funding
I've had a few inquiries about funding to support this work. Some are percolating; I'm appending a solicitation we could potentially apply to:
Dear Colleagues,
I have sent to the Harvard Medical School faculty the email below notifying them of an urgent RFP related to the COVID-19 pandemic. If any of your faculty have research relevant to the current pandemic, please feel free to forward this and encourage them to apply. The turnaround is short, as proposals are due March 24, 2020, in order to release the funds as soon as possible and launch the research projects.
Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have any questions.
George
Office of the Dean
Dear HMS and HSDM Faculty:
The outbreak of COVID-19 can be considered the single most threatening pandemic to arise in the last century, and we have taken action accordingly to safeguard our community. However, as a leading medical school with clinical and research faculty throughout a large hospital ecosystem, we also have the ability to actively combat the outbreak by executing critical and timely research relevant to the pandemic.
Many of you are aware of a workshop that took place on March 2, which gathered 80 members of the greater Boston biomedical research community to determine how to collectively respond to the COVID-19 outbreak. That community has solidified into the Greater Boston Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (GBCPR), led by Faculty Co-Directors Arlene Sharpe and Bruce Walker. The consortium has received its initial funding from Harvard University based on generous support from the China Evergrande Group in partnership with the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health in Guangzhou, China.
Through this email I am announcing a Request for Proposals for the Evergrande COVID-19 Response Fund Awards, administered by the GBCPR. We are compressing the typical RFP schedule, with two-page proposals due March 24, 2020, and funding beginning as soon as possible in April 2020. Awards will be made in the $50,000 to $500,000 range, which includes total costs per project cumulatively across all budget years. Areas of research include epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines and clinical management related to COVID-19.
Tenure-track faculty members at the level of assistant, associate, or full professor at Harvard University (HMS, FAS, HCSPH, HSDM, SEAS), MIT, Boston University School of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School and hospitals and research institutes affiliated with these four medical schools are eligible to apply as lead PIs. Senior scientists from biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are eligible as co-PIs.
Proposals should be submitted by email to gbcpr@hms.harvard.edu. More information can be found on the consortium website.
We encourage all researchers who work on these topics to apply, particularly those whose research is directly applicable to address the current urgent needs of the COVID-19 outbreak.
If you are wondering why we are announcing this RFP at the same time as we are curtailing much of our in-person laboratory activities, the answer is simple: Our laboratories are being shut down for one set of public health reasons (i.e., the safety of our lab personnel and reducing the spread of the disease in our community), while COVID-19 research is being ramped up for a different set of public health reasons (i.e., to achieve short- and long-term control of the viral illness at the individual patient level and control of this pandemic and future pandemics at the population level). Both sets of activities serve our mission to alleviate suffering and improve health and well-being for all.
Please feel free to forward this RFP to eligible colleagues throughout the Commonwealth, as we expand our community of researchers to combat the pandemic.
Sincerely,
George Q. Daley Dean of the Faculty of Medicine Harvard University