Investigator Initiated Research in Computational Genomics and Data Science (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

Funding Agency:

  • National Institutes of Health
RFP# and Website: 
PAR-21-254
Description: 

Through this FOA, NHGRI seeks to fund innovative research efforts in computational genomics, data science, statistics, and bioinformatics for basic and/or clinical genomic sciences that are broadly applicable to human health and disease. NHGRI also seeks to fund research leading to improvement of existing software or approaches that are in broad use by the genomics community.

The following are examples of the types of research studies that may be appropriate for this FOA; applicants are encouraged to propose creative and innovative research topics that go beyond the examples listed here. Research topics appropriate for this FOA may include development of novel computational, bioinformatics, statistical, or analytical approaches, tools, or software, for:

  • Processing or analyzing new genomic data types

  • Improving efficiency and scalability of compute-intensive genomic applications

  • Interactively analyzing or visualizing large genomic data sets

  • Causal statistical modeling related to genomic research

  • Machine learning and AI methods for genomics, including creating interpretable models

  • Supporting ‘plain language’ genomics queries of literature, data, and knowledge resources

  • Integrating in vitro cellular data and model organism data with human genomic data

  • Integrating and interpreting multiple genomic data types including sequence, functional, phenotypic, clinical, and single-cell or sub-cellular data

  • Processing and integrating genome sequence data to enhance representation of population variation

  • Identifying or prioritizing genetic variants that may be relevant to human disease

  • Enhancing secure sharing and use of genomic data in combination with clinical data

  • Integrating genomic based workflows and frameworks into Electronic Health Records to improve clinical decision support in health IT systems

  • Genomic based computational models and workflows mitigating inherent and pervasive biases that interfere with the meaningful and beneficial use of genomics in clinical care

  • Interfacing between Electronic Health Records, genomic data, and laboratory information systems

NHGRI also invites applications that improve, validate, make robust, or scale existing genomic software and tools (refinement and hardening) to enable reproducible use by the biomedical research community, including:

  • Processing sequence data for sequence assembly, variant detection (SNPs and SVs), imputation, and resolution of haplotypes for both variant interpretation and clinical recommendations

  • Enabling scalable and cost-effective curation of FAIR metadata for genomic and phenotypic data,

  • Significantly improving visualization capabilities of existing software and tools

  • Rigorous benchmarking of tools, methods, or algorithms for genomics

Awards: 

Application budgets are limited to $500,000 in direct costs and need to reflect the actual needs of the proposed project.

Letter of Intent: 
Not required
Full Proposal Submission Deadline: 

Standard dates apply. All applications are due by 5:00 PM local time of applicant organization. All types of non-AIDS applications allowed for this funding opportunity announcement are due on the listed date(s). Applicants are encouraged to apply early to allow adequate time to make any corrections to errors found in the application during the submission process by the due date. No late applications will be accepted for this Funding Opportunity Announcement.

Contacts: 

Daniel Gilchrist, Ph.D., National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), Email: Daniel.Gilchrist@nih.gov