Purpose: The purpose of the School of Medicine Bridge Grant Program is to provide interim support to investigators who are experiencing a temporary gap in funding.

Eligibility: Any full-time faculty member of the School of Medicine is eligible to apply.  Faculty who have failed to provide a Final Report on any previously funded SOM Research Committee grant are not eligible. Applications will be entertained only from investigators who were principal investigators on national extramural grants (e.g., NIH, American Heart Association, NSF, VA) within the last two years, are now experiencing a temporary gap in funding and who have submitted an external grant application.  Applicants will be considered without regard to academic rank.

*Faculty are allowed to hold 1 SOM Research Committee grant at a time. This includes the Basic, Bridge, and Collaborative mechanisms.

Amount and period of support:

The maximum award is $40,000 and the period of support is one year.

Timing:

Applications (either original or resubmission) are accepted three times per year, and only one application per cycle per applicant may be submitted. The review process and decision on funding will be completed within two months of s submission deadline, according to the following schedule:

Submission Dates: August 1st, December 1st, and April 1st

Funding Dates: October 1st, February 1st, and June 1st

Review Criteria and Process:

The Research Committee will make every effort to assure expeditious review. The Chair will assign each application to two Research Committee members for review.  Other members of the Executive Faculty of the School of Medicine may be recruited to review proposals on an “as needed” basis. Each reviewer will provide the Research Committee with a written review and will remain anonymous to the applicant.

After consideration by the SOM Research Committee, proposals will be ranked based on the following criteria:  (a) the scientific merit of the application and (b) the likelihood that an award will lead to extramural funding.  The applicant must provide a written response to the critiques of the submitted external grant. Please note that for the Bridge Grant application, your two page narrative on how you will respond to reviewers’ critiques from a recently-submitted (but unfunded) grant, and how you will use the SOM Research Committee bridge grant funds to keep your research program moving forward during the period of lapsed funding is a critical component of the bridge grant application.

The Chair of the Research Committee will provide the applicant with a written response and copies of the reviewers' critiques. If a proposal is approved with a budget reduction, the applicant has the option to accept the budget reduction or to revise and resubmit the application for the next available cycle.  A maximum of two resubmissions of the same application is permitted.

Temporal extension:

If, for unforeseeable reasons, the project cannot be completed by the end of the project period, the Research Committee may extend this period upon request. The Principal Investigator must request an extension in writing and must provide a detailed justification for the extension to the Chair of the Research Committee no less than two months before the grant end date.

Final report:

The Final Report should be submitted to the Research Office within 60 days of the end of the grant period, and must contain the following:

1.  A summary (two pages maximum) describing the studies performed, the outcomes and their relationship to the Specific Aims.

AND

2. Evidence (e.g., copy of the application cover page and abstract or summary sheet of review) that the Principle Investigator has made an attempt to secure extramural funding based on the grant awarded by the Research Committee.  If no attempt has been made to seek extramural funding, the PI must provide a written explanation of why this has not been possible.

Acknowledgment:

Unless otherwise instructed by the Office of the Dean, any publication (e.g., manuscript, abstract, etc) resulting from research supported by a School of Medicine Research Committee Award should contain the following statement in the acknowledgements: “This work was supported in part by a grant from the University of Louisville School of Medicine.” A copy of such a paper or abstract should be sent to the Research Committee office.

Submission:

Grants must be submitted as a singlePDF file sent as email attachment to the HSC Research Office. Except for the cover pages, the grant application must be in a directly-generated (not scanned) PDF file. To submit:

• Download the Cover Page and Basic Grant application DOC files from this website.
• Complete all sections by filling in the requested information and/or pasting in text as necessary.
• Except for the Cover Page, generate a PDF file directly from the DOC file using Adobe Acrobat. This should be available in the department or division office. Do not print and scan the grant as this may not produce legible copies of data or graphs.
• For the cover page, print and sign the form. You may scan this signed cover page to produce the PDF of the signed document. (Alternatively you may insert a scanned copy of your signature into the DOC file and then directly generate the PDF file as indicated above.) Please merge the cover page file with the body of the grant application into a single file for submission.
• Attach the PDF file to an email and send to the HSC Research Office at hscro@louisville.edu.