This Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) highlights the urgent need for social, behavioral, economic, health communication, and epidemiologic research relevant to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and COVID-19. This NOSI encourages urgent competitive supplements and administrative supplements to existing longitudinal studies that address key social and behavioral questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including adherence to and transmission mitigation from various containment and mitigation efforts; social, behavioral, and economic impacts from these containment and mitigation efforts; and downstream health impacts resulting from these social, behavioral, and economic impacts, including differences in risk and resiliency based on gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other social determinants of health.

To rapidly improve our understanding of the critical social and behavioral aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, this NOSI encourages submission of applications for urgent competitive revisions or administrative supplements to active grants studying existing longitudinal cohorts, particularly those cohorts with considerable data relevant to COVID-19 social and behavioral factors prior and subsequent to the SAR-CoV-2 outbreak in various locations. These submissions are encouraged to consider four broad areas:

1. Adherence to or transmission reductions from various public health containment and mitigation efforts including but not limited to risk communication, handwashing, disinfecting surfaces, social distancing, self-quarantine, paid sick leave, school closures, and business closures.
2. Economic, social, and personal well-being impacts of these various containment and mitigation actions (e.g., unemployment, social isolation, stress, mental health, substance use, physical activity).
3. The impacts and behavioral responses to misinformation being communicated about COVID-19 and its prevention, treatment and health effects via a range of information channels, including traditional and social media.
4. Downstream health effects from these economic, social, and personal impacts including but not limited to substance use/abuse, mental illness, suicide, stress-related physical disorders, and limitations on healthcare access.

In addressing any of the four areas of interest it will be necessary to examine natural variation in individual, family, social, geographic, and structural levels of response, adherence, stigma, and impact using foreign and domestic opportunities, focusing on specific sectors of the population (including but not limited to gender, age group, socioeconomic status, geographic region, race/ethnicity, urban/rural, sexual orientation, gender identity). Investigators are strongly encouraged to include a range of groups and include medically underserved regions and vulnerable populations (e.g. pregnant women, the homeless, prison populations, people with disabilities, those in shelters or residential treatment settings) to the degree possible given the characteristics of their existing cohorts.

Applications are encouraged to leverage existing cohorts that present opportunities for quasi-experimental designs, natural experiments, interrupted time series analyses, computational and statistical modeling, and AI approaches. Applications that propose only descriptive pre-post associations are strongly discouraged. Findings from proposals submitted under this NOSI should generate more precise modeling parameters that could lead to increased accuracy and actionable predictions of use in this or future epidemics, examine underlying mechanisms of these interventions and their impacts, and/or leverage the staggered implementation of these interventions and their impacts in various locations (cities, counties, states, countries) for natural experiments controlling for appropriate confounds.

Dear Colleagues:

NSF recently recorded a webinar about the requirement to use an NSF-approved format for both the biographical sketch and current & pending support documents as part of proposals submitted to NSF. The policy, outlined in the NSF Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG) (NSF 20-1), goes into effect for proposals submitted or due, on or after June 1, 2020.  The two NSF-approved formats are SciENcv: Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae, and an NSF Fillable PDF. 

Webinar topics include:

• The policy guidance for preparation of the biographical sketch and current and pending support sections of the proposal
• A walk-through of the user experience in accessing these formats in NSF systems
• Detailed guidance from NIH on using SciENcv for preparing both documents
• Answers to a number of frequently asked questions (FAQs)

For additional information, see the NSF pages for the biographical sketch and current and pending support.  We would like your feedback on these formats prior to the June 1^st requirement. Please provide your comments and questions to policy@nsf.gov. 

Regards,

Jean Feldman

Office of Budget, Finance & Award Management

National Science Foundation

Dear Colleagues:

The Foundation has issued guidance on NSF’s implementation of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Memorandum (M-20-20), entitled, Repurposing Existing Federal Financial Assistance Programs and Awards to Support the Emergency Response to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). NSF remains committed to working with the Administration, other federal agencies, and the research community to effectively respond to the COVID-19 national emergency. This guidance is to implement the flexibility class exception authorized by OMB Memorandum M-20-20 that allows Federal awarding agencies to repurpose their Federal assistance awards (in whole or part) to support the COVID-19 response, as consistent with applicable laws. This will certainly help address questions that recipients may have regarding the donation of items/resources from NSF awards. 

Any questions about the policies described in the NSF Guidance should be directed to policy@nsf.gov. Questions specific to a particular award should be directed to the cognizant NSF Program Officer. NSF is working to update existing FAQs and other resources to reflect NSF’s new guidance and will keep you informed on our website at: nsf.gov/coronavirus.

Jean Feldman

National Science Foundation

Just a reminder that eRA is planning a major undertaking this month, to migrate its modules and data to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud April 17-20 (Fri-Mon).

During this cloud migration, from 8 am ET on Friday, April 17 to 8 pm ET on Monday, April 20, all eRA modules (eRA Commons, ASSIST, IAR, iEdison, etc.) and all informational websites (era.nih.gov, etc.) will be unavailable. 

Any affected due dates will be covered under NIH’s late application policy due to COVID-19, which allows all applications submitted late for due dates between March 9, 2020, and May 1, 2020, to be accepted through May 1, 2020.

Grants.gov will continue processing applications during the migration window.  Applications received via Grants.gov will be put in a queue, and then eRA will process them on Monday night, April 20. The standard 2-day viewing window for successfully submitted applications will be applied.

Note that eRA will be closely monitoring the availability of staff needed to do the migration; please check the eRA Cloud Migration webpage of the eRA website for confirmation of its plans late next week.

Cloud computing provides us with a number of advantages. These include improved security, reliability, and scalability of the system.

As you can imagine, NIH is devoting significant resources to COVID-19. In addition to dedicating regularly appropriated funds, to date NIH has received emergency funding for COVID-19-related activities in two supplemental bills (available from the NIH Office of Budget website), that together provide:

• $1.532 billion for NIAID
• $103.4 million for NHLBI
• $60 million for NIBIB
• $36 million for NCATS
• $30 million for the NIH Office of Director
• $10 million for NIEHS
• $10 million for NLM

To get funding as quickly as possible to the research community, we are using Urgent and Emergency competing revisions and administrative supplements to existing grant awards. This approach allows us to leverage resident expertise, getting additional funding to those researchers who are already working with other organisms, models, or tools so that they can quickly shift focus to the novel coronavirus. These Urgent and Emergency competitive revision Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) allow NIH to fund applications quickly, often in under three months, sometimes much quicker than that, because evaluation for scientific and technical merit is done by an internal review panel convened by staff of the NIH awarding institute or center rather than by our traditional peer review process.

The Urgent and Emergency competing revision FOAs sound very similar. And they are, but there is an important distinction.

• The Emergency Competitive Revision FOA can only be used for funding available for applications based on a presidentially declared disaster under the Stafford Act, a public health emergency declared by the Secretary, HHS, or other local, regional or national disaster. This means that for COVID-19 funding, it can only be used by those NIH Institutes and Centers I listed above that received special emergency funding.
• The Urgent Competitive Revision FOA can be used to meet immediate needs to help address a specific public health crisis in a timely manner. This vehicle is used to help address a specific public health crisis that was unforeseen when the application or progress report was submitted.

When responding to these types of funding opportunities, it is important that you understand how they work.

• They require applications to be submitted in response to an Emergency or Urgent Notice of Special Interest (NOSI). We are maintaining a list of COVID-19 specific Notices of Special Interest on our Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Information for NIH Applicants and Recipients of NIH Funding website.
• You need to read the instructions in the NOSI and in the FOA it points to carefully. If the instructions in the NOSI differ from those in the FOA, follow those in the NOSI.
• There are specific review criteria specified in the FOA. Make sure you address those as well as any that might be mentioned in the NOSI. They are how NIH staff will evaluate your application for funding.
• The NOSI will instruct you to include the NOSI number in the Agency Routing Identifier field (Box 4b) of the SF424 (R&R) Form. This information is very important for NIH tracking of spending of emergency award funding. Applications without this information in Box 4b may not be considered for this type of funding.
• Often the due dates are rolling, meaning you should submit the application as soon as it is ready to get it considered for funding as quickly as possible.

NIH is issuing new COVID-19 related NOSIs frequently. Please check back for these and other COVID-19-related information on our Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Information for NIH Applicants and Recipients of NIH Funding website.

You can learn more about NOSI’s in this quick 5 minute video.