This past spring, NIH rolled out changes to their biosketch and other support requirements – the first substantive changes to these standard documents in quite a while. These changes are designed to help NIH more effectively evaluate potential foreign influence and the commitment levels of PIs applying for funding, or having their funding renewed.
The biosketch, which is used in the same format at all stages of NIH funding, changes are pretty straightforward: the “Positions and Honors” section has been reorganized into reverse chronological order and reframed as “Positions, Scientific Appointments, and Honors,” in order to capture a broader picture of the investigator’s affiliations. The example posted on the NIH biosketch website includes membership in professional societies, consultant positions, study section memberships, and advisory board memberships – some of which may not have occurred to investigators to include in the past. In addition, for non-fellowship applications, the entirety of part D (research support) is removed, which can free up quite a bit of space within the hard five page limit for investigators with a lot of funding. Investigators are still welcome to highlight relevant grant funding in their Personal Statement section, but it is not required.
The Current & Pending Support document, which is usually only required for just-in-time requests and annual reporting, has also been standardized across all its uses – and completely overhauled. The format for each grant is lengthened with additional information on how effort changes over the years of the grant, and most importantly, there is a new required section for In Kind Support. There’s quite a bit of discussion on the NIH website regarding what to disclose here – the bottom line is, if you’re getting free-to-you labor (like a postdoc paid/employed by an outside entity) or materials (like access to a cell line or facility that isn’t generally made available for free), it should be listed here. NIH is very serious about these changes – they are also now requiring that the PI sign a freshly updated copy for every time the current & pending support document is required, either in ink or via an official digital signature (like Adobe or DocuSign – but NOT a scanned image dropped into the Word document).
NIH’s guidelines technically say that these new formats should be used for anything due on or after May 25, 2021, but they have also stated that they won’t start rejecting applications for using outdated versions until January 25, 2022. Some investigators may feel that this means it’s not “really required” yet. However, Northwestern University’s Office of Sponsored Research is requiring that we fully comply with this new format starting September 2021, and will begin enforcing this at the proposal stage!
The conversion process, especially for the Current & Pending Support document, can be lengthy for those with complicated support, so starting early – well before it is required to be turned in to OSR or to NIH – is key. Many of us working in research administration may find ourselves assisting research faculty and staff with the update process, but ultimately, only the investigators themselves can be totally certain that they’re capturing all support, especially in-kind support, which can’t be easily tracked in any of our usual institutional reports. If you support investigators who will be submitting or reporting to NIH anytime in the next year, this is worth touching base about early in case you find yourself supporting the conversion process, too.
By: TJ Hubbs, Senior Research Administrator, Movement Disorders Division, Department of Neurology