Submitting a proposal soon? Please follow our new streamlined pre-award process

The Research: Administration and Development (RAD) team is excited to introduce the UCI BioSci Grant Proposal Form starting February 1, 2022! The RAD team will use this form to efficiently collect all the necessary information for grant proposal submissions in order to provide support to faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and researchers in BioSci. The form takes 3-5 minutes to complete. Once the form is submitted, a copy of the responses will be sent to the email address listed on the form, and the RAD team will add your request to our proposal queue.

To initiate the pre-award process for a proposal submission in BioSci, please fill out this Google Form: https://bit.ly/ucibioscigrants.

Completing this form ensures that the RAD team has the necessary information to help you submit your proposal to the sponsor. For any questions or concerns, please contact bio-research@uci.edu.

Use this tool to find collaborators and communicate your research

UCI Profiles lets you search for collaborators based on a specific research topic, look at a researcher’s collaborator network, and learn about a researcher’s grants, publications, and clinical trials. You can also use UCI Profiles to communicate your research to potential mentees and collaborators.

Setting up your profile is easy after logging in. Add a photo and research blurb, and verify your current listing of publications. The system will use machine learning to automatically update your profile. You can also link to your lab website, videos, and Twitter feeds.

You can see an example profile on UCSF Profiles. Please contact bio-som-profiles@uci.edu with any questions.

Please welcome Lorena Andrade, BioSci’s new EHS coordinator!

It is our pleasure to announce Lorena Andrade as the new Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) coordinator for the School of Biological Sciences. She started in this position on December 13, 2021. As liaisons between the academic schools and UCI EHS, the coordinators identify and report unsafe conditions, provide compliance assistance, and clarify regulatory requirements.

Lorena has a bachelor’s degree in animal science from Cal Poly Pomona and has served in the EHS office for the past 11 years as the vivaria safety officer and biosafety specialist. In these roles, she worked closely with the Office of Research and assisted researchers with safety compliance based on their IACUC and IBC protocols. Prior to EHS, Lorena was a research laboratory manager in the School of Medicine for 4 years.

Lorena is located in Natural Sciences I, Room 1212. Her extension is x4-2041. Lorena is looking forward to visiting the different departments to introduce herself. Please join us in welcoming Lorena to the BioSci team!

Attend and present your research at the UCI Conte Center's 9th Annual Symposium

The UCI Conte Center is hosting its 9th Annual Symposium titled Early-Life Adversity: From Reality to Research and Back on March 23, 2022 from 9AM to 3PM. The keynote speaker is Nadine Burke Harris, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.A.P., California's first Surgeon General. Please register to attend the symposium by February 28, 2022.

Faculty, postdocs, and graduate students are also invited to present a poster at the symposium. Everyone with a poster will give a 2-minute in-person presentation. The three best posters will each win a $100 gift card. Please email your abstracts and questions to James Weinstock by February 28, 2022.

February

Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Seminar

Dr. Nikolajczyk is Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Nutritional Science at the University of Kentucky.

Room 1114 Natural Sciences I

March

BioSci DEI Speaker Series

Dr. King is a Practitioner-Researcher at the Hope Center for Community, College, and Justice. In her work, she supports the empowerment of colleges and universities seeking to advance their basic needs resources and programming for student success.

Room 1114 Natural Sciences I

Federal agencies are likely restricting grant funding levels and the release of funding announcements while they wait for the 2022 budget to pass through Congress.

The U.S. government has not yet passed a budget for its 2022 fiscal year (Oct 1 to Sept 30). When Congress doesn’t pass a budget, the government either shuts down or operates under a continuing resolution (CR). The 2nd CR for this fiscal year will end Feb 18, and a 3rd CR is under discussion that would keep the government open until Mar 11. If the 3rd CR passes, we will be about half-way through the government’s fiscal year with no budget. While federal agencies may restrict a program officer’s ability to spend money during a CR, after the budget passes, program officers will look for ways to spend their 2022 budget before the fiscal year ends on Sept 30. Pending grants and delayed notices of award will be processed, and funding mechanisms with quick turnaround times (such as NSF’s RAPID, EAGER, planning and conference grants) may be used to spend budgets.

Thinking about applying to the NSF CAREER Program? UCI has a new workshop to help

Directors of Research Development from four UCI schools will host a 3-session virtual workshop to help faculty write competitive NSF CAREER proposals. The next CAREER program due date is July 25, 2022.

Interested BioSci faculty are invited to view agendas and register for the workshop sessions by clicking on the links below:

• Session 1: February 18 (3pm to 4:15pm) - Proposal Tips and Awardee Panel Discussion
• Session 2: March 4 (3pm to 4:15pm) - Education Plan, Evaluation, and Broader Impacts
• Session 3: March 11 (3pm to 4:15pm) - Budget, Data Management, and Other Requirements

NSF DEB Virtual Office Hour: How to Write a Great Review

Program Officers from NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) will discuss how to write a great review and answer NSF-related questions. This office hour is on Monday, February 14, 2022 at 10AM PT. You can register here to attend and check out upcoming office hour topics.

ICTS Call for Planning Grants

The Institute for Clinical & Translational Science (ICTS) is accepting applications for planning grant proposals. These proposals will be part of ICTS’s suite of applications for the next competitive submission to the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program in May 2023. To help prepare a competitive application and develop evidence of team collaboration and preliminary data, the planning grant awards will include a $50,000 stipend.

Please click on the link above to read more about the planning grant application requirements. There, you can also read about the three types of CTSA funding opportunities (each ~$300-500k annually, direct costs for 3-5 years). These opportunities support translational science research that highlights UCI’s (and partners’) strengths and that advances the CTSA vision as outlined by NIH NCATS.

Please note that in order to submit a planning grant proposal, you must attend an ICTS webinar on either February 23 or March 2. You can register for one of the webinars here.

Planning grant proposal due date: April 15, 2022

NIH National Institute of Mental Health Instrumentation Program (S10)

This program funds the purchase of new instruments or instrument upgrades that are used to conduct mental health-related research. These instruments are usually too expensive to be purchased with typical research grants. Investigators must have current NIH funding to apply. NIH encourages such instruments to be housed in a shared facility rather than in an individual investigator’s laboratory.

With tight budgets within UCI and BioSci, we encourage eligible faculty to apply for external instrumentation funding. The next due date is October 7, 2022. Subsequent due dates are October 10, 2023 and October 9, 2024. Awards are for one year.

Next due date: October 7, 2022

As a reminder, UCI is also eligible for two other NIH S10 programs: Shared Instrumentation Grant (SIG) Program (S10) and High-End Instrumentation (HEI) Grant Program (S10). The next due date for those two programs is June 1, 2022.

BioSci alum is a Gates Cambridge Scholar!

Catthi Ly, who graduated from UCI in 2021 with a major in Human Biology and Anthropology, is one of 23 U.S. students to receive a Gates Cambridge Scholarship for 2022. This award is considered one of the most prestigious for postgraduate study in the world. At UCI, Catthi conducted research at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, and public health. At Cambridge University, she will work toward an MPhil degree in Health, Medicine, and Society. Her research will uncover how medical uncertainty complicates the achievement of health equity and how decision-making changes when the scientific limits of medicine are reached.

Grant proposals submitted from FY 2018 to 2021

To get grants funded, you must submit grant proposals. BioSci’s researchers have submitted an average of 212.5 proposals per year for the past 4 fiscal years.

Help us to generate information for the Bio Bulletin

Submit details about seminars and other research-related events on campus here. 

Submit funding opportunity announcements here.

If the Bio Bulletin was forwarded to you and you’d like to subscribe, sign up here. 

If you’re a faculty, postdoc, graduate student, or other researcher in the School of Biological Science and would like help with a grant submission, please email bio-research@uci.edu.