Pilot and Feasibility Program

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Project Summary The Harvard NORC-H has had a thriving P&F Program for 20 years. Over the last 10 years, the Center has funded 58 grants. These applicants were from highly promising junior investigators, a large percentage of whom were K funded, as well as a limited number of established investigators or new senior investigators proposing a new direction of research. The research projects were often clinical and translational commensurate with the themes of the Center. These awardees have significantly leveraged the awarded P&F funding totaling approximately $1,200,000, generating over $49,000,000 in subsequent NIH funds, including a significant number of R01 grants. These P&F grants have been successful in helping us to achieve our goals of promoting, retaining and promoting successful young faculty to nutrition and obesity research. In fact many of the awardees are now Center investigators and mentoring their own junior faculty. The overarching goal of the Center is to facilitate and catalyze research in nutrition and obesity at Harvard, with a particular focus on translational research, by supporting the exploration of innovative projects by new investigators, novel projects representing a new direction in obesity and nutrition research by established investigators, and to stimulate new investigators from other areas of research to engage in obesity and nutrition research, and to promote and retain these investigators in the field. Our goals are to promote novel cutting edge research in nutrition and obesity, while promoting a new generation of researchers interested and retained in the field, to promote the engagement of a wide spectrum of the research community, through comprehensive peer review of submitted proposals, active monitoring of results and publications, and enrichment, through organized symposia highlighting the work of the successful grantees and engaging these researchers in successful collaborations, to facilitate the success of our grantees grants through: 1) the use of shared core resources, made uniquely accessible to grantees through an incentives and a weighed system of charge back subsidies to P&F winners 2) provision of consultations in model development for specific experimental strategies, and 3) specific statistical support to P&F applicants and ongoing support to awardees to facilitate optimal study design.