Collaborative Opportunities for Multidisciplinary, Bold, and Innovative Neuroscience (COMBINE) (RM1 Clinical Trial Optional)
Funding Agency:
- National Institutes of Health
A team science approach expands our ability to pursue challenging problems in neuroscience research in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, rigorous, and mechanistic manner. This Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) encourages ambitious interdisciplinary team efforts to overcome basic, translational, and clinical research challenges within the NINDS mission.
A successful application to the COMBINE program will have a single, focused goal, require team-based integration of distinct disciplines and/or viewpoints, and deliver a transformative outcome within 5 years. This NOFO will support interdisciplinary teams that seek to cross technical and conceptual boundaries through interdisciplinary collaboration to achieve a single, focused, and transformative goal. The research goal must be well-defined and sufficiently focused so that meaningful outcomes can be accomplished within 5 years. It should also be of sufficient scope and complexity that it can only be achieved through an integrative team effort and not by individual, parallel, or series of efforts. All contributions by each team member and pieces of the experimental plan are expected to be synergistic, integrated, and essential to the goal.
The list below includes representative, but not exhaustive, examples of interdisciplinary opportunities:
- A goal that challenges existing paradigms, overcomes long-standing roadblocks to progress, and/or develops new synergies between different scientific fields
- Basic, translational, and/or clinical collaborations with a goal of reaching a significantly higher mechanistic understanding of nervous system function and/or dysfunction
- Challenges in understanding and targeting disease modifying therapies that require collaborations across basic, translational, and/or clinical disciplines
- Scientific efforts requiring integration of previously siloed and/or disparate areas of scientific or technical expertise
- A scientific question that requires leveraging an innovative combination of tools and approaches, or the application of cutting-edge tools, resources, conceptual, or computational frameworks (such as those arising from the BRAIN initiative)
- Challenges that necessitate bridging across species, scales and disciplines (e.g., to reveal shared/generalizable and/or unique neural processes)
Application budgets need to reflect the actual needs of the proposed project. It is anticipated that most awards will be between $500,000-$1.5M direct costs.
October 20, 2023
For inquiries related to a specific neuroscience topic, contact the relevant NINDS Program Official.