Important Dates
All applicants are asked to provide a brief Statement of Intent prior to submission of a full proposal. Please provide a 2-3 sentence summary of your proposal, which will be used to assist the BBI in the recruitment of external reviewers with the appropriate expertise. Please send the Statement of Intent to bbiumd@umd.edu by Friday, October 7, 2022. Full proposals are due Friday, November 11, 2022.
Full text of BBI 2023 Seed Grant RFP
OVERVIEW
The Brain and Behavior Institute (BBI) at the University of Maryland (UMD) advances neuroscience by fostering collaboration with diverse partner disciplines, developing cutting-edge tools and promoting the translation of basic science.
The BBI seed grant program promotes this mission by cultivating new collaborations among neuroscientists, engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, physical scientists, cognitive scientists and humanities scholars. The program funds innovative collaborative work focused on solving the most pressing problems related to nervous system function in development and aging, and it enables the generation of pilot data to increase competitiveness for external awards. To date, BBI seed grant investments have yielded an over 700% return in funding from government and private organizations, including the NIH BRAIN Initiative, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institute for Mental Health, National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, AT&T, and Lieber Institute for Brain Development.
GUIDELINES FOR PROPOSALS
Proposals should be high-risk, high-impact exploratory research to collect pilot data necessary to compete for external funding from sources that support innovative and interdisciplinary projects, such as the BRAIN Initiative and ARPA-H, or for funding by agencies such as NIH, DARPA, IARPA, NSF, etc. Proposals have a maximum budget of $150,000 for 12 months.
Priority for funding will be given to proposals that make use of one of the BBI’s two new research cores—the Advanced Genomic Technologies Core and the Small Animal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core—and to proposals that target one of the two research foci identified for growth and expansion: aging and development. Aging and development are the two temporal epochs most critical to the acquisition and maintenance of sensation, perception, cognition, mental health and physical health as well as most vulnerable to disruption by changes in the internal or external environment.
PI Eligibility
All proposals must be interdisciplinary with at least two Principal Investigators (PI), both of whom are tenured, tenure-track or professional track faculty at UMD. Having multiple PIs from the same department on the same application is discouraged. Individuals with postdoctoral titles are not eligible to be PIs but can be included in the proposal team. Outside collaborations (UMB, NIH, etc.) are allowed, but a non-UMD investigator cannot be a PI on a proposal, and no money can be awarded to support non-UMD investigators. Individual investigators may participate in up to two proposals, and if two proposals are awarded to one PI, the funding for each proposal will be administered separately.
STATEMENT OF INTENT
In order to assist in the recruitment of external reviewers with appropriate expertise, all proposal teams are asked to provide a brief statement of intent prior to submission of a full proposal. Please send a 2-3 sentence summary of your proposal to bbiumd@umd.edu by Friday, October 7, 2022. Full proposals are due five weeks later on Friday, November 11, 2022.
SUBMISSION PROCESS
Final proposals should contain the following sections (in order):
1. Signed proposal cover sheet (see template)
2. Proposal (not to exceed four pages total)
- Description of the project, including specific subsections for Significance, Innovation and Approach. The impact of the proposed work must be clear to individuals both within and outside of your discipline. The recommended length for this section is two pages.
- How the work fits within the one of the two BBI research foci targeted for growth and expansion, aging and development.
- The necessity of the collaboration to achieve your goals, what each individual brings to the collaborative effort, and the history of collaboration between the PIs, if any.
- The specific target (funding mechanism and submission date) for a forthcoming proposal to an external funding agency. The proposal must describe how the BBI seed grant will enable the submission of your externally funded proposal.
3. Detailed budget and justification (see template)
4. Short bios of the PIs (two pages max per PI; any format)
FORMATTING
All text should be in single-spaced Arial 11-point font with one-inch margins. Please merge all documents into a single pdf named PIsLastName_BBI2023SeedProposal, and submit via the InfoReady portal. Late or incomplete submissions cannot be accepted. Questions regarding this call for proposals should be directed to bbiumd@umd.edu.
SELECTION CRITERIA AND DEADLINES
Seed grants are awarded on a competitive basis. Each proposal will be externally reviewed. Review criteria include: the significance and impact of the proposed experiments, the relevance of the proposed experiments to the BBI research foci of aging and development, the necessity and strength of the collaboration to achieve the proposal goal, and the likelihood of subsequent funding from external sources. Applications from new collaborators and first-time PIs will receive priority over applicants who have received funding before.
Statement of Intent: Friday, October 7, 2022 at 11:59 p.m.
Proposal Deadline: Friday, November 11, 2022 at 11:59 p.m.
Selection Notification Date: Mid-December 2022
