Expert Locator for Grant and Contract Review at NIH

Executive Summary

The scientific peer review process is essential for ensuring that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grant applications and contract proposals are accurately and transparently evaluated for quality, significance and originality. Accurately matching reviewer expertise with applications or contracts under review is a cornerstone of the peer review process and one of our most important responsibilities. Presently, this is a very labor-intensive and time consuming process that involves multiple manual and stand-alone electronic systems for identifying and tracking eligible reviewers. With the advent of fully electronic submission of research grants and proposals, the opportunity exists for SROs to quickly identify and assign un-conflicted reviewers with expertise matched to applications or proposals with greater precision and with much less effort. However, integrated electronic approaches first must be developed.

We would like to build an electronic web-based tool that identifies qualified Scientists that can understand and evaluate grant applications submitted to the NIH for funding. This project will develop and test an easy-to-use system that integrates NIH Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization fingerprinting of review-related publications, applications, proposals, funding opportunity announcements and scientists accessible in the NIH Electronic Research Administration (eRA) system together with select eRA Query View Report search and reporting features to rapidly identify appropriate reviewers with matching expertise for any given application or proposal.

A project supported by the: HHS Ignite Accelerator

Team Members

J. Bruce Sundstrom (Project Lead), NIH
Jay Radke, NIH
Audrey Lau, NIH

Milestones

January 2017: Project selected into the HHS Ignite Accelerator
February 2017: Time in the Accelerator began