Pilot--Project Program

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GOALS AND SUMMARY OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS The EHSRC has now funded 98 pilot grants over the past 15 years. The Pilot Grant Program has been a highly valued component of the EHSRC, serving both the research, career development and training missions of the Center. It has helped advance the careers of talented junior investigators by bringing them into environmental health research. It has fostered innovation and nurtured novel ideas fueling further grant support and publication. The EHSRC will devote more than $250,000 per year to the pilot grant program with $200,000 from Center funds and $60,000 - $90,000 per year of matching funds from the Vice President for Research. Dr. Peter S. Thorne, Center Director directed the program until 2003, at which time Dr. Larry Robertson became the director of the Pilot Grant Program in the last grant cycle of the EHSRC. The Goals of the EHSRC Pilot Grant Program are to: ¿ Provide initial support for junior investigators to establish new lines of environmental health research ¿ Provide services of state-of-the-art facility cores to pilot grant investigators to enhance their research ¿ Facilitate exploration of innovative new directions in environmental health for established investigators ¿ Stimulate investigators from other disciplines to apply their expertise to environmental health research ¿ Foster new interdisciplinary collaborations through awarding of pilot projects to investigators that have not previously worked together The objective measures of the success of the program are: Grants and contracts developed as progeny of pilot grants Manuscripts emanating from the pilot grant support Students mentored and M.S. theses and Ph.D. dissertations generated through pilot grant support Post-doctoral fellows mentored in research and grantsmanship through the Pilot Grant Program New interdisciplinary collaborations established as a result of the program The pilot grant program has been extremely successful in meeting these objectives. As shown in Table 10.1, the EHSRC has funded 98 pilot grants since it was inaugurated in 1990. There have been 83 projects funded through the Research Pilot Grant Program and15 through the International Pilot Grant Program that was initiated in 1997. Table 10.1 provides data demonstrating the success rate for pilot grant submissions. The Pilot Grant Program has funded 55% of the Research Pilot Grant applications and 54% of the International Pilot Grant applications. Nearly all funded pilot grants have been projects involving junior investigators and the majority of awards have gone to projects with junior principal investigators. Junior investigators include assistant professors, faculty associates, and postdoctoral fellows. Uncharacteristically, there were no pilot grant applications submitted to the International Pilot Grant Program in Rounds 18-20. This was discussed among the Executive Committee with Dr. Tom Cook, the Director of International Outreach. Three reasons were suggested: 1) in those years the international trainees that were hosted through our Fogarty-funded Center for International Rural and Environmental Health (CIREH) were focused on areas less well aligned with the focus of the EHSRC; 2) as Central European countries have joined the European Union our trainees have increasingly been drawn from Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa and are less prepared to compete for research grants; and 3) One international pilot grant competed successfully in the regular Research Pilot Grant pool. We will continue to encourage applications from trainees and their mentors and will seek to better publicize the International Program. We will also re-evaluate the program after the next round of awards are made to determine the viability of the International Pilot Grant Program