Welcome to the AUG's Early Career Research Leadership Program. I'm Dr. Carolyn Swenson, the moderator for today's webinar. We are honored to have with us Dr. Kerr and Dr. Saliv from the National Institute of Aging. Dr. Kerr is the program officer for the STEM Cell Program in the Aging Physiology Branch of the Division of Aging Biology. And Dr. Saliv is a program officer for the Division of Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology. Before we begin, I'd like to review just a few housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded and live streamed. If you have questions, please put them in the Q&A feature to ask any of the speakers during the presentation. I will be moderating a Q&A session at the end. And so I will be asking your questions to our panelists at the end. But if you have any tech issues, please use the chat feature. AUG staff will be monitoring that and available to assist if you have any issues. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Dr. Kerr. Hello and good evening, everyone. I'm Candace Kerr, and I'm here along with my esteemed colleague, Dr. Marcelle Saliv. And we're program officers at the National Institute on Aging. And we'd like to thank the organizers for inviting us to talk to you today about NIA's mission to support aging research. Next slide. We have no disclosures. Next slide. The topics of our presentation today includes an introduction to NIA's mission and infrastructure, followed by career development timelines and funding opportunities for junior investigators. Plus, Dr. Saliv will talk more about specific and uniquely NIA-supported funding opportunities, as well as provide some tips and tricks on how to get more information about future funding opportunities and provide you with important NIA resources. Next slide. So if you didn't know already, NIA is one of 27 institutes and centers that mix up NIH. It's led by our director, Richard Hodes, and the acting deputy director, Melinda Kelly. NIA's overall budget, which just saw increases last year of over $110 million, while primarily slated for Alzheimer's research, makes NIA now the fourth largest institute at NIH in terms of budget. Next slide. So the overarching mission of NIA is to conduct and support research on aging and the health of older people. Specifically, NIA seeks to understand the nature of aging and the aging process, including the diseases and conditions associated with growing older, for the purpose of extending healthier, active years of life. This includes supporting and conducting high-quality research in biological, clinical, behavioral, social, and economic aspects of aging. This includes the training and developing highly skilled research scientists, providing resources to the research community, as well as disseminating information like we're doing here today with you and communicating it to the public. Next slide. These funds are managed by our four extramural divisions, including the Division of Aging Biology, the Division of Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology, the Division of Behavioral and Social Research, and the Division of Neuroscience. So my division, the Division of Aging Biology, focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging, while Dr. Salih's clinical division, DGCG, focuses on patient-oriented and clinical studies. And as her name suggests, BSR focuses on behavioral and social aspects and the Division of Neuroscience on the aging of the central nervous system. Next slide. So together, these branches, divisions, in fact, all focus in all biological aspects of aging, known as the hallmarks of aging. So aging researchers study aging ranging from the cellular to the organismal level. At the organismal level, our former division director of DAB, Philippe A. Sierra, along with others, define this emerging field called geroscience, depicted on the far right. The geroscience hypothesis poses that since aging physiology plays a major role in many, if not all, chronic diseases, therapeutically addressing aging physiology directly will prevent the onset or mitigate the severity of multiple chronic diseases. So age-related dysfunction and aging models are the cornerstone with which our aging researchers study pelvic floor disorders and its related comorbidities. Next slide. Currently, our Division of Aging Biology is led by Ron Kohansky and is made up of three branches, genetics and cell biology, aging physiology, and the biological resource branch, which is quite popular. Our research utilizes a variety of aging animal models from yeast to human subjects. Next slide. Of the three branches, the aging physiology branch manages the most applications related to aging and tissues of the pelvic floor. For example, I manage organ dysfunction of the bladder, urethra, prostate, and reproductive tissues. Dr. John Williams manages applications studying kidney, and our chief, Dr. Rebecca Foner, manages studies focused on the changes in immune cells and impact of the microbiome in these tissues. Next slide. However, if the main emphasis of your work is more focused on the senescence or genetic regulation or metabolism of these tissues versus the disease or the organ itself, then these studies are covered by our program officers in the genetic and cell biology branch by our branch chief, Dr. Max Gow, Dr. Viviana Perez-Montes, and Dr. Iwe Friedl. Next slide. The Division of Aging Biology also has a biological research branch led by Dr. Francesca Maccarini. This branch manages non-human primate research, but it also provides a variety of aging cell lines, aging tissues, access to aging mice and rats for NIA-supported research projects. So please see their resource page on the web or contact me if you're interested in accessing these resources, as these resources are rather limited and there is an application process. Next slide. So, like other NIH institutes, NIA funds a variety of award types that are investigator initiative, including R01s, and even though we also include others that the institutes no longer support, which are of interest to a lot of our junior investigators, which are R03s and R21s. The R03s are two years at about $60,000 a year to help support sort of new directions for researchers. You don't necessarily have to be an early stage or junior investigator to do that. And our R21s, which are these high risk, high reward two year investigations that some of our junior investigators, that when they're not early stage investigators, sort of like to tap into. So we do this in addition to traditional career development awards you see here. And this year, NIA also began participating in the new F99-K00 program that I'll discuss in the next few slides. Next slide. So now let's drill down a little bit more on the traditional career development awards. Next slide. Here is a timeline of when career development awarding begins. It begins at the predoctoral level where awards are given to either the institute in the form of T32 awards who then provide these funds to qualifying candidates or their fellowship awards or F awards, which are given directly to the predoctoral student for F31s or the postdocs for F32s. Predoctorates may also apply for this new F99-K00 I mentioned earlier, and this is to help them with their transition from their PhD degree to their postdoc. Similar to how the K99-R00 transitions postdocs to faculty positions, these are two years of exploration in the F99 followed by a more developed program in the K00 stage. So both of these, I want to make note too, are the only two career awards that NIA currently supports that does not require US citizenship. So NIA also has loan repayment awards, L30s, for MDs to pay back their medical loans. And once the postdoc is ready to develop on their own independent research, then they're ready to apply for the career awards or the K awards. Next slide. So here are the various K awards that NIA provides, including K01s for PhDs, K08s for MDs, and K23s for MDs proposing a clinical trial. Then we have K24s that are for mid-career PIs that are proposing to train others, and K25s are for established engineers, mathematicians, or related careers that want to transition into the biomedical field. All of the K awards have standard due dates and they provide approximately $70,000 in salary plus fringe. They do require 75% effort and provide another $25,000 to $50,000 for research materials. Next slide. So back to the K99 career award. Like I mentioned, it has these two phases. A training phase, the K99 for two years, and an R01 for three years. And the objective, again, is to transition from this postdoc to independence. The eligibility is that postdocs have to be within the four years of their PhD research experience. The US citizenship and residency, like I mentioned, are not required. And the R00 transition is not automatic. You have to remember that a tenure track position or equivalent must be offered and accepted for you to transition to that R01. Next slide. NIA also participates in the K99 R00 funding opportunity known as Mosaic, which is designed to expand the diversity of the research workforce. And for more information about this opportunity, or others similar to that, I've put the website down, www.diversity.nih.gov, where you can find out more information about the Mosaic funding opportunity, and how you can get involved with it. And also, www.diversity.nih.gov, where you can find out and keep up with current details on funding opportunities in this space. Next slide. Here, you can also learn about NIA's administrative supplements to promote junior investigators through workforce diversity, and also re-entry into the research career program. So these are administrative supplements that are given to grants to PI investigators to help increase diversity in the workforce or to return back to a research career program after being out for so many years, based on life's adversity. Next slide. So another exciting mechanism that just came out in the past year, and which NIA participates to, is known as the CATS award for early stage investigators. So early stage investigators are within the 10 years of their degree or training, and this award was created by NIH in honor of Steven Katz, who passed away in 2018, and was the director of NIAMS, and our National Institute on Arthritic Sciences, and who was always a champion of this concept of helping out junior investigators without the requirement of preliminary data, which is kind of like what the R21 used to be fashioned around. The R21 is these high risk, high rewards, where you didn't need to put any data in, but we all know you really got to put preliminary data in to be successful through review. Here, this award is for early stage investigators through an R01 mechanism, where preliminary data is not allowed. So here it's very important to talk to your program officer, I can't emphasize it, to make sure that within your application you don't put anything in there that can take your application out from not being reviewed. And we'll talk about these two broadly in the next two slides. So next slide. Here's the emphasis on no preliminary data. The importance of this is manifested in the idea that whatever is published out there already is background knowledge enough. And so when you want to present that knowledge and you put that in figure legends, the figure legends, for example, have to have references in it, or the application will be returned. And so you can rely on some of your prior work and expertise as sort of a foundation for what you're doing, but you want to be very cautious that the data you're showing has already been published, because the next requirement for a CATS award is the next slide. So next slide please. This is the requirement that the PI needs to have a significant change in their research direction. So a lot of you, if you have not focused on aging research in terms of older populations and aging models, this is an angle that you can look into that suggests that, you know, you wrap a mentoring team around you of aging experts and you have a one page opportunity here that's required for this application to express why you have this change in direction. And the CATS awards, like our ones, are up to five years of support, but they do have their unique due dates. So you want to look at that funding announcement. Next slide. And here I just wanted to wrap up with some opportunities that are currently out there and being published and talk about them a little. And it's a little different than other institutes where you go right to what the disease you're looking at is what you focus on. And so you're looking at funding announcements with your specific disease. Here I challenge you not to do that so much. And why I say that is because NIA provides a variety of funding opportunities in addition to the parent grants that we just discussed. And the purpose is to fund aging research and to increase our understanding of how aging and diseases are linked. So some of these, while it may not immediately cross your mind as related to pelvic floor dysfunction, they may still be relevant. For instance, NIA has funding announcements related to Alzheimer's, as NIA is charged with millions of dollars, I mentioned earlier, from Congress each year that must be spent researching this disease. So while this initiative supports a cure, it also seeks a better understanding of treatment between Alzheimer's and Alzheimer's disease. So studying pelvic floor disorders in the context of Alzheimer's or in Alzheimer's patients would be relevant research. And you'll see why that may be important when Dr. Salih discuss the differences in our pay lines between Alzheimer's and Alzheimer's research. So the same may also be said about our other funding announcements targeting aging and down syndromes and other announcements with aging older adults that live with AIDS. So what is most important is learning how to use funding to address aging and down syndromes. So the same may also be said about our other funding announcements targeting aging and down syndromes and other announcements with aging older adults that live with AIDS. So what is most important is learning how pelvic floor disorders impact or is impacted by age in these populations. Could be a subject of an application for these FOAs. We also have R15s for undergraduates focused training. We have an R21, R33 in the novel development of therapeutics for treating age related diseases. And we also participate in a K12 to build interdisciplinary research careers in women's health program, which may be something that pelvic floor disorders, you know, can really fall into. Next slide. So I'll stop here and Dr. Salih will continue from here to cover additional and unique ways NIA is promoting the research workforce. So thank you for listening. I guess we'll have questions at the end. Dr. Salih, take it from here. Thanks, Candice. Hi. Welcome. Can you push the advance, please? I'm Marcel Salih from the National Institute on Aging and I wanted to highlight first on this slide, a blog post from 2017 I did on some workshops that we were working on with other institutes on urinary incontinence. Next slide. So my division, as Candice mentioned, covers geriatrics, which is studying old people and clinical gerontology, which is aging across the lifespan. So we have a focus on maintaining health and independence in old age, improving the functional abilities in old age, and a big focus on multiple chronic conditions, which I think is relevant to all clinical areas. We do have three branches and they are named in this division title, so I won't repeat them. And the third branch is clinical trials. So we do have some larger clinical trials on treatment and prevention conditions in old age and aging. So that's the essence of this division. Next slide. So I want to just highlight some resources, I think, and an eclectic group that can help get started thinking about NIA as a funding source. So if you're looking for a career development resource, a grant on career development, there is a kiosk at NIH that really gets you started. If you look across the top, it has kind of some tabs that can get you started on this. And it selects it, you go through a couple of questions and it gets to things that are applicable to you. So if you're, say, finished your residency, an early faculty member, that's a great one. And that can come up with some of these, like the K01 is shown here. And Candice already talked about, there's a lot of different choices. This can help you decide amongst those choices and get started. And so then it links you to the funding announcements and links you to some frequently asked questions. Next slide. So that's just one example, but I want to kind of highlight a few others. This just gives you an overview. So the ones that we won't, all these I think I'll work through with a few exceptions. So I think I'll do the exceptions right now. MSTAR is there in the middle, which is a summer program for medical students. So if you know any medical students, it's a great introduction to aging for them, because a lot of them don't get that in the medical school curriculum, and they can do that. And there's about, I think, 25 across the country. So that's got a nice website on that. CLINSTAR is more for physicians trying to join into aging. So that's going to be a theme here. CLINSTAR has a lot of resources. It has pilot grants that are talked about on this link near the bottom. And those pilot grants can get a jumpstart at the very beginning to get started into your first grant, if that's what you're looking for. And Paul Beeson, I'll get to at the very end, but that's a career development award that's unique to NIA and has a higher level of funding than you see some other places. Next slide. So NIA looked at this green path that's sort of the career development from early training, grad school or med school, postdoc, early career, and so on, and looked at, next, can you click ahead, and looked at where was there a problem. And we found that the problem was, in that bridge from early career, from postdoc to early career, really, especially for physicians. And so we came up with this GEMSTAR program to fill that in and click ahead again. And that is kind of this pre-K or before career development awards to, for junior faculty physicians to launch their career and bridge their specialty or so urogynecology or whatever specialty to aging. Aging is very broad, and geriatrics is a shortage specialty, so we really need to bring other people into our field, and that's been a strategy. And Candice mentioned an amount, this amount is even wrong. We've got the R03, I think, up to 100,000 a year for two years for this GEMSTAR. And so it does provide research funds, that amount. And we started a conference every two years to really bring people together from the scholars to kind of cross-pollinate and talk about their work together and it's offered every year. And it just closed, but we will be offering it again next year. And there's a website that explains it linked here. Next slide. For even earlier, we focus on Butler-Williams, which is really just a five-day introduction to NIA. And this has now really been offered virtually. And I think we're announcing it now for next year, so this is kind of an old slide, but we're announcing it for 2022 to bring junior faculty and investigators who are new to aging research to learn about the NIA and have some experience also discussing your research aims with some program officers, learn about the Institute, and learn about the four programs in much more depth than Candice and I could cover today. So that one is pretty competitive, but it definitely offers a good program. Next slide. So I mentioned the GEMSTAR and I wanted to say it's very good for AUGS members and urogynecologists. And I think these are not all such people, but these are some of the relevant projects that I've had in my portfolio recently. And thank you, Dr. Richter, for your comment. I think I've listed several of the grantees. A few were just funded, like Susie Meyer on hip exercises on pelvic floor muscle to prevent worsening urinary incontinence or non-surgical management. Lenore Ackerman on vaginal microbiota and urge urinary incontinence. Scott Bauer on this frailty, the link between frailty and lower urinary tract symptoms in older men. Chuck Scales some years ago had his project on urinary dysfunction, informing accountable urologic care. And Ann Suskind had a urological study on common surgical procedures in the nursing home residents. So these are just some, I think, success stories of what the GEMSTAR can do and really get people started or push their career towards aging in a big way. Next slide. So the Beeson Award I mentioned, and it's a much higher dollar amount. If you saw Candice's slide on the K, it's got like 75K for salary. This one is a little bit higher and has 50K a year for research costs. And it's really dedicated to emerging leaders in aging. And again, from various specialties, a variety of specialties are in this. Beeson is for MDs only. I think there are a few exceptions for non-MDs, but not too many. Clinically trained, early stage investigators. And I mentioned Scott Bauer. I think his GEMSTAR led to his Beeson that he just got awarded in that same area that I mentioned. So it has an RFA listed here and the link, and it was just due also. So it's due in about a year from now. So I think it's worth looking into if you're into that. And one thing I should mention also that's a recent NIA policy change for the K awards is that for surgeons, we are allowing 50% effort as a minimum. So normally the Ks have a 75% minimum, but we recognize that for surgeons, this was posing a problem. And so we formally announced that as a policy this year. Next slide. So Candace and I are both program officers. So I just wanted to touch on, when you hear from a mentor or from me, you should call a program officer. So this is sort of the nuts and bolts of that. So we are developing, our work involves developing funding initiatives, advocating for projects, talking to the PIs about their ideas, offering feedback on aims pages, explaining summary statements and giving advice. And if you email either of us about your idea, we can either give you that advice or connect you to someone else who might be better. Depends, we have to look at it and kind of judge that. We can sometimes recommend a study section or two. And one misconception is that we participate in the program in the peer review, we do not. We sit there very quietly and listen, okay? So if you count that as participating, then we do, but that's not really participating. So we prefer email with some aims. They don't necessarily have to be a full page, but some draft aims. We recommend that you start with the matchmaker tool that's in NIH Reporter, just to find a link. So if you don't want to do that, just send it to me. But you can find out if it should be me or Candace or NIDDK from that. But email us and schedule a call and we can discuss your aims with you and give you some of that advice. And your collaborators are welcome if so. But we don't speak for the other institutes. So sometimes we suggest contacting another institute for those questions that fall in between. Next slide. Next slide. Yeah, okay. I put in this about reading a funding announcement. I think Candace and I both made reference to a lot of different funding announcements and you kind of have to screen through them. But if you think you're going to apply to the funding announcement, you really have to read the whole thing. And it can be quite long. If you, in the old days, I guess when you had a printer that someone else was paying for, you could print it out and it'd be 25 pages long. But now, you can't even read it on your phone. It's too long. But read the whole thing multiple times. It has, the overview is in the title. There's some, this code, like we've been throwing out R03, R01. The purpose is very short and concise, but you really need to look at the full description, the key dates. If there's a thing that says standard dates, then you have to kind of click through and figure out when those standard dates are. Who's eligible, very key. As Candice said, sometimes non-citizens have specific issues they can't apply for very much. The contact names are in there, and they're a good starting place for if you have no idea. But I think sometimes, like with that Beeson announcement, the person listed may be the right person for you, or maybe the right person for you is me. And so, I'm not listed in the Beeson announcement, so buyer beware. Key things that, the description is usually one to two pages of text with a lot of detail. And then, there are requirements now. We put in how much money we intend to spend on a funding announcement for some of them. If there's dedicated money, they will say that. Some things don't have that, and we'll get to the payline in a second. Sometimes, they have a limited project period. Sometimes, it's five years. Sometimes, it's two years. So, look at that. And there are instructions on what you must address. And then, there's the review criteria. And some people think we have only one set of review criteria, but that's not true. And sometimes, we have special review criteria for certain announcements. Next slide. And so, I'll just talk about review very briefly. As I said, I don't participate in it, but I know a lot about it. So, for a lot of grants in the R thing here, they're reviewed by the NIH Center for Scientific Review, which is like, it's kind of a sister to NIA, but they only do review. And they convene those study sections. Next slide. I mean, Vance, yeah. Whereas, for some of the other things, like the K grants, especially the career development grants are reviewed by NIA. And the BESIN has its own RFA panel. The GEMSTAR has an RFA panel convened by NIA. And a few large clinical trials are reviewed by NIA, program projects, meeting grants, and so on. So, those are all reviewed by NIA. So, that's another thing. So, this may sound like some other language. And if so, revisit this with the call with the program officer. Next slide. So, we just started the fiscal year 2022, but we completed 2021 with these pay lines. And advance this again. So, I think, just suffice it to say that on the left-hand side, it's got the NIA review, and those are just based on the score. So, the score runs from 10 to 90, and low score is better, like in golf. So, that shows you what those pay lines are. But most people are looking at the percentiles for those NIHR grants. And that's the top line on the right-hand side. So, the CSR reviewed grants, under 500,000 for R01 had a percent of 10 for the general pay line. And if they were large, only a percentile of seven. But for the Alzheimer's pay line, as you see on the right, 28th percentile. And so, that's the substantial difference that Candice mentioned. So, we do have some grants that bridge between the brain and the bladder, and have been able to reach that AD pay line based on some, I'll get into that maybe in the discussion. So, there is some chance of that, but a lot of things, if they're straight geriatrics without any Alzheimer's, they get the general pay line. And then just to notice that there are some bonuses for new and early stage investigators, and this is just for the RO1s that's shown here in that right-hand side. Next slide. And finally, we do have these initiatives and plan things, as I said, that's one of the things program officers do. So we have a way, those, if I go to try to get money for a project, it goes through various steps and the concepts are announced on our blog or they're announced in the concept approval page and also discussed on the blog. The funding announcements are on that research funding website and the NIA blog I listed here, and I highly recommend you sign up for it and you get a weekly blog posting about NIA and it covers a lot of different topics. Next slide. And this is my contact information and another promotion of the blog. So I think we can stop and answer some questions. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Kerr and Dr. Saliv. That was very informative. We are now gonna open up the Q&A section. So if you have any questions, please put your question in the Q&A box and I will ask those questions to our panelists. I am gonna go ahead and get started. Dr. Saliv, you mentioned the NIH Reporter Matchmaker Tool, which is extremely helpful, but for those participants on with us tonight who are not familiar with that tool, can you give us a little more insight in terms of what you would use that for and what kinds of things you can find on that website? Sure, yeah. I'll put it into the chat also, the link, and it's a great tool for understanding about NIH, but it can kind of be, I guess, a time sink also. You can search it for a lot of things and at the bottom, there's a box and you can type in any text you want. So you could type in like, urge urinary incontinence and aging or something like that. And you would get things, the most relevant things coming up to that would pop in by funded projects. You'd get really funded projects. And then, but you can, in addition to just using a sentence, you could use your whole abstract of your grant to see if, what are the relevant things close to that that are funded? Because you don't wanna have the same thing as somebody else did, right? Of course, but it's gotta, you can look for potential collaborators, you can see how much stuff is funded now, approximately. So it's got a lot of things there. And there's a second tab, which you can match it to the program officer. And so that lists the program officers for your perusal. But the thing about those grants is there's a lot of rich information on them. It says, how much money was funded for one year. I think it says what study section it went to, and that can be sometimes helpful. So it's got a lot of potential. You can look at the whole abstract of the grant if you are really interested in that grant. And that's a little bit more than, that's about the most you can get, but then if you contact the PI, you might be able to find out even more about the person's grant. So just to clarify, if you have a research idea and you're not sure which institute would be the best one to likely fund that idea, what should you do in that situation? Well, I recommend talking to multiple institutes then. So reaching out to the program officers? Yes. Okay. Yes, because I can give you the level of interest on NIA might have for your idea, but I can't tell you about what the other institutes might think because it's impossible for me to know that. And I will advise you if I think it's, and usually it is advisable to talk to them, but sometimes it isn't. I mean, I think it's, I usually encourage that talk, but there are rare occasions when it's not worthwhile. Okay. We do have a question about career development awards. So for MDs, someone who's an MD PhD, does it make more sense to apply for a K01 or a K08 as an early investigator? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think there's much difference between the K01 and the K08. I've looked at it and I have had this question before and for the life of me, I don't really know the difference. Maybe Candice knows, but I can tell you that if you're an MD and you're doing clinical research that you should definitely not apply for the K01, but you should probably apply for the K23. But the K08, it's common and there's nothing wrong with either of them. And I have about the same equal numbers of K01 and K08 in my group and some MDs in each one, MD PhD. So it sounds like they're pretty similar. There aren't any like specific differences you can think of right off the bat that would make one more appealing than the other. Right. I don't think so. Okay. Because all pelvic floor disorders increase with aging, making them all kind of aging related disorders and conditions, how do researchers know which of the pelvic floor disorders is something that the NIA would be interested in funding? So, because aging is a big component of all of the pelvic floor disorders. So I guess I'm kind of trying to see what would make one of these conditions that we would want to study, not something that the NIA would want to fund. Well, I think it's about the framing of the issue and not the basic like epidemiology of it that it's, everything is more common in older people. So we're not that impressed by that anymore at NIA. It's about what are you going to study that's related to that? So, and is it related? It doesn't have to be related to aging, but as Candice showed those, if you're interested in the mechanism and it's somehow tied to those pillars of aging or the, whatever they call it these days, that there are factors related to aging that we're trying to understand. We are the most common to admit we don't understand a lot about aging. We understand a little bit about aging and we know what we want to learn. And so it's about how the questions are posed and what people want to look at. So I think that's the key. Okay. And if I could add to that too, things that kind of discriminate the applications when they come in as a focus of NIA versus a focus of another institute really is a focus on the aging models. So many a time you see research studies focusing on aging relevant discourse of some sort, whether it's in animals or it's in people, but the ages aren't defined within the realm of when these diseases occur during aging. They're not using aging models. So I tell everybody you better be in an, you better be studying an aging animal or an aging human, one or the other. And of course, with the investigator initiative, R01s and that sort, you really want to have preliminary data in that space too. And you want your mentors to be in that space. So using NIH Matchmaker is a great tool where you could just put, like Marcel said, aging pelvic floor disorder, and then all the awards pop up, and then you sort it by the institute that supported it, NIA. So by definition, those applications made it through review will have aging models that were tested in it. And so those are the types of expertise that we're looking at. And the reviewers are looking at whether the review goes to a study section that has aging in its name or a study section that doesn't have aging in its name. Once that application has an NIA tag, meaning it's going to go to NIA, that review knows that that aging expertise needs to be there. So they have to understand and appreciate in your application exactly what an aging model is. What does an aging tissue look like? Are you looking at those aging markers, which are the hallmarks of the pillars, like Marcel was saying? Are you really looking at those? Because at the end of the day, you may have a great platform to say, this causes the disease, and you frame it like that. It's no longer aging. Now disease is some other institute's auspice. But if it is directed towards looking at this aging mechanism that impacts this disease or how this disease impacts aging, whichever way you want to spin it, now it becomes more of an aging focus. That's really helpful. Kind of along those same lines, do you recommend that researchers applying for grants through NIA funding mechanisms have a gerontologist or some sort of aging specialist on the grant with them? I mean, that's kind of what it's sounding like you're saying. Well, I say it like this. If you really want to learn what aging research is, you want an aging mentor. If you don't have an aging mentor, how are you supposed to learn what the aging research community is worried about or thinking about? Does the title geriatrician or clinical gerontologist have to be in that X, your mentor's title? No, but what their research interests and accomplishments, defining them as an expert in aging research, who's going to mentor you in aging probably is. Well, it doesn't look like we're having any other questions in the chat right now, but I would like to allow a few more minutes just in case some other questions pop up. Well, I can comment on that last question also. I agree with Candice. And on the clinical side with the GEMSTAR and the BESIN, coming to aging, I always recommend to have a team of mentors, and then one should be at least in that geriatrics or gerontology area. But you can have someone in your clinical area as well, and somebody else, a statistician, or sometimes you need that. That's very helpful. Can you both, or one of you tell us where we could find the NIA strategic priorities? So if people have questions about what current priorities the NIA has, where would they go to find that? So it looks like Marcel's looking that up, and Marcel also- It was on slide five. I can put it into the chat. Okay, that would be great, thank you. And the emphasis is if you want to see what's gonna get out there before it's published, the only sort of hint you may have to that is looking at the concept clearances. So these concept clearances, as Marcel mentioned, are projects that program officers and other experts in the field have developed, and they have to be approved at council. So every time, every standard due date, your grants are submitted, then they go through a council review. At that council review, these concept clearances have to be approved. That doesn't mean that that is gonna be coming, a funding announcement or a funding opportunity, doesn't mean that, but a funding announcement cannot occur unless it's gone through council. So it's a good kind of preview of the types of things we think about. And do you get the abstract for that proposal, or what information do you see for that concept? Well, NIA actually posts those concept clearances after every council, and it just kind of gives you an idea of what the concept is. Okay. It's sort of like an abstract. I think it's like, you know, it's an overview, a couple paragraphs, really. But I think a lot of our stuff for this area is gonna be investigator initiated. And so, you know, it's not been a topic of a lot of funding announcements with money, with money beside them. So, or whatever. And just in our last few minutes, I don't wanna put you on the spot, but if you could give our early career researchers one piece of advice, what would that be for them? Launching their research careers. Contact your program officer. Great. Absolutely. Yeah, I think one thing I tell people about their specific aims page is to have it read by many, many people, including kind of even the high level lay person. So that, because the study sections are very large and broad, and, you know, they have people without your expertise, you know, which is really most of the people on that study section. It doesn't matter what study section it is. They're from all different fields. And so for them to buy into your grant, you know, they tend to read that aims page while they're listening to the discussion, I think. And so they're trying to get it in their head how they're gonna vote on your grant, on the score. And, you know, so if that aims page is compelling and they get it, you know, that's why you should spend a lot of time on the aims page. And so, you know, some people understand that and it's very hard to do. It takes a lot of work. That is great advice. I don't see any of their questions in the chat. So I think we can wrap things up just a few minutes early, but I want to sincerely thank you both for joining us and for the excellent information that you provided. And I would like to thank everyone for joining us today on the webinar. And just for your information, our next webinar will be held on November 29th at 7 p.m. Eastern time. And we will get to hear from Dr. Julia Barthold, who is a program director at NIDDK. So if you have, if you would like to sign up, you can go to the pfdresearch.org website. And again, thank you, Dr. Kerr and Dr. Salih. And good night to everyone. Good night, thank you. Bye-bye.

webinar

AUG's Early Career Research Leadership Program

Dr. Carolyn Swenson

Dr. Kerr

Dr. Salih

National Institute of Aging

NIA

aging research

career development opportunities