Fiscal Year 2009 will not be leaving us with a shortage of topics to discuss. Are you as out of breath as I am? Let's take a minute to review what's been happening and discuss Financial Conflict of Interest policy review and recommendations. Read on to stay on top of this year's changes...

On July 8, President Obama nominated Dr. Francis S. Collins to be Director of the National Institutes fo Health. Dr. Collins, a physician and geneticist, has served as the Director of the National Genome Research Institute, where he led the Human Genome Project to completion. Congress is now considering his nomination.

Review and award of applications which propose the use of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) were delayed pending the issuance of the NIH Guidelines on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research. Now that the Guidelines have been issued, review and award for those applications will take place as follows…

All awardees of ARRA funds, including NIH recipients, are required to file a quarterly report for each project to provide information on the numbers of jobs created or retained, how much of the project is complete, etc. Within a month of submission, these reports will be made available to the public on the Recovery.gov Web site, achieving an unprecedented level of transparency into the ways Federal funds are spent. For more information on what you can do to prepare and how we can help read on…

The National Institutes of Health is grateful for the outstanding services provided by NIH peer reviewers and wishes to minimize disincentives that such service may incur on reviewers’ research pursuits. Therefore, appointed members of chartered standing NIH study sections, NIH Boards of Scientific Counselors, NIH Advisory Boards or Councils, and the NIH Peer Review Advisory Committee may now submit R01, R21, and R34 applications according to alternate or “continuous” submission and review procedures.

In mid July, the NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) and the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) held a workshop to discuss strategies for maximizing core facility use and efficiency and to identify common problems encountered in managing facilities. In today's challenging economy, core facilities can help extramural researchers achieve more through the cost-efficient sharing of expensive "core" resources--cutting edge tools that are otherwise difficult to find or afford.