Parent Announcements (For Unsolicited or Investigator-Initiated Applications)

NIH and other agencies serviced by eRA Commons want your investigator-initiated applications. Electronic grant applications must be submitted in response to a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA)**. We have developed Parent announcements for use by applicants who wish to submit what were formerly termed investigator-initiated or ‘unsolicited’ applications. Apply using the electronic application package for your chosen mechanism, listed in the table below. Read More About Parent Announcements. Not all Institutes and Centers participate in all FOAs. Please read announcements carefully to determine participation.

* Alert: NIH is in the process of reissuing all parent announcements. If you intend to apply for a due date of January 25 or beyond, please be sure to use the parent announcement that has a release date of December 2009 or beyond, as marked with a red asterisk. If you don’t see a new announcement for the type of grant application you’re considering – check back, it may be posted soon. See Notice NOT-OD-10-031 for more information.

• Applicants may also want to search RePORTER to find out if projects in their area have been funded by NIH and what NIH Institutes and Centers have shown an interest in their area in the past. This may help narrow their search for a suitable opportunity. RePORTER is part of the Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT), which provides access to reports, data, and analyses of NIH research activities, including information on NIH expenditures and the results of NIH-supported research.
  
  
• Don’t be afraid to contact staff at NIH Institutes/Centers (PDF - 4.5 MB) to discuss your application.

• For information on grants and grants policy: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/oer.htm



• For information on types of grant programs and NIH Activity Codes: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/funding/funding_program.htm

An important procedural change with electronic submission of grant applications is that all applications must be submitted in response to a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA)*. NIH and other HHS Agencies have developed omnibus Parent announcements for use by applicants who wish to submit what were formerly termed "unsolicited" applications. Responding to such an omnibus or umbrella Parent FOA ensures that the correct application package is used and enables NIH to receive the application from Grants.gov. This process in no way diminishes the interest of NIH Institutes and Centers in investigator-initiated, unsolicited research grant applications. Parent announcements are NIH-wide, but some NIH institutes may limit their participation, so check the announcement's statement of interest. For institute-specific opportunities in your area of science, search the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts.

While Parent announcements mark a big change in the way R01s have traditionally been received at NIH and other HHS agencies, Parent announcements are not new to NIH.  NIH has required a Parent announcement for small research grants (R03) and exploratory/developmental grants (R21) for many years. Parent announcements are now also used for conference grants (R13), AREA grants (R15), SBIR grants (R43, R44), STTR grants (R41, R42), Career Development awards (K01, K08, K23, K24, K25 and K99/R00) and Individual Fellowships (F31, F32 and F33), and will be issued for and Institutional Research Training Grants (T32 and T35) in the future. Most NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) participate in these Parent announcements. Parent announcements are not generally available for other highly specialized grant mechanisms (e.g. resource programs, construction grants, or education projects) and thus individual ICs will be issuing specific FOAs.

** Note: FOA is Grants.gov's terminology for what NIH refers to as Program Announcement (PA), Request for Application (RFA), Program Announcement with special receipt, referral and/or review consideration (PAR) and Program Announcement with a set aside (PAS).