Sponsor Deadline for Letters of Intent (requested but not required): 30 days in advance of the full proposal deadline

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

Sponsor Deadlines for Full Proposals: July 1, 2022; October 5, 2022; June 30, 2023; October 4, 2023; June 28, 2024; October 2, 2024

Award Information: The combined budget for direct costs for the two-year project period may not exceed $450,000. No more than $225,000 may be requested in any single year. NIH intends to commit up to $2.5M per year to fund 10 awards.

This R34 FOA solicits applications that offer a limited scope of aims and an approach that will establish feasibility, validity, or other technically qualifying results that, if successful, would support, enable, and/or lay the groundwork for a potential, subsequent Targeted BRAIN Circuits Projects - TargetedBCP R01, as described in the companion FOA below (RFA-NS-22-026). Applications should propose adventurous, exploratory research projects that use innovative, methodologically-integrated approaches to understand how circuit activity gives rise to mental experience and behavior.

Sponsor Deadline for Letters of Intent (requested but not required): 30 days in advance of the full proposal deadline

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

Sponsor Deadlines for Full Proposals: July 1, 2022; October 6, 2022; June 30, 2023; October 4, 2023; June 28, 2024; October 2, 2024

Award Information: Application budgets are not limited. The maximum project period is 5 years. NIH intends to commit up to an estimated total of $15M per year to fund 20 awards.

This FOA solicits applications for research projects that seek to understand how circuit activity gives rise to mental experience and behavior using innovative, methodologically-integrated approaches. The goal is to support adventurous projects that can realize a potentially transformative outcome within five years. Applications are expected to address circuit function in the context of specific behaviors or neural systems, such as sensation, perception, attention, reasoning, intention, decision-making, emotion, navigation, communication, or homeostasis. Projects should link theory, data analysis, and/or computational approaches to experimental design and should produce predictive models (conceptual or quantitative). Projects should aim to improve the understanding of circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating dynamic patterns of neural activity. Diverse species or experimental systems and a cross-species/comparative approach are welcome and should be chosen based on their power to address the specific question at hand and to reveal generalizable and fundamental neuroscience principles.