NIH Pioneer Award
Sponsor Deadline: September 2, 2016
Award Amount: $700,000/year for 5 years 

The NIH Pioneer Award initiative complements NIH's traditional, investigator-initiated grant programs by supporting individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering and possibly transforming approaches to addressing major biomedical or behavioral challenges that have the potential to produce an unusually high impact on a broad area of biomedical or behavioral research. To be considered pioneering, the proposed research must reflect substantially different scientific directions from those already being pursued in the investigator’s research program or elsewhere. While the research direction may have as its foundation the applicant’s prior work and expertise, it cannot be an obvious extension or scale up of a current research enterprise which could be anticipated to be competitive as a new or renewal R01 application.  Rather, the proposed project must reflect a fundamental new insight into the potential solution of a problem, which may derive from the development of exceptionally innovative approaches and/or from the posing of radically unconventional hypotheses.  Pioneer awardees are required to commit the major portion (at least 51%) of their research effort to activities supported by the Pioneer Award research project.