FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic is an imminent public health emergency.  Successful management, containment and recovery from this virus requires efforts at all levels of society.  CTSI will help University of Pittsburgh investigators to develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic by awarding grants for up to $50,000 in funding. Our intent is to support new research initiatives that will make immediate progress towards reducing the harm to individuals, groups, and society from COVID-19.

Are you developing an idea for a research project that uses predictive or computational modeling to improve knowledge of health, medicine, and disease? You may be eligible for funding through CTSI’s Biomedical Modeling Pilot Awards. These awards provide pilot funding of up to $25,000 for transdisciplinary collaborations that unite quantitative modeling with clinical and translational research. Applications are now being accepted. Submit your proposal before midnight on Tuesday, December 1, 2020.

CRISP (CTSI’s Research Initiative for Special Populations) is a funding opportunity sponsored by CTSI’s Integrating Special Populations (ISP) Core. CRISP offers funding of up to $25,000 to support research initiatives that work with groups that are frequently underrepresented in research. The principal investigator (PI) must be a faculty member at Pitt.

For the 2019 funding cycle, additional bonus funding of $5,000 may be awarded for applications that demonstrate a meaningful partnership with a community organization representing the special population of interest designated in the proposal.

The REAL (REsearch Across the Lifespan) pilot awards are sponsored by the Special Populations Core of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). This funding opportunity is designed to encourage new research addressing how biological processes, clinical problems, response to therapy, or other health-relevant phenomena change or evolve during the human lifespan. To be responsive to this opportunity, projects must include or compare two or more of the following groups: fetuses, infants, children, adolescents, young adults, middle-age adults, and older adults.

For the 2018/2019 cycle of REAL, submission that include an epigenomic component will be eligible to receive an additional $5,000 bonus award (up to $30,000 total).

The Quantitative Methodologies Pilot Program (QuMP) is a funding opportunity that supports interdisciplinary, translational research involving quantitative methodologies, such as mathematical modeling, statistics, biostatistics, and epidemiology. The QuMP Program specifically aims to encourage and support novel applications of quantitative methodologies, either through the novel use of existing methodologies or through the development of entirely new quantitative methodologies. Projects funded by the program are expected to involve trans-disciplinary collaborations between translational investigators and quantitative scientists.

The Pitt Innovation Challenge (PInCh^®) is seeking your bold solution to an important health problem. 

The CTSI created the PInCh program in order to stimulate the translation of novel problem-focused research into the community by giving researchers a venue to be creative, develop new ideas, and work with people beyond their usual sphere of collaborators.

The Virginia Kaufman Pain Research Challenge is a funding opportunity for ideas and solutions associated with both physiological and psychological pain. Research solutions can address the dynamics of pain, causes and alleviation of pain, and treatment to prevent and/or mitigate pain. Solutions should address a specific problem in the area(s) of pain including mechanism, treatments, modalities, and impacts of acute and chronic pain. 

The WORDOUT Community Research Dissemination Challenge is an exciting opportunity for community organizations to offer ideas for getting the “word out” about the latest in research dissemination. The 2019 cycle of WORDOUT matches researchers at the University of Pittsburgh with community organizations to think about creative ways to disseminate research.

SPIRiT, the Sharing Partnership for Innovative Research in Translation, is pleased to announce a new funding program that supports pilot research projects representing collaborations between investigators from at least two of the SPIRiT sites. The SPIRiT Consortium members supporting this program include Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, Washington University in St. Louis, and Yale University – all members of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program. The investigator(s) from each of the participating sites must have a significant, defined role in the research project. Although the participating investigators may have collaborated in the past, the research project proposed must be novel and not part of an ongoing project. In other words, the proposed research must represent a new collaboration between investigators from at least two (2) SPIRiT sites OR a new project conducted by existing collaborators from at least two (2) SPIRiT sites. Proposed projects may address any aspect of clinical and translational science.

The CTSI Innovation Core is currently offering campus investigators the opportunity to participate in a unique professional development program aimed at providing biomedical researchers with foundational skills in the discipline of Human-Centered Design. This opportunity is for early career investigators at the University of Pittsburgh  working at all stages of the translational spectrum. 

This pilot funding opportunity is seeking applications for research projects that explore how patient location relative to providers of healthcare interacts with health and health care delivery.  Individuals live at varying distances from medical facilities, and these distances may alter the manner by which patients access resources.  Likewise, providers face challenges delivering services to patients in remote locations.  Understanding the impact of location on health and developing new ways to improve delivery of services to patients remote from medical facilities may impact the health of diverse populations.

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) wishes for University of Pittsburgh investigators to identify potential disparities and to develop solutions to reduce any disparities in delivery of COVID-19 vaccines and/or therapeutics. To help this effort, CTSI will award a small number of grants for up to $25,000 in funding to reduce disparities in COVID-19 vaccination and/or therapeutics.   

These pilot awards will support new or ongoing research that focuses on using dissemination and implementation research methods to support the adoption, implementation or maintenance of an evidence-based practice or program. Proposed research may be at earlier stages along the translational continuum if the focus is on designing or developing innovations with D&I in mind.

Investigators are also encouraged to consider their work in the context of health equity (e.g., including equity as an implementation outcome or metric; or focusing on expanding healthcare access for vulnerable populations).

CTSI includes in its mission a goal to increase the development and dissemination of skills throughout the University’s research workforce. To address this, we are offering Pilot Awards for investigators to incorporate into their research the use of existing data resources of a type that they have never used before. Examples of existing data resources include “-omics” data, large national databases, physical science databases, biorepositories, public records, marketing databases, and social media. This Pilot Award should stimulate exploration, novel analyses, or novel applications of the many biorepositories and data collections that are already available or develop new skills for the principal investigator and team.

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) at the University of Pittsburgh seek applications for the Public Health Trans-Disciplinary Collaboration Pilot Awards. Applicants can request up to $40,000 in direct costs, with a maximum funding period of one year. The goal of this program is to establish and strengthen collaborations between GSPH and School of Medicine (SOM) faculty members. Priority areas for these awards are climate change and health, and precision public health.  

The Willingness to Participate (W2P) Pilot award will support research on how people choose to participate in research. The W2P Pilot awards will go to support projects that help increase understanding of research receptivity and engagement of the general public or specific populations, as well as to projects that test solutions to increase receptivity and engagement. Responsive applications will provide insight and knowledge into specific barriers or facilitators of participant recruitment and retention for a research field. 

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at the University of Pittsburgh in partnership with the office of the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of UPMC seek applications for the Commercialization-Innovations Pilot Awards. These awards are part of a series of funding opportunities to stimulate research for which implementation may involve inventions or commercialization.

CTSI’s Implementation Lab aims to connect researchers with health care leaders and policymakers to implement partner-defined priority evidence-based practices. These unique pilots are designed to support investigators interested in partnering with either the UPMC CHP Primary Care Center, UPMC Children’s Community Pediatrics Group (CCP) or Wolff Center to improve the implementation of evidence-based practices and programs.

The goal of the SSIH Pilot Award is to co-create research in collaboration with communities and/or community-based organizations that amplify community priorities and expertise. The structure of this award will include support from the CTSI Community PARTners Core, and we intend that built-in support will encourage applications from investigators who may not have prior experience with community-partnered methodology.

The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic had been a public health emergency which is evolving in how it impacts people.  While we now enjoy robust vaccines, disease surveillance, and clinical care models for acute COVID-19 to help manage the pandemic, “Long COVID” remains a challenge. The Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) will help the University of Pittsburgh investigators to develop novel solutions to challenges posed by Long COVID-19 by awarding grants for up to $20,000 in funding. Our intent is to support new research initiatives that will make progress towards addressing the subset of COVID patients who suffer persistent effects of COVID‑19 infection.

The overall goal of this program is to create, mentor, and support mid-career scholars from SHS to lead high impact inter-professional teams that address society’s most pressing health-related challenges. Awards of $150,000 across two years will support the creation of teams of scholars comprising faculty from at least three of the SHS (Dental, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Public Health). Projects should propose a compelling approach for addressing scientific or health challenges requiring broad expertise from across the health sciences.

The goal of this program is to enhance collaboration between faculty members in SSoE and those in the six Schools of the Health Sciences (SHS) – i.e., the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, Pharmacy, Dental Medicine, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, and Nursing. The financial support will be utilized to establish or expand trans-disciplinary collaborations that will ultimately lead to the submission of collaborative external grant applications in the areas of human health and medicine.