2009 NIH Directors New Innovator Award Program (DP2) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The 2009 NIH Directors New Innovator Award Program (DP2), announced by the National Institutes of Health under Funding Opportunity Number RFA-RM-09-003, is a discretionary grant competition designed to identify and back a small group of unusually creative early-career scientists with ideas that are both bold and highly innovative. The central goal of the program is to accelerate novel research approaches that could reshape thinking or practice in biomedical and behavioral research, especially when the proposed work targets broad and important scientific problems and carries the potential for major impact. The New Innovator Award was originally created in 2007 as part of the NIH Directors efforts to stimulate high-risk, high-reward science, and it is positioned as a complement to NIHs traditional support for new investigators through R01 awards, not a replacement for them. In other words, NIH is using DP2 to create room for unusually original concepts that might not fit neatly into more conventional mechanisms, while still maintaining the R01 as the main pathway for most new investigators.

For fiscal year 2009, the competition is explicitly structured as a two-phase process. The first phase is a pre-application stage that was solicited under a separate announcement, PAR-09-013. Those pre-applications are reviewed by external reviewers, and only the strongest submissions are invited to move forward. The second phase, governed by this FOA (RFA-RM-09-003), is the full application stage, and the final set of 2009 New Innovator Awardees is chosen from among the invited applicants. A practical implication of this design is that investigators cannot simply submit a full application from scratch; they must first have participated in the pre-application competition and received an invitation to submit the full DP2 application. NIH also notes that applicants should read both announcements because the pre-application and full-application steps are linked and jointly define the overall requirements and expectations.

This funding opportunity uses the DP2 grant mechanism, which is specific to the New Innovator Award. While the text provided does not break down yearly budgets per award, it clearly states the scale of the overall investment: NIH expects to commit approximately $55.7 million in total funding across a five-year period for the cohort of awards made under this cycle. NIH anticipates making up to 24 awards in 2009, meaning the program is intentionally selective and aimed at a limited number of projects rather than broad distribution across many smaller grants. There is no cost sharing or matching requirement, which reduces barriers for applicants and signals that NIH intends to shoulder the full funding responsibility associated with the supported projects.

Eligibility is broad and covers a wide range of organizational types that can serve as applicant institutions. Eligible applicants include public and state-controlled institutions of higher education, private institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations (including 501(c)(3) and certain non-501(c)(3) nonprofits), small businesses, and for-profit organizations other than small businesses. Governmental entities are also included, such as state governments, federally recognized Native American tribal governments, and U.S. territories or possessions, as well as Native American tribal organizations that are not federally recognized. The opportunity also explicitly includes several categories of institutions and organizations often highlighted in federal research programs, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving institutions, Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs), Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions, faith-based or community-based organizations, regional organizations, and eligible agencies of the federal government. As with most NIH programs, institutional eligibility is only one part of the picture; the award is fundamentally intended for "new investigators," and the defining emphasis is on exceptional creativity and the promise of transformative, innovative research rather than incremental extensions of established work.

Key administrative details anchor the timeline and identity of the opportunity. The FOA was posted on October 27, 2008, with an original and current closing date of May 27, 2009, and an archive date of June 27, 2009. It is categorized under Health as the funding activity area and is associated with CFDA number 93.310 (Trans-NIH Research Support). The official full announcement is hosted by NIH at the link provided in the notice (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-RM-09-003.html). For technical issues accessing the announcement, NIH points applicants to the NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) webmaster contact (FBOWebmaster@OD.NIH.GOV), reflecting that support for access and linking problems is handled centrally.

Taken together, the 2009 DP2 New Innovator Award opportunity is best understood as a highly competitive, two-step NIH Directors initiative that concentrates substantial, multi-year resources on a small number of early-career investigators whose ideas are unusually daring and innovative, with the explicit aim of generating outsized impact on important biomedical and behavioral research challenges.

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Next opportunity: 2009 NIH Directors Pioneer Award Program (DP1)

Previous opportunity: Midwest Region Challenge Cost Share Grants

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