Strategic Priorities Pilot Award

This service is provided by the Pilot and Collaborative Studies Resource (PCSR) 

Overview

The Strategic Priorities Pilot Award program offers awards that deploy institutional funds to address emerging strategic priorities. The program is designed to flexibly respond to pressing institutional, local, and national needs and jump-start timely research collaborations.

  • Duration: One year
  • Award amount: $80,000

The application process is multi-stage, starting with the submission of a brief pre-proposal. Selected pre-proposal applications will be provided with consultations to further develop their project, including the potential generalizability of their approach to solve problems in other domains, and then invited to submit a full proposal for funding consideration.

Current Focus - Innovative Translational Research 

The Innovative Translational Research – Strategic Priorities Pilot Award supports innovative and disruptive ideas that seek to address barriers to research.  

The Irving Institute invites pre-proposal applications for innovative translational research projects across the translational research spectrum from basic science to clinical implementation to public health delivery and scale-up.  

  • Is there a roadblock in your field that prevents you from doing the type of research you want to do? 
  • Is your field in need of innovation to solve a persistent problem?

Problems that could be broadly generalizable across domains will be prioritized. Projects with an interdisciplinary and team science approach will be especially competitive.  

Pre-Proposals should:  

  • Propose an innovation and/or identify a barrier or problem they seek to address.  
  • Propose a plan to test the innovation and/or mitigate the barrier.  
  • Describe how they will evaluate the effectiveness of the project.
  • Briefly explain if and how their innovation may be broadly generalizable beyond the specific project and domain.  

Previous Focus

2022-2023: Learning Health System

The Learning Health System – Strategic Priorities Pilot Award, was a collaboration with the Irving Institute, Columbia University Medical Center (CUIMC), ColumbiaDoctors and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (Columbia Engineering), to support proposals that apply a learning health systems (LHS) approach that integrates informatics, research, and clinical practice programs to solve real-world problems at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP)/CUIMC.

As part of  the Learning Health System initiative , the pilot award offered early resources for innovative and creative LHS studies including rapid cycle trials and interventions in digital health, decision support, quality improvement (QI), and patient safety.

2023-2024: Translational Science 

The Translational Science – Strategic Priorities Pilot Award supported translational science projects that address barriers in translational research and the inefficiencies in the research process that are common across diseases and conditions, generating innovations that overcome longstanding challenges along the translational research pipeline. Addressing barriers in the research process will accelerate the time from discovery to improved human health. 

Review slides from our information session here and Frequently Asked Questions here

See a list of Strategic Priorities Pilot Award recipients.

Eligibility

  • Principal investigator(s) must have a faculty appointment at Columbia University of assistant professor or higher.
  • Postdoctoral fellows are not eligible to apply as principal investigator.
  • Teams may include outside consultants/collaborators (e.g., community stakeholders) with unique experience or expertise in innovative approaches not currently available at NYP/Columbia. However, sub-awards are not permitted.
  • Teams are limited to no more than six investigators.
  • During each application cycle, only one submission is permitted per principal investigator (PI). However, PIs may be listed as co-investigators or consultants on other applications.

Special consideration will be given to projects that include research plans reflecting alignment with the Irving Institute commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

We strongly encourage applications from underrepresented groups.

Deadlines

Apply by December 19, 2024.

Cite it, Submit it, Share it!

If your research has benefited from one or more Irving Institute resources, please remember to:

  • Cite our CTSA grant, UL1 TR001873, in any relevant publications, abstracts, chapters, and/or posters.
  • Submit your publications to PubMed Central (PMC) for compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.
  • Share your research updates with us by sending an email to: irving_institute@cumc.columbia.edu.

 

Contact

Kayla Zalcgendler
622 West 168th Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10033
United States