Sponsor Deadline for Letters of Intent (requested): 30 days in advance of the full proposal deadline

Sponsor Deadlines for Full Proposals: October 15, 2021; June 10, 2022; October 14, 2022; June 9, 2023; October 13, 2023; June 7, 2024

FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: 5 business days prior to submission

Award Information: Application budgets are not limited. The maximum project period is 3 years. NIH intend to commit an estimated total of $4M to fund 4-7 awards. 

This FOA solicits applications to develop informatics tools for analyzing, visualizing, and integrating data related to the BRAIN Initiative or to enhance our understanding of the brain. As part of programs of building the informatics infrastructure for the BRAIN Initiative, the FOA supports several different, but related activities. These include modifying existing analysis and visualization tools to deal with BRAIN Initiative data and integrating different types of BRAIN Initiative datasets. Proposing the development of new tools to deal with BRAIN Initiative data is also permitted. The tools supported under this FOA will make use of relevant data standards and will be built so that they can be integrated into the data repositories, both of which are created in awards under the other FOAs of the BRAIN initiative informatics program. The tools must be user-friendly in accessing and analyzing data from appropriate data archives, and should analyze/visualize data without requiring users to download data. The tools should also allow data to be combined for analysis/visualization from multiple locations.

Sponsor Deadline for Letters of Intent (requested): September 7, 2021

Sponsor Deadline for Full Proposals: October 7, 2021

FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: September 30, 2021

Award Information: Application budgets are limited to $300,000 (direct costs) each year for up to 3 years. NIH intends to commit an estimated total of $4M to fund 8 awards each fiscal year.

This FOA encourages secondary analysis of the large amounts of existing data relevant to the goals of the BRAIN Initiative. The data do not need to be held in one of the funded BRAIN Initiative data archives, but the data must be held in a data archive that is readily accessible to the research community. Support will be provided for innovative analysis of relevant existing datasets using conventional or novel analytic methods, data science techniques, and machine learning approaches. Support may also be requested to prepare and submit existing data into any of the BRAIN Initiative data archives. Investigators should not underestimate the time and effort that may be necessary to curate or harmonize data.

The goal of this FOA is to promote studies that will significantly advance new discoveries and accelerate the pace of research of the BRAIN Initiative through harnessing the big data and machine learning opportunities. Awardees are expected to enhance the value of existing data, improve the overall data integration and analysis capability, and strengthen the statistical power and rigor and reproducibility of BRAIN Initiative related data.