/RFA Announcement

The NIH Program Announcement (PA) for support of conferences and scientific meetings (R13/U13), previously PAR-03-176, has been reissued as PA-06-041. The new PA was released on October 26, 2005 with an opening date of November 21, 2005. Please review the updated guidelines described in the executive summary, as well as the format for submission and receipt dates for submitting requests.

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