HSPH GENES AND ENVIRONMENT INITIATIVE (GENI)
INTERNAL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS
Issued: November 3, 2008
Letters of Intent: January 16, 2009
Proposals: February 20, 2009
GENI is designed to bring together several areas of traditional excellence at the School – environmental health research, population science, quantitative methods, and bench science - to make an important contribution to understanding the combined effects of genetic and environmental factors on human health and their underlying mechanisms.
In 2007, GENI issued its first RFP and funded three proposals in the spring of 2008. This fall, the initiative hosted its first mini-symposium and poster session. GENI is now issuing a second round of its request for proposals as described below:
Program Description:
HSPH through GENI will fund up to three pilot projects for up to $100,000/year (direct costs) for each of two years (or possibly more projects for lesser amounts). Proposals for these research initiatives should involve multidisciplinary teams and address innovative and important questions concerning genes and the environment – how genetic susceptibility is affected by exposure to environmental factors including toxicants, nutrition, drugs, and behaviors; how genetic variability (individuals with different genetic make ups) affects responses to environmental exposures; the phenotype effects due to interaction of genes and the environment; and the effect of the environment on genes. Examples of areas of inquiry that would be of interest include but are not limited to: effects of environment on gene structure or expression, DNA methylation, histone acetylation, protein damage, or glycosylation and the high level computational analysis required to approach these questions; effects of germline variation on response to exposure; platform development to enable quantitative, experimental and large scale analysis pertaining to gene-environment interaction; heritable and non-heritable epigenetics regulated by environmental exposures; platform development to examine epigenetic changes genome-wide; how to measure individual biological responses to environmental toxin, dietary or drug intake, physical activity and social behaviors using “omics” technology; how the environment modifies genetic effects on diseases; analytic tools for studying gene and environment interactions in laboratory and population-based studies, such as genome-wide association studies.
Important goals of the program are to support high risk/high gain projects and to broaden collaborations by exploring innovative new research dimensions. While existing collaborators may submit a proposal, it is strongly recommended and priority will be given to proposals that develop new collaborations or extend existing ones to new participants to broaden research directions with new perspectives from independent disciplines. Project budgets may include modest and appropriate amounts of faculty salary and fringe.
All HSPH primary faculty and research scientists are eligible to be co-PIs and can include collaborators broadly from the HSPH research community – faculty, research scientists, and postdocs.
Timeline:
November 3: Release RFP
January 16: Required letters of intent to submit a proposal indicating the collaborators, the title of the project, and provisional specific aims (no more than 150 words). Names of suggested reviewers may also be included.
February 20: Proposal of no more than 5 pages, consisting of an abstract, specific aims, background, a research plan, collaborators, and summary budget. The proposal should address the following issues: challenges of the research, its potential impact, novelty of the approach, likelihood of success and appropriateness to the RFP
March 2: Selected proposals sent for external review
March 30: Notification of action on proposals
Review Process:
All proposals will be triaged by the Initiative Steering Committee and selected proposals will be submitted to appropriate external reviewers to determine final disposition.Submissions:
Letters of Intent and Proposals and/or questions about the program should be submitted electronically to:Alix Smullin
HSPH
Deans Office
asmullin@hsph.harvard.edu