Pilot Project Program

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SUMMARY – PILOT PROJECT PROGRAM (PPP) The goal of the Pilot Project Program (PPP) of the Center for Environmental Health and Justice in Northern Manhattan (CEHJNM) is to provide seed funding and intellectual support to outstanding new research ideas from existing members and potential new members. The PPP provides funding for research (≤$35K for full pilot projects and ≤$10K for mini-pilots), access to CEHJNM state-of-the-art facility cores (FCs), and research design, grant preparation, and intellectual support. The PPP specifically promotes projects that interact with our local communities. We prioritize applications from (a) early-career faculty; (b) teams led by and/or including scientists in key roles from groups historically underrepresented in science and academia; (c) faculty who are not yet CEHJNM members. Funding advances our understanding of the health impacts of environmental exposures with a focus on CEHJNM’s five scientific directions: Environmental Justice, Advancing the Exposome, Environmental Data Science, Biological and Molecular Mechanisms, and Climate and Health. In addition to supporting CEHJNM’s current directions, the PPP also encourages the development of research outside of those directions as a way to develop novel areas of focus. Over the lifetime of the CEHJNM, the PPP has been an extraordinary success. Between 2013 and 2021, the PPP received 115 pilot proposals, of which 52 were funded. PPP awardees included investigators from 19 different departments across Columbia University (CU), thus fostering the development of new interdisciplinary collaboration and the expansion of the CEHJNM community. More importantly, the PPP seeded novel ideas that significantly advanced the impact of CEHJNM’s research. Innovations for this funding cycle include a new funding mechanism, a change in leadership, and new review criteria to promote diversity. We will introduce a new category of full-pilot awards, the Cross-Disciplinary Linked Pilots (Linked Pilots) soliciting two coordinated pilot applications (≤$35K each) linking a mechanistic pilot to a human study. The PPP leadership now includes a population scientist (Factor-Litvak) and a laboratory scientist (Re) to help support a full range of applications. We will also modify our scoring criteria to formally include the diversity of the applicant team in the review process. The aims of the PPP are to: Aim 1. Foster innovative environmental health research that fills critical translational gaps and fosters CEHJNM’s current and future research directions. Aim 2. Support early-career faculty members, particularly those identifying with groups historically underrepresented in science and academia, to develop creative, novel research projects. Aim 3. Attract faculty members from the CU community with diverse backgrounds and expertise. Aim 4. Facilitate research on crucial environmental health questions and concerns identified through multidirectional communications with community groups and stakeholders.