Supporting New Faculty Recruitment

NINDS GUIDANCE TO APPLICANTS FOR THE P30, RECOVERY ACT LIMITED COMPETITION: Supporting New Faculty Recruitment (RFA-OD-09-005).

The purpose of this document is to clarify and provide guidance to NINDS applicants responding to the Funding Announcement entitled, “Recovery Act Limited Competition: Supporting New Faculty Recruitment to Enhance Research Resources through Biomedical Research Core Centers (P30),” which was reissued on March 30, 2009.

The purpose of this announcement is to provide resources that will facilitate the hiring of new faculty into secure, tenure-track or equivalent positions. This ARRA-related announcement was issued in light of the reduction in available faculty positions due to the current economic climate.

This Funding Announcement uses the P30 Center Core Grant mechanism. Consequently, the announcement discusses details relating to the mission, administration, and resources of these Core Centers. However, the intent of this announcement is simply as stated above, and does not utilize the type of Core Center with which many applicants may be familiar.

To clarify, there does not have to be an existing "core facility", and it is not necessary to create a "core facility", as typically defined by NIH. For the purposes of this announcement, NIH has defined a Biomedical Core Center "as a community of multidisciplinary researchers focusing on areas of biomedical research relevant to NIH, such as centers, departments, programs, and/or trans-departmental collaborations or consortia". Thus, a department or center or other institutional entity, whether typical or unique, can submit an application to hire new faculty. The new hire(s) should fit within the expertise of the unit doing the hiring, in that intellectual and physical resources should be in place to facilitate their success. Applicants to NINDS can only use these funds to hire faculty whose research directly addresses the NINDS mission.

Additional NINDS-specific guidance can be found at Contacts, Submission Dates and Special Interests/Instructions and at RFA-OD-09-005.

Please feel free to contact Stephen Korn, Ph.D., Director of Training and Career Development, with any questions about this announcement.