Substance Use and Abuse, Risky Decision Making and HIV/AIDS (R01) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The NIH grant opportunity "Substance Use and Abuse, Risky Decision Making and HIV/AIDS (R01)" (Funding Opportunity Number PA-14-061) is designed to support rigorous, model-driven research that explains how people make decisions that either increase or reduce their risk of acquiring or transmitting HIV, as well as decisions that affect adherence to HIV treatment. The core idea behind the announcement is that decision-making is not just a matter of knowledge or intentions; it is shaped by cognitive processes (how people think and evaluate options), motivational forces (what they want or prioritize), and emotional states (stress, fear, excitement, craving), all of which can interact with substance use and other contexts that influence HIV-related behaviors. By producing a clearer, mechanistic understanding of how these decisions are made, the NIH aims to lay the groundwork for more effective prevention and intervention strategies that directly target the drivers of risky behavior and treatment noncompliance.

A central emphasis of the FOA is on understanding decision making in relation to brain systems and networks. Applicants are encouraged to investigate the neural circuitry and functional systems that contribute to real-world choices tied to HIV risk, including brain neuroendocrine pathways (for example, systems affected by stress hormones) and reinforcement mechanisms that shape learning, reward, craving, and habit formation. The announcement highlights that decision-making processes can contribute to both substance use/abuse and HIV risk behaviors, meaning the same underlying mechanisms may help explain why individuals engage in drug or alcohol use and also why they might choose behaviors such as unprotected sex, needle sharing, inconsistent prevention practices, or poor adherence to antiretroviral therapy. The expectation is that linking behavioral decision models to underlying biological and neural function can reveal actionable leverage points for reducing HIV risk behaviors.

This FOA specifically calls for R01 projects, which generally implies mature, well-justified research plans with strong preliminary rationale and a focus on empirical, hypothesis-driven, confirmatory work. The announcement is explicit that applications should use solid theory and modeling frameworks rather than purely descriptive studies. Computational modeling approaches are encouraged, along with confirmatory tests of mechanistic hypotheses about how decisions are formed and enacted under different conditions (including the influence of substances, stress, social environments, and contextual cues). In contrast, exploratory or hypothesis-generating work is considered a better fit for related NIH mechanisms such as R21 or R03. Another firm boundary is that animal research is not allowed under this announcement; proposed studies should involve humans and human-relevant methods.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is strongly encouraged. The FOA invites perspectives and methods from psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, decision sciences, neuroscience, and computational modeling, reflecting the view that HIV risk and treatment adherence are shaped by multiple layers of influence. In practice, this can support studies that integrate, for example, behavioral economics measures of risk preference and delay discounting with neuroimaging, psychophysiology, neuroendocrine assessment, or other neuroscience tools, while also accounting for social and cultural factors that affect real-life decision contexts. The overall goal is not simply to document that risky behaviors occur, but to explain why they occur through models that can be tested, refined, and ultimately used to inform interventions.

From an administrative standpoint, this is a discretionary NIH grant opportunity in the health and education activity category, associated with CFDA numbers 93.273 (Alcohol Research Programs) and 93.279 (Drug Abuse and Addiction Research Programs). There is no cost sharing or matching requirement. The FOA was posted on January 7, 2014, and the original and final closing date listed is May 7, 2017, with an archive date of June 7, 2017, meaning it functioned as an active opportunity during that period and is now archived as a historical announcement.

Eligibility is broad and includes many types of organizations. Eligible applicants include state, county, city or township governments; special district governments; federally recognized Native American tribal governments and other tribal organizations; public and state-controlled institutions of higher education; private institutions of higher education; independent school districts; public housing authorities and Indian housing authorities; nonprofits with or without 501(c)(3) status (excluding higher education institutions in that specific clause); small businesses; and other for-profit organizations (with small businesses separately listed). The FOA also explicitly welcomes a range of additional applicants such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving institutions, Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs), Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian serving institutions, and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions (AANAPISIs), as well as faith-based and community-based organizations where appropriate. Importantly, non-U.S. entities are eligible to apply, including foreign organizations and foreign institutions, and non-U.S. components of U.S. organizations are also eligible; foreign components are allowed under NIH policy definitions.

In practical terms, a competitive application under this announcement would be expected to present a clearly articulated decision-making model connected to HIV risk or HIV treatment adherence, specify testable hypotheses, and describe rigorous methods for measuring decision processes and their cognitive, motivational, emotional, and neurobiological correlates. The endgame is translational in the sense of informing better strategies to reduce HIV risk and improve treatment adherence, but the pathway emphasized here runs through mechanism: explaining decision making well enough that interventions can be designed to target the real drivers of behavior rather than relying solely on information provision or broad, non-specific behavior change approaches.

The full announcement was hosted by NIH at the listed link (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-14-061.html). For access issues or linking problems, the contact provided is the NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER) webmaster at FBOWebmaster@OD.NIH.GOV.

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