NIMHD Financial Management Plan for Grant Awards

The NIMHD Appropriation for FY 2021 is $391,586,000 which represents an almost 17% increase above the previous fiscal year’s appropriated budget. The appropriated funds dedicate $45,000,000 toward a legislated program for chronic diseases health disparities and an additional $5,000,000 for the RCMI program.

NIMHD does not have a strict pay line and takes several factors into consideration when funding decisions are made. These include:

• Scientific and technical merit of the proposed project, as determined by scientific peer review in the context of NIMHD priorities and areas of funding.
• National Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NACMHD) recommendations.
• Overall programmatic portfolio balance and need such as scientific gaps and needs, areas of special interest to the NIMHD, underrepresented scientific areas in NIMHD’s portfolio, and overlap with existing programs.
• Development and diversity of biomedical workforce that supports the NIH Next Generation Researchers Initiative (NGRI) NIH Next Generation Researcher’s Initiative (NGRI) and promotes researchers from underrepresented groups as a program priority.
• Potential for highly innovative scientific impact in advancing the science of minority health and health disparities.

To maximize available resources for new research grants, NIMHD competing R01 awards for established investigators will be subject to programmatic adjustments from the Initial Review Group (IRG) and NACMHD recommended levels. These adjustments will take into consideration the overall scientific and technical merit of the grant application, comments in the summary statement, the cost of the proposed research, other resources available for related research projects, and program priorities. NIMHD will reduce R01 competing awards for established investigators in FY 2021 by an average of up to 15% within the general allocation based on review of individual applications.

Consistent with the NIH NGRI, NIMHD seeks to encourage the stable integration of early stage investigators (ESIs) into the scientific research workforce. In support of this, NIMHD competing R01 awards for ESIs in FY 2021 will generally be funded at 100% of the IRG and NACMHD recommended levels.

NIMHD will generally fund non-competing continuation awards (Type 5s) in FY 2021 at the full committed levels.

Page updated April 9, 2021