Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide

ISCB News and Announcements

NIH Seeks High Risk, High Impact Proposals through NIH Director’s Pioneer, New Innovator, and Transformative R01 Initiatives


August 31, 2009 - NIH welcomes proposals for 2010 NIH Director's Pioneer Awards and New Innovator Awards. Both programs are part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research http://nihroadmap.nih.gov and support exceptionally creative scientists who take highly innovative, potentially high-impact approaches to major challenges in biomedical or behavioral research.

Pioneer Awards provide up to $2.5 million in direct costs over 5 years and are open to scientists at any career stage. New Innovator Awards provide up to $1.5 million in direct costs over the same period and are for early stage investigators (ESI) who have not received an NIH regular research (R01) or similar NIH grant.

NIH expects to make at least 7 Pioneer Awards and at least 33 New Innovator Awards in September 2010.

To continue its strong record of diversity in these programs, NIH especially encourages women and members of groups that are underrepresented in NIH research to apply.

The deadline for submitting Pioneer Award applications is October 20, 2009. See the instructions in the RFA, (RFA-RM-09-010) and http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/pioneer for more information. Send questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The deadline for submitting New Innovator Award applications is October 27, 2009. See the instructions in the RFA (RFA-RM-09-011) and http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/newinnovator for more information. Send questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..


Transformative R01 Program

The Transformative R01 (T-R01) supports exceptionally innovative, high risk, original and/or unconventional research projects that have the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms.  Please check http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/T-R01 for more information about the program and upcoming funding opportunities.

The NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, launched in 2004, is a series of initiatives designed to address fundamental knowledge gaps, develop transformative tools and technologies, and/or foster innovative approaches to complex problems. Funded through the NIH Common Fund, these programs cut across the missions of individual NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) and are intended to accelerate the translation of research to improvements in public health. Additional information about the NIH Roadmap and Common Fund can be found at www.nihroadmap.nih.gov  http://www.nihroadmap.nih.gov.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) –“The Nation's Medical Research Agency” – includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.
ISMB/ECCB 2009 Live Blog

During the ISMB/ECCB 2009 conference in Stockholm the ISCB, for the first time, facilitated a blogging forum and actively encouraged bloggers to comment on the conference and the scientific program. The blogs were visible on our main portal site, in the detailed program pages and on the hosting server at FriendFeed. The blogging community turned out to be very active and a large number of talks collected numerous comments with a peek of about 230 comments for Prof. Thomas Lengauer's keynote talk.

You can still access the blogs either on the conference website here or on the FriendFeed server here.

The ISCB is very happy that our experiment was taken up so positively and we would like to thank all the bloggers for their input, which was highly  appreciated and contributed significantly to the overall conference experience for bloggers and non-bloggers alike. We certainly plan to repeat this for ISMB 2010 in Boston and have collected some ideas on how to improve and extend the service for ISMB and other ISCB conferences.

ISMB/ECCB 2009 Conference Blogging

Calling all Bloggers!

This year ISCB is paving the way to create a link between the ISMB/ECCB scientific program, ISCB's web portal and our community's bloggers. To accomplish this we have collaborated with last year's core blogger team from ISMB in Toronto (see http://www.ploscompbiol.org/) and are planning the following:
A designated blog tech team will trigger the creation of a new blog on the FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/ismbeccb2009) platform shortly before the start of each talk in the conference schedule. The feed link will be posted into our online program schedule for all subscribers to easily find.

Anyone can then join that feed to participate in real-time blogging of the talk with colleagues that might be seated on the opposite side of the aisle, or the opposite side of the globe! You do not need to be attending ISMB/ECCB in Stockholm to blog along with the rest of them.

By embracing blogging as a valuable conference activity we hope to help speed the dissemination of the science presented in Stockholm.

If you are not already subscribed to FriendFeed and think you might want to participate in this activity, sign up in advance and get ready to jump right into the discussions without delay!

More Articles ...

  1. NIH Public Access Policy Member Poll
  2. ISCB Announces 2009 Award Winners
  3. Participate in ISCB Blogs on Hot Topics for Bioinformaticians
  4. ISCB Members Receive Special Discount to AMIA

ISCB On the Web

FlickrFacebookGoogleTwitterLinkedinYoutube