NIH Funding

Promoting innovative population research through external funding is an important part of the missions of CEDA and BPC.  Facilitating grants from NIH, particularly from NIA and NICHD, is our top priority. This page serves as a guide to resources for understanding the basics of NIH grantsmanship, with links to key NIH information as well as sets of instructions we have created to help navigate the IRB process on campus, completion of essential forms, etc.  

NIH Official Documentation

The first step for grant applicants is to read the official sources of information, and we provide them here for your convenience. However, one can get quickly overwhelmed with the all but undecipherable and enormous content so the second step is to reach out to the PopSciences team for guidance, in the next section.

PopSciences Guides

UC Berkeley Campus General Resources about Grant Writing and Related Topics

  • Sponsored Projects Office at UC Berkeley Guide to Proposal Review and Submission: https://spo.berkeley.edu/guide/submitquick.html and also General Information: https://spo.berkeley.edu/pi.html.
  • Pivot is a funding opportunity and expertise database system that combines a funding database of over 20,000 opportunities with a database of over 3 million researcher expertise profiles.
  • Berkeley Research and Development Office (BRDO): https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/brdo/. For advice and support on submitting external grants, particularly if large and/or complex.
  • Grant application checklists: Be sure to ask your grant administrator in Shared Services for a checklist of documents that you need to submit your grant. 

Specific Resources For Grant Applications

  • eRa Commons: NIH has an electronic registration of Principal Investigator applicants, known as eRA Commons, though soon changing to login.gov/. At Cal you must ask our Office of Sponsored Research to get registered (scroll down on page). Or just write to spoawards@berkeley.edu. You must state what your role will be (e.g., PI, postdoc).
  • Congressional District Codes are necessary for the applications. Or search by zipcode (and look at the House of Rep’s district).
  • Grant Central Guide to Writing NIH (or NSF) grants.  Highly recommended.