NIH Deputy Director Dr. Raynard Kington urged 300 participants at the eRA Symposium to embrace the new eRA system and to participate actively in refining it. In his opening remarks on April 30, Dr. Kington stressed that NIHers “will be the pioneers, and our ability to use [eRA] successfully will have great resonance throughout the Department.” Health and Human Services (HHS) currently is evaluating eRA for department-wide use.

This year’s symposium, entitled “Progress in Program: Tying It All Together,” was dedicated to informing the Program community about the growing challenges of grants administration as well as the opportunities offered by eRA.  Dr. Ronald N. Germain, deputy chief of NIAID’s laboratory of immunology, explained how grant portfolios would become more interdisciplinary and complex as a reflection of systems biology, the new trend in biological research. According to Germain, major advances are not likely to come from small single-PI laboratories. “Rather, larger teams comprising expert biologists, computer programmers, mathematicians, engineers, chemists, and others are needed to collect and assemble the vast amount of data into predictive models of biological behavior.” NIH will need to create new funding mechanisms in support of systems biology.

Project Manager Dr. John McGowan then emphasized the potential for advancing medical research through the mining of eRA data using Knowledge Management technology. Expected to grow from six to twelve terabytes in the near future, the eRA database is accessed in 300 countries worldwide.  Approximately 3,500 extramural staff at NIH, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) use the eRA system. More than 2,500 grantees already have registered for the new NIH eRA Commons (eRA’s external interface); more than 50,000 are expected to enroll when the system reaches full productivity. In addition, the Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects (CRISP), eRA’s biomedical database system containing information on research projects and programs supported by HHS, is accessible to the general public.

In his presentation on “Future Directions,” Dr. Steve Hausman, deputy director of NIAMS and eRA advocate for advanced technologies, gave a summary of major FY 2002 eRA successes, including the scanning of all incoming applications, distribution of proposals to reviewers via CD, support for electronic submission of peer reviews, automated generation of summary statements, and a facility for submitting progress reports through a Web interface.  By 2004, it is expected that 80 percent of principal investigators (PIs) will use eSNAP to submit their progress reports online. 

Dr. Hausman also introduced new emerging technologies, including Gyricon-based media for electronic paper, improved collaborative technologies for conducting meetings, wireless broadband, BroadBench, Spot technology, Blue-Ray DVD and Augmented Cognition, which offer many possibilities for improving grants administration business practices. 

For more information and copies of symposium presentations, visit http://era.nih.gov/eraworkshop3/. To view the videocast of the symposium, go to http://videocast.nih.gov/PastEvents.asp and select “NIH Only Events.”