Pilot Grant Program

Many factors make it difficult to break into the fields of quantitative genetics and systems genetics. These include rapid changes in methods and equipment, dramatic increases in volume and variety of data, and the many complementary, complex, and competing methods for analysis. The Pilot core will work with early career colleagues in SUD research (fellows and pre-tenured faculty) to enable them to explore new omics technologies, new statistical methods/models, and new rat models in SUD research and when needed, provide them with the computational resources and statistical expertise for capitalizing on their and/or public data sets. They will be encouraged to work closely with the Administrative (Admin) core, the Systems Analysis and Modeling (SAM) core, and the Single Molecule AI-assisted RaT omics (SMART) core to create a synergy of resources. Pilots are intended to be moderately risky and innovative. Pilots must also make use of at least one of the research support cores in a significant way. We will also use this Pilot program in one other special way—to bridge across two or more labs. Pilots will have to involve new collaborations between initially independent NIDA teams at one or more institutes. This core will provide SUD researchers not only financial resources to break into the field of systems genetics but also will provide guidance from the inception of the pilot study to success in obtaining more substantial, long-term funding.