NIH Research Project Grant (Parent R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
PA-25-301, posted December 18, 2024 and currently open. NIH's parent announcement for investigator-initiated R01 research project grants not proposing clinical trials; standard NIH submission policies and due dates apply, with the listing closing January 7, 2028.
BRAIN Initiative: Development and Validation of Novel Tools to Probe Cell-Specific and Circuit-Specific Processes in the Brain
This NIH BRAIN Initiative R01 supports development and validation of transformative tools for cell-specific and circuit-specific analysis in the nervous system. Priorities include precise genetic and non-genetic targeting, molecular sensors, minimally invasive repeated measurements, scalable single-cell assays, cross-species tools, and technologies that break current barriers in monitoring or manipulating neural circuits.
BRAIN Initiative: Theories, Models and Methods for Analysis of Complex Data from the Brain (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
This NIH BRAIN Initiative funding opportunity supports new or substantially advanced theories, mechanistic or predictive models, and computational or statistical methods that improve quantitative understanding of brain function across scales. Tools must address complex neural and behavioral data and be made broadly available to the neuroscience research community.
NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (R01 Clinical Trial Optional)
The NIH Common Fund supports individuals or teams pursuing exceptionally innovative, unconventional research with the potential to create or overturn major paradigms across biomedical and behavioral science.
“Super Spreaders in the Corona Epidemics”
Recently a powerful example of a replicating nano-machine entered our society. In principle, it’s just a normal disease, that one attempts to model with 3 or 4 simple coupled equations with 2 important parameters: a timescale, and a replication factor (the famous R0). Then one tries to guess how changes in society change R0 and perhaps adopt some more or less strong lock-down measures. However, this virus has more “personality” than that. It behaves differently in different persons, and persons behave differently. Presumably, only a few of us infect a lot, while most do not infect so much. This assumption is supported by the observation that couples living together only infect each other with about 15 percent probability, indicating that most infected people are not really infectious. I will discuss this and other aspects of Covid-19 in the perspective of models that describe heterogeneous individuals in a society. In particular, we suggest that limiting superspreading opportunities is a cost-effective strategy to mitigate Covid-19.