Arts & Human Development Task Force
October 4, 2012 Webinar NIH Presentation Transcript

Presenter: Bill Elwood, PhD., Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, National Institutes of Health

Slide 1

Names of presenters

Slide 2

One of the questions I saw there was “What is an R24?” It is an infrastructure supports grant to build research teams that have not worked together, they definitely have not work together on relationships among culture, health, and well-being. This is a one-time RFA. Most of you will apply before the deadline of December 17.

Sometime ago, Congress passed a law in which all applications having to do with HIV and AIDS come in under their own deadline. AIDS-only applications can come in as late as  February13. Any other topics for this RFA will be turned away.

If you have never applied for funding, if you need to have profiles in the NIH Commons. I encourage you to start that as soon as possible.

Slide 3

A few more facts, we welcome researchers to complement the basic social and behavioral sciences. OppNet has a dedicated pool of money from all of the institutes and centers at NIH and it is dedicated to basic research in the social and behavioral sciences. That is why applications must have that emphasis. But because the arts and humanities and all of these research areas contribute to so much to the culture and the dynamic human process, we really welcome you folks to part of the research team. In an R24, people build through a small research project. Some of your application will be judged on the potential that your project has to deliver those new insights into culture, health, and well-being. It might be of sufficient size to generate a later research application but it does not have to do that.

Slide 4

You can see OppNet and how it functions. You will see the logos of all the OppNet members at the bottom of the page. There are 29 of them within the office of the NIH director and those blue lines are hyperlinks for you to explore later.

Slide 5

What is a basic behavioral and social science research? It is an important thing to cover because sometimes in our field believe that when they say basic research they mean connecting beginning or pillar research. In this case, the NIH definition furthers our understandings on the mechanisms and patterns of behavioral and social functioning. We at NIH divide BBSSR into three categories.

Slide 6

The first is behavior on social processes and that this animal model and human functioning at the individual level and group levels at assorted sizes. Some of the examples are the kinds of work that NIH has been interested in in the past.

Slide 7

The second category at NIH is biopsychosocial research. You'll hear this a term more often called biobehavioral or biosocial. The matter what you call it, you can see how it is a ven diagram in which the relationship among those different factors and how they influence one another. Examples like behavioral genetics, and neurosciences, sociogenomics.

Slide 8

Number three is what we will see most relevant to this particular funding op, methodology and measurement. On the right you will see a social network map. New methods of analyzing existing data, new approaches to collecting data, design, how does all of this relate to arts and humanities? In public health research, we have measured culture through variables such as race and ethnicity, the language spoken at home, and that translates into interchangeable phrases like cultural competency, literacy, sensitivity, community-based research. What we do not do is measure culture as the dynamic human variable. It is a process and not a static variable on which you can control efficacy measures. This is a new way to consider it. In the arts and sciences,

Slide 9

There have been ties between arts and sciences but there has been limited attention to health. You can see the examples there.

Slide 10 & 11

Critical studies of literature, but not too much historical ties to health research. There has been arts and sciences in health but it has been very applied, like psychodrama or dance therapy for people who are recovering from cancer. Or the use of folk music and health education campaigns. This is different because we are concentrating for this RFA on more basic sciences. You also know that and we've looked at the arts to make our environment more livable and walkable.

Slide 12

The three photographs you see our from our new NIH campus. People come from all over the world to participate in our clinical trials and on the left you see a healing fountain and volunteers often play music for patients who can come down to the atrium or come to the different levels.

Slide 13

So, archival studies, that is what allowed people to document trends over time. Representation of health and illness. The perception of what is health and wellness. Field studies. Looking at places where people exercise, looking at health care delivery settings. Or public health settings. Studies are also very welcome in this regard. There is much research people can conduct and we welcome that.

Slide 14

There has been a few projects we have funded over three years and although they do not relate to expressly to this RFA, may have inspired us in many ways. For example, she studies how Croats’ neuroscience, because of English, how the brain actually changes its wiring the longer people live in the United States from eastern cultures. How their attitudes change and the where and how their brain functions as well. If you click on those, they may not provide models for your research but they will definitely call you into the types of language that to go into successful NIH OppNet applications.

Slide 15

Here are two more projects focusing on basic science. The brain functioning of young, bilingual children as they progress from learning English in schools to becoming better English speakers, already having proficiency of Spanish at home. These bullets you see are listed directly from the RFA.

Slide 16

I will not spend too much time on them. But those six bullets all fall under the heading of develop and test, whether it is a new method, mixed methods,

Slide 17

Looking and cultural practices, another power verb in our list of examples is investigate. Investing multilingualism on how visually and hearing impaired people perceive and process information. Looking for attitudes within groups

Slide 18

Here are two examples from our office on aids research. A lot of basic research can be conducted in what we call clinical settings, which not only refers you to clinics but also the behavior on social research under that rubric. Whether it is HIV or another disease, so long as you are looking at the basic processes that might be transferred to another kind of population or another study. Those would qualify as OppNet grants.

Slide 19

If you're still interested, after hearing me talk and looking at the slides, how to start on this? We encourage you to read and re-read the RFA. Follow the link that covers basic so-so and behavioral research. Please reach out to us. We love to give feedback and ideas because we are trying to get as many competitive applications as possible. So OppNet can spend all of its money in other institutes with extra money to burn might be able to pick them up as well. If there is one tip I give to anyone and everyone regardless of where I am, it is to have concise, specific aims. They should go all the way through your application. Every bit of it. Sometimes people leave and then you get to the rest of their application and it does not seem to match anything that was introduced. Another tip that I think is important, particularly for the R24, are the personal statements. There are many researchers who have a standard boilerplate but this is about building research teams. A member of your team will want to write in that section how she or he is perfect for that role and how that person's expertise complements everyone else on the team so you have this amazing potential for synergy and progress.

Slide 20

If NIH applications are foreign to you, you might want to follow all of these links for information on the application process and when you get ready to send those papers, all of us are familiar with OppNet as well as this particular RFA.

Slide 21

We would love to hear from you this afternoon with questions as well as in the future with your ideas. I will turn it back over to you, Sunil.

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