Inter-Institutional Pilot Project Awards

The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences’ (NCATS) Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) program seeks to develop and implement innovative solutions that will improve the efficiency, quality, and impact of the process for turning observations in the laboratory, clinic, and community into interventions that improve the health of individuals and communities.

The CTSA program supports a national network of medical research institutions that work together to speed the translation of research discovery into improved patient care. Eight CTSA institutions have joined together to form the Consortium of Rural States (CORES): The University of Utah Health, the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Frontiers Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the University of Kentucky, the Translational Research Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the University of Iowa, Dartmouth University, and Penn State University.

The purpose of this request for applications (RFA) is to promote multi-institutional collaboration across the CTSA consortium by funding innovative translational science research projects that involve two or more of these seven CTSA institutions. This pilot program is soliciting applications from faculty members at all career levels for translational science pilot projects that will exemplify the CTSA mission of “understanding a scientific or operational principle underlying a step of the translational process with the goal of developing generalizable principles to accelerate translational research.”

CORES Pilot Focus Areas

The CORES Inter‐Institutional Pilot Program will fund translational science projects aiming to identify and overcome barriers to the performance of translational research.

Pilots should articulate a clear translational research barrier(s) and propose an innovative plan to overcome or ameliorate the barrier (i.e., a translational science innovation). The proposed innovations should be broadly generalizable to many different translational research questions, and not specific to any one project or disease. Proposed projects should align with one of the following project scopes:

In accordance with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) strategic plan and its commitment to increasing representation in research, funding emphasis for this RFA will be given to translational science proposals that address one of the following:

• Climate Change and Environmental Health
• Rural Health
• Maternal Health
• Health Equity for Underrepresented Populations
  • For example, pediatric populations, older adults, people with disabilities and/or rare disorders, underrepresented racial/ethnic and/or sexual and gender minorities, rural populations or populations with low socio-economic status. Click here for more details.

Full Request for Applications can be found here. 

At least two of the participating CTSAs must be collaborating on the same application.

Principal Investigators (PI) for these awards must be members of a participating institution’s faculty (junior or senior investigators - all title series including regular, research, clinical and special).

The collaborating PIs must complete one application with separate budgets, one budget for each participating institution.

Successful projects will exemplify NCATS’ and the CORES Multi‐Institutional Pilot Program missions as described above.

Projects must be approved at each participating CTSA to qualify for funding.

Purely non-human animal research does not qualify for funding under this program.

All questions regarding eligibility and application submissions should be directed to Robin Liston, MPH, Project Director.