The University of Pittsburgh has a long history with NIH Institutional National Research Service Awards (NRSA) dating back to the 1980s. In June of 2022, Pitt convened an Institutional Training Grant Summit to engage Pitt’s academic community with the following objectives:
- Highlight the impact of current National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutional training grant programs on the University’s research enterprise.
- Share training trends, changes in the current NIH funding landscape, and new opportunities at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
- Identify ways to leverage existing institutional resources and networks of support.
- Engage with other stakeholders to identify gaps in institutional support for training grant programs and propose solutions.
The Summit was attended by 126 training grant directors, training faculty, grant administrators, and other faculty members, staff and academic leaders interested in fostering and supporting renewed growth in institutional training grant programs across funding agencies. You can access the minutes from the Summit here.
A key challenge that was identified is the fragmentation of proposal development information and resources for institutional training grants across Pitt. The need for a centralized location where Pitt faculty could easily access information about the range of institutional traineeship programs led to cross-institutional collaboration to create this comprehensive site.