Planning for Maximizing Investigators ’ Research Award (MIRA) Renewals

As we work on issuing a new funding opportunity announcement (FOA) for the established investigator (EI) MIRA program, we thought it would be useful to address a few common questions we’ve been hearing. The new FOA will allow applications from NIGMS grantees who have one or more single-Principal Investigator (PI) R01-equivalent awards, just as the current FOA does. In addition, the new FOA (to be published by Fall 2019) will allow renewal applications from PIs who already have MIRA grants. One key goal of the MIRA program is to increase funding stability for researchers. This was accomplished in part by making the awards a year longer than are typical of NIGMS R01s for established investigators. In addition, we intend to ensure that the success rate for MIRA renewals will be higher than for R01 renewals and will be at least as high as the success rate for new EI MIRA applications, which is currently more than 50%. Another approach to increasing the stability of funding is to change the funding decision paradigm for renewal applications away from being necessarily yes or no. Instead, the Institute can modulate a PI’s budget downward rather than not funding the renewal application at all. This approach can be used for MIRA renewal applications that are deemed meritorious but not as strong as would have been expected based on the previous budget or other factors. In such cases, the application could be funded for the full 5 years but at the new, lower level, allo...
Source: NIGMS Feedback Loop Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - Category: Biomedical Science Authors: Tags: Director’s Messages Funding Trends Research Administration Early Stage Investigator Established Investigator Funding Policies MIRA R01 Source Type: blogs