Funding, News and Announcements

On April 2, CIHR provided an update about the impact of COVID-19 on the Project Grant Program and other competitions. Key messages to come from the announcement:

Competitions:

• The Spring 2020 grant competition has been cancelled.

1. Nominated Principal Applicants (NPAs) from the Spring 2020 Project Grant competition will be given the option to bring their submission forward automatically to the Fall 2020 Project Grant competition, or to withdraw their application and resubmit a new or updated application to the Fall competition.  

• CIHR will place a moratorium on all existing and any new strategic/institute-driven funding opportunities during the next three months. The exception is that any funding competitions related to COVID-19 will continue to go forward.

Extensions:

• CIHR will financially extend all existing Investigator-Initiated Research grants scheduled to expire between June 30, 2020 and March 30, 2021, for one year.
• An automatic one-year extension to the authority-to-use-funds date for all active grants. This will give researchers an additional full year to use any residual funds not yet spent to compensate for disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Details on the process for the above announcements are still pending. ORS will provide an update when more information is available.

The full text of CIHR’s announcement is available here.

FAQs pertaining to CIHR’s latest announcement are available here.