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This Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) aims to support the establishment of programs to enhance research rigor and transparency practices within academic and research institutions to promote a culture of high-quality neuroscience research. Attention to principles of rigorous study design and transparent reporting are essential to enable the neuroscientific community, as well as the biomedical community at large, to design and perform valid experiments and to assess the value of scientific findings. Awards are intended to support the implementation of innovative programs, strategies, and approaches at the departmental, inter-departmental, or equivalent intra-institutional entity level.

More than 25 million Americans suffer from daily chronic pain, a highly debilitating medical condition that is complex and difficult to manage. In recent decades, there has been an overreliance in the prescription of opioids for chronic pain despite their poor ability to improve function and high addiction liability. This contributed to a significant and alarming epidemic of opioid overdose deaths and addictions. Innovative scientific solutions to develop alternative pain treatment options are thus critically needed. Through targeted research efforts, the NIH HEAL Initiative aims to support the development of safe and effective devices to treat pain with little or no addiction liability. This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is designed to support interdisciplinary research teams of multiple PD/PIs to investigate the mechanism of action of pain relief by medical devices with the overall goal of optimizing therapeutic outcomes for FDA-approved or -cleared technologies. Program teams are expected to accomplish goals that require considerable synergy and collaborative interactions. Teams must leverage appropriate multi-disciplinary expertise to develop new principles and methods for experimentation, analysis, and interpretation. Teams are encouraged to consider objectives that will produce major advances in the field of pain relief by medical devices.

Reissue of RFA-NS-22-027 to comply with DMSP - No new dates are being added. (Reissue of RFA-NS-18-014 and RFA-NS-21-014) This R34 NOFO solicits applications that offer a limited scope of aims and an approach that will establish feasibility, validity, or other technically qualifying results that, if successful, would support, enable, and/or lay the groundwork for a potential, subsequent Targeted Brain Circuits Projects - TargetedBCP R01, as described in the companion NOFO (RFA-NS-22-026). Applications should be exploratory research projects that use innovative, methodologically-integrated approaches to understand how circuit activity gives rise to mental experience and behavior.

Reissue of RFA-NS-22-026 to comply with DMSP - No new dates are being added.(Reissue of RFA-NS-18-030) This NOFO solicits applications for research projects that use innovative, methodologically-integrated approaches to understand how circuit activity gives rise to mental experience and behavior. The goal is to support projects that can realize a meaningful outcome within 5 years. Applications should address circuit function in the context of specific neural systems such as sensation, perception, attention, reasoning, intention, decision-making, emotion, navigation, communication or homeostasis. Projects should link theory and data analysis to experimental design and should produce predictive models as deliverables. Projects should aim to improve the understanding of circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating dynamic patterns of neural activity. Projects can use non-human and human species, and applications should explain how the selected species offers ideal conditions for revealing general principles about the circuit basis of a specific behavior.

Reissue of RFA-NS-22-028 to comply with DMSP - No new dates are being added. Reissue of:RFA-NS-18-029 and RFA-NS-20-029. This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is designed to support teams of investigators that seek to cross boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration to elucidate the contributions of dynamic circuit activity to a specific behavioral or neural system. Applications are encouraged to propose adventurous and challenging goals that can only be tackled by a synergistic team-based approach and have the potential to be transformative and/or to enable significant advances. These studies at the exploratory stage are intended for the development of experimental capabilities and/or theoretical frameworks in preparation for a future competition for larger-scale or extended efforts, including the BRAIN TargetedBCP R01 or the multi-component, Team-Research BRAIN Circuit Programs (U19). The overall goal of this FOA is to enable a large-scale analysis of neural systems and circuits within the context and during the simultaneous measurement of an ethologically relevant behavior. Toward this end, teams are expected to assemble and leverage multi-disciplinary expertise, and to integrate experimental with computational and theoretical approaches. Teams are expected to bridge fields by incorporating rich information on cell-types, on circuit functionality and connectivity, in conjunction with sophisticated analyses of an ethologically relevant behavior of an organism or a well-defined neural system. Teams are also expected to aim for a mechanistic understanding of the circuits of the central nervous system (CNS) by applying cutting-edge methods such as those for large-scale recording, manipulation, and analysis of neural circuits across multiple regions of the CNS.

Reissue of RFA-NS-22-011 to comply with DMSP. No additional receipt dates added. This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) supports efforts to disseminate resources and to integrate them into neuroscience research practice. Projects should be highly relevant to specific goals of the BRAIN Initiative, goals that are described in the planning document "BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision." They should engage in one or more of the following activities: distribution of tools and reagents; user training on the usage of new technologies or techniques; providing access to existing technology platforms and specialized facilities; minor improvements to increase the scale/efficiency of resource production and delivery; minor adaptations to meet the needs of a user community. Applications strictly focused on technology or software development, rather than dissemination of an existing resource, are not responsive to this FOA. Refinements to microscopes or tools necessary to customize them to the experimental needs of the end users is allowed. Projects should address compelling needs of neuroscience researchers working toward the goals of the BRAIN 2025 report that are otherwise unavailable or impractical in their current form.

The goal of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (K99/R00) program is to enhance workforce diversity in the neuroscience workforce and maintain a strong cohort of new and talented, NIH-supported, independent investigators from diverse backgrounds in BRAIN Initiative research areas. This program is designed to facilitate a timely transition of outstanding postdoctoral researchers with research and/or clinical doctorate degree from mentored, postdoctoral research positions to independent, tenure-track or equivalent faculty positions. The program will provide independent NIH research support during this transition to assist awardees in launching competitive, independent research careers.

The purpose of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (K99/R00) program is to enhance workforce diversity in the neuroscience workforce and maintain a strong cohort of new and talented, NIH-supported, independent investigators from diverse backgrounds in BRAIN Initiative research areas. This program is designed to facilitate a timely transition of outstanding postdoctoral researchers with a research and/or clinical doctorate degree from mentored, postdoctoral research positions to independent, tenure-track or equivalent faculty positions. The program will provide independent NIH research support during this transition to assist awardees in launching competitive, independent research careers.

Reissue of RFA-MH-22-220 to comply with DMSP. This FOA supports the development of software to visualize and analyze the data as part of programs of building the informatics infrastructure for the BRAIN Initiative. Other informatics programs include developing data standards that are needed to describe the new experiments that are being created by or used in the BRAIN Initiative ( RFA-MH-19-146 ), and creating the data infrastructures that will house the data from multiple experimental groups ( RFA-MH-19-145 ). Each of the programs is aimed at building an infrastructure that is used by a particular sub-domain of experimentalists rather than building a single all-encompassing informatics infrastructure now. Building the infrastructure one experimental area at a time will ensure that the infrastructure is immediately useful to components of the research community. As our understanding of the brain improves, it may be possible to create linkages between these various sub-domain specific informatics programs. Investigators of the informatics programs should keep that goal in mind and build for the future even though the current efforts are more limited in scope.

The purpose of this funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is to provide investigators with access to resources provided by the Data Management Coordinating Center for Diagnostic Centers of Excellence (RFA-NS-22-051), as part of the next phase of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network. Resources include infrastructure, data management, and clinical research support for a new Network of clinical sites that provide diagnostic services for patients with undiagnosed diseases.