The National Institutes of Health, awash in $10 billion dollars of stimulus cash and scrambling to get it out the door, has announced a new round of supplemental grants that aim to retain or hire new postdoctoral fellows in the labs of NIH-funded investigators.

These "administrative supplements" are meant to "promote job creation and economic development along with accelerating the pace and achievement of scientific research," according to the NIH announcement describing the grants.

The NIH has now announced three rounds of supplementary funding--the two previous rounds requested applications for money to upgrade equipment or to undertake new construction--available to NIH-funded researchers. The agency aims to funnel $1 billion of its stimulus money through these three programs by September 10, 2010.

Raynard Kington, acting NIH director, told The Scientist that such supplementary grants represent a way for the NIH to award grant money efficiently. "This is actually a quicker way than to start grants de novo," he said. "If we stopped to create a new program, we couldn't get it out in time."

Successful applicants who seek to supplement their NIH Research Grants can expect "not more than 50 percent of the amount of the parent grant," according to the NIH. Supplements to Research Career Development Awards, however, will generally be limited to requests of $50,000.

You can find the instructions for applying to these grants, for which an application deadline has not yet been defined, here.

April will be a busy month for researchers hoping to attract some of the NIH stimulus cash. The deadline for the recently-announced Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research is April 27th. Stay tuned to The Scientist for a comprehensive guide to getting a slice of the NIH stimulus pie as application deadlines near.


Related stories:

New NIH stimulus grants go live
[4th March 2009]

NIH stimulus to fund old grants
[19th February 2009]