Inside eRA, April 2, 2004 (Volume 5, Issue 2)

Dr. Israel Lederhendler Becomes Interim eRA Project Manager

Dr. Israel (Izja) Lederhendler has accepted the position of interim eRA project manager. Under the terms of his appointment, Dr. Lederhendler will devote 50 percent of his time to eRA and 50 percent to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he is a program officer. His strong belief in the importance of eRA in achieving the NIH mission led him to accept the eRA position, which realistically is a full-time job.

Prior to his appointment, Dr. Lederhendler served with Dr. Carlos Caban as co-advocate for the Scientific Program Management community. He also participated in the Program Officers/Program Officials Forum, the electronic Program Users Group and the Program Portal Joint Application Design team.

Dr. Lederhendler chaired his first eRA Project Team meeting on February 10. In his opening remarks, he spoke about his professional obligation –– to ensure that tax dollars lead to useful public health advances. To this end, eRA has been working to develop effective management tools to make optimal use of the extramural grants administration database. This direction offers the greatest opportunity for eRA to contribute to national and international efforts to improve public health. Technically oriented efforts risk getting caught up in the latest systems and how they work, potentially losing sight of NIH’s public-health mandate.

Dr. Lederhendler considers his two principal responsibilities to be maintaining project momentum and communicating project challenges and opportunities to the community-at-large. He encouraged business-area advocates to generate enthusiasm by engaging in productive “cross-talk.” He highlighted the current Grants Management (GM) redesign effort as a great opportunity to get GM, Budget, and Program representatives together to collaborate for the best end-to-end design. 

At NIMH, his home institute, Dr. Israel Lederhendler serves as chief of the Basic Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience Program. He was trained in psychology  (McGill University), biopsychology (City University of New York, American Museum of Natural History) and behavioral neurobiology (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute). In addition to administering a grants portfolio, he was coordinator of sleep and chronobiology research for NIMH, serving as a member of the Advisory Board of the National Center for Sleep Disorders Research (NHLBI) and the Trans-NIH Sleep Research Coordinating Committee.

Dr. Lederhendler is a fellow of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology. He has served as a guest editor for peer-reviewed journals and has co-edited several volumes dealing with behavioral neuroscience and its application to mental health. He joined NIH as a senior staff fellow in 1987 (Laboratory of Biophysics, NINDS). After moving to NIMH as a research administrator in 1991, he led efforts to establish integrative and comparative perspectives within the neurosciences.

eRA Gears Up for June/July e-Application Pilot

eRA has announced its third e-application pilot after successfully receiving four electronic Competing Grant Application Process (CGAP) applications for the March 1 receipt date. The next pilot will accept electronic applications for the January 2005 council round. Receipt deadlines are June 1 for new, competing applications and July 1 for revised and competing continuation applications.

Thus far, all applications for the production pilots have been submitted by authorized Service Providers. Currently, Service Providers comprise commercial companies with NIH awards to develop submission vehicles for e-grants.

The March pilot supported applications of three different types: simple, Type 2 competing; revised Type 1; and revised Type 2 competing continuation. Unlike the fall 2003 pilot, no paper copies of the applications were submitted in March. Thus, from Receipt and Referral to potential award, these applications will be handled electronically by NIH staff.

For the March pilot, a validation service was implemented to enable submitters to perform a “test run” that applied all the business-rule checks required for the NIH to generate a database record and a grant image. This validation service reduced data discrepancy problems that were encountered in the first pilot.

The eRA team also is improving and expanding on-line documentation for applicants and Service Providers. See http://era.nih.gov/Projectmgmt/SBIR/ for up-to-date pilot plans, terms and conditions, participant packages, grant assembly instructions and forms. There also is essential resource material for system-to-system application submission, the method recommended by eRA. This documentation includes validations, error messages, message content definitions, schema specifications and crosswalks.

For the June/July pilot, NIH intends to accept electronic submissions for R01, R03, and R21 mechanisms ONLY. NIH will receive e-applications responding to Program Announcements (PAs) for the standing submission dates. Responses to Requests for Applications (RFAs), Subprojects, Program Project and Center grants, Supplements, Research Career Awards, Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants, Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants, Training grants, Fellowships, and AREA grants will NOT be eligible for the June/July pilot. Additionally, submissions involving a change of Principal Investigator (PI) or institution still must be submitted on paper.

NIH only will accept applications with modular budgets for the June 1 receipt date. Service Providers may submit a limited number of applications with full budgets (excluding consortia) for the July 1 receipt date.

Grantee institutions interested in participating in the next pilot are encouraged to contact one of NIH’s authorized Service Providers. See the eRA Web site for contact information. Alternatively, grantee institutions can choose to develop their own NIH-compliant grant application submission software. Institutions and commercial companies interested in becoming authorized Service Providers should send an email request to Scarlett Gibb, chief, eRA Planning, Communications and Outreach Branch at gibbs@mail.nih.gov.

Service Providers must successfully submit a test application of each type before being authorized to participate in the June/July production pilot. This test run is the first step in the Service Provider certification process.

e-Grants and Commons Top List of eRA Priorities for FY2004

Two of eRA’s highest priorities for FY2004 are improving and expanding the capabilities of electronic applications and the Commons. The top-ten list also includes other initiatives designed to standardize, simplify and expedite grant-related interactions between NIH and the grantee community.

Among plans to enhance e-applications are support for all non-competing Type 5 grant progress reports, resubmissions, National Research Service Award (NRSA) forms, and electronic Notices of Grant Awards (NGAs). eRA also intends to integrate its electronic competing application process (CGAP) software with Grants.gov, where institutions can apply for Federal grants online through a unified process.

New Commons facilities will include a Web Query Tool (WebQT) interface for the Status module. Web QT is a user-friendly search facility already available to internal NIH staff. eRA also plans to upgrade X-Train, the NIH Commons interface for tracking National Research Service Awards (NRSA) training appointments. X-Train will be converted to Java Version 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), the industry standard for building large-scale business applications for the Web.

eRA users also will benefit from other funded priorities, including:

• Consolidation of all Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) research grant processing under eRA.   
• Implementation of organizational hierarchy structures that accommodate security, supervisory oversight, workflow requirements and delegation of authority for internal and grantee users.   
• Development of a comprehensive electronic notification system.   
• Creation of an eRA interface to the Departmental Contracts Information System (DCIS).

In planning for this year, the eRA Project Team worked to balance and satisfy requirements from many sources, including internal and external users, legislation, Federal, HHS and NIH policy and plans. At the same time, the team strove to accomplish its objectives in accordance with industry best practices.

As the eRA team works to achieve the goals of its funded priorities, new and shifting priorities continue to emerge. NIH management will need to decide whether to provide additional funding for new requirements or to replace scheduled initiatives with new ones. Emerging requirements result, in part, from the following initiatives:

• The NIH Roadmap –– The Roadmap provides a framework of NIH priorities for sponsoring research in the 21^st century. “Research Teams of the Future” is one of the Roadmap’s core themes. To accelerate medical discovery, NIH plans to encourage interdisciplinary and public/private sector collaboration. Undoubtedly, eRA will assume the responsibility of tracking a widening network of co-investigators and key personnel.   
• Knowledge Management (KM) –– NIH leaders have recognized the potential role of KM in maximizing the utility of eRA data for promoting health research and hastening discoveries.    
• Most Efficient Organization (MEO) –– OMB Circular A-76 establishes Federal procedures for determining whether certain activities should be performed under contract with commercial sources or in-house using government personnel. According to standard review procedures, agencies develop proposals for a “most efficient organization” to compete with bids from the private sector. In response to A-76 requirements, NIH established the Office of Grants Support Services (OGSS) within the Office of Extramural Research (OER) in the NIH Office of the Director (OD). The OGSS strategy to improve organizational effectiveness, efficiency and accountability is critically dependent on the continued development of eRA capabilities.   
• Grants.gov –– In compliance with Public Law 106-107 and the President’s Management Agenda, Grants.gov was established as a unified “storefront” for customers of Federal grants to electronically find opportunities, apply, and manage grants. Grants.gov is one of 24 Federal, cross-agency, E-Government initiatives focused on improving access to services via the Internet. Concurrent with work on the NIH CGAP, the eRA team meets regularly with the Grants.gov team to define standards, conduct pilot testing, and coordinate efforts.

For more information about eRA plans for FY2004, contact Scarlett Gibb, chief, Planning, Communications and Outreach Branch, at gibbs@mail.nih.gov or 301-435-0690 x603.

eRA’s Virtual School Gets a Makeover

The NIH eRA virtual school has undergone an extreme makeover. Have you visited lately? If not, then it’s time to take a look. All you need is a Web browser. The virtual school still is located at http://era.nih.gov/virtualschool/. 

eRA training and outreach staff are dedicated to providing comprehensive, up-to-date instruction on using NIH research grant-processing systems. The renovated virtual school has a welcoming new interface and offers a variety of resources for learning, including interactive tutorials, frequently asked questions, quick information reference sheets, and links to user guides, user groups, presentations and news articles. Thus far, there are special sections for the Committee Management, Review and Program communities.

The underlying technology for virtual school tutorials is RoboDemo® software, which enables the creation of animated, interactive simulations of user applications. RoboDemo records the instructional demonstration, including mouse clicks and keystrokes, as a high-resolution, compressed movie. Training staff can enhance the movie with text annotations, audio effects, and images; users are able to participate interactively through click boxes and text-entry fields.

eRA’s virtual school first opened its doors in May 2003 with the goal of offering instruction and documentation to internal and external users anywhere, at any time. The Web-based tutorials are designed to be both alternatives and supplements to on-the-job training and formal classroom instruction.

Give on-line learning a chance. For more information, contact Patty.Austin@nih.gov.

eRA Issues New Task Orders for Software Support

In accordance with its new procurement structure, eRA has competed a series of work assignments among its three design, development and maintenance contractors: AC Technologies (ACT), Northrop Grumman Information Technology (NGIT), and Science Application International Corporation (SAIC). ACT recently won task order #1 for system maintenance, NGIT task order #2 for the iEdison project, and SAIC task order #3 for creation of a datamart proof of concept.

While the first two task orders address existing work, the datamart project is a new eRA endeavor. A datamart is a single, integrated source of key information for reporting purposes. The specific objective of Task Order #3 is to implement a working datamart developed at the National Cancer Institute to harvest eRA information. If SAIC is successful, eRA will have the basic architecture to build a number of datamarts dedicated to the specific reporting and analytical requirements of eRA users. 

The eRA currently is evaluating quotes for four additional work assignments. Task order #4 calls for the construction of an eRA interface with the Departmental Contracts Information System (DCIS). The statement of work (SOW) for task order #5 involves Commons’ enhancements, including the creation of a grantee “closeout” module. The sixth task order will expand electronic grant receipt capabilities by enabling additional transactions, implementing an interface with Grants.gov, assisting with future pilots with Service Providers and Grants.gov, and supporting more types of grant mechanisms. Task order #7 will provide NIH with a technical evaluation of software and approaches for the next phases of CGAP development and expansion.

In keeping with its new acquisition environment, eRA will create SOWs as the need for support arises and then will give NGIT, ACT and SAIC the opportunity to prepare quotes. These contractors may establish partnerships with subcontractors to assist them. Under the terms of the contract, partnering arrangements must remain intact until the completion of the task order.

For more information about eRA support task orders, contact Donna Frahm at frahmd@mail.nih.gov or 301- 594.9747.

Janna Wehrle Is New Advocate for Scientific Program Management

Dr. Janna Wehrle is the newest member of the eRA Project Management team. She recently joined Dr. Carlos Caban as co-advocate for the Scientific Program Management community. Dr. Israel Lederhendler, who now serves as interim eRA project manager, was Caban’s former co-advocate.

For several years, Dr. Wehrle has been an active participant in the creation of eRA tools for Program staff. The current Program Module (PGM), developed by the electronic Program Users’ Group (ePUG) under the leadership of Drs. Caban and Lederhendler, is an attractive and reasonably stable platform where program officials (POs) can accomplish most of their tasks. Nevertheless, Dr. Wehrle believes that PGM still needs improvement, both in functionality and user friendliness. “One of my goals as ePUG co-chair and co-advocate for Program is to ensure that PGM enhancement proceeds as quickly as possible and that PGM training and usage increase NIH-wide. Another goal is to identify and promote the development of eRA tools that reach across NIH business areas.” 

Dr. Wehrle came to NIH in 1995 as a program director in the Division of Cell Biology and Biophysics at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). At present, she has three portfolios of research grants: protein folding and dynamics; nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic methods for high-resolution structure determination; and macromolecular computation. Wehrle also chairs the committee that oversees minority recruitment and responsible conduct of research issues on NIGMS training grants. 

After earning a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Ohio State University, Dr. Wehrle received a post-doctoral fellowship to study cancer metabolism at Johns Hopkins. She subsequently joined the faculty there in a research division of the Department of Radiology, developing noninvasive NMR methods for prediction and monitoring of solid tumor response to cancer therapies. 

Consolidation of OPDIV Research Grant Processing Moves Ahead

NIH and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are proceeding on schedule to consolidate the processing of all CDC research grants under eRA in FY2004. This collaboration follows the recent decision by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to centralize all research grants processing under the eRA system. 

The CDC implementation team has completed registration, training, data identification, and business-process activities. CDC currently has 175 registered eRA users with four active centers performing pre-award and award activities. The remaining CDC centers, institutes and offices (CIOs) are anxiously waiting for approximately 775 active research grants to be migrated to eRA. Ultimately, CDC will use eRA to process its research grants through all phases of the grant lifecycle.

Activities still in process include the completion of an interface to CDC's financial system for grant obligations, rollout of CDC-specific changes to the eRA system, and resolution of the remaining business process/policy changes.

Formal CDC eRA Users Groups are forming to give production users a forum to share functional details on system usage, best practices, requirements and recommended system changes. CDC already has raised multiple Operational Division (OPDIV) integration issues to DHHS, including the lack of formal change control procedures and the need for additional funding to cover the costs of consolidation.

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has begun migration and eRA utilization planning. HRSA representatives met with the eRA team to demonstrate their current system, to analyze functionality needs, and to discuss the future migration of HRSA data to eRA.

In keeping with community participation in eRA decision-making, Teresa Kinley represents CDC on the eRA Project Team. Anthony Freeman (AHRQ) and Libby Hartnett (HRSA) also have agreed to serve as advocates for their agencies.

Send questions about the HHS grant processing integration to Mark Siegert at siegerm@mail.nih.gov or 301-435-9086.

Craig Jordan to Serve as Liaison between eRA and EPMC

Dr. Craig Jordan has accepted the role of liaison between eRA and the Extramural Program Management Committee (EPMC). With the recent change in leadership of both the eRA Project Management Team and EPMC, and in recognition of the growing importance of eRA activities at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), members decided that formal liaison representation would be mutually beneficial.

EPMC advises NIH on matters relating to NIH policies, guidelines, and procedures governing the overall administration and management of extramural research and research training. Members of EPMC, who meet bi-weekly, include a senior extramural program official from each Institute and Center (IC). Dr. Jordan represents the Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), where he serves as director, Division of Extramural Activities. According to Jordan, EPMC’s interest in eRA is driven by how “the changing face of electronic research administration is touching on issues of policy, practice, staffing, and the day-to-day logistics of all areas of NIH extramural program management.”

All members of EPMC have a strong interest in the impact of eRA on how their IC achieves its mission. Staff members from each IC rely on many internal eRA interfaces, including Peer Review, Institute and Center Operations, QuickView, Electronic Council Book and Grants Closeout. All ICs also are affected by the way NIH interacts with the grantee community through external interfaces such as the Commons, the electronic Competing Grant Application Process (CGAP), the electronic Simplified Non-competing Application Process (eSNAP), and Internet-Assisted Review.

CIT Offers eRA Classes in April

The Center for Information Technology (CIT) will offer the following eRA classes this month. For more information, go to the CIT Training Program Web site at http://training.cit.nih.gov/.