mudphudder

Be honest, you want to know what NIH grants the PI down the hall has.  Right?  Of course you do.  You want to know how good he’s got it and how that compares to your NIH funding situation.  Well, the completely open thing to do would be to ask but then you look nosey and the other PI might figure out your ulterior motive.  But you have another option: the CRISP database.

To quote from the CRISP website:

CRISP (Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects) is a searchable database of federally funded biomedical research projects conducted at universities, hospitals, and other research institutions. The database, maintained by the Office of Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health, includes projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (SAMHSA), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP), Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ), and Office of Assistant Secretary of Health (OASH). Users, including the public, can use the CRISP interface to search for scientific concepts, emerging trends and techniques, or identify specific projects and/or investigators.

So you can use this database to spy on any investigator’s NIH funding status.  But in all seriousness, the CRISP database can be a really useful tool if you are thinking of writing a grant or even starting a new project because you can see if someone is already funded to work on your project.  It can potentially save you a lot of time in not writing a grant that someone else already has (or at least give you an opportunity to sufficiently distinguish your own grant).  Moreover, by knowing who else is working on a similar project, you can either know who to contact for collaboration or help (if you need it) or in contrast, you’ll know who to hide your work from…

Addendum:

Thanks to the readers who pointed out that CRISP is no longer up and running.  But, for those of you who still have the morbid curiosity to see which cocksuckers have NIH funding while you languish away barely making ends-meet on foundation grants, there is the RePORT Expenditures and Results query tool at: http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm

September 11th, 2009 | Tags: funding | Category: md / medical student stuff, md / phd student stuff, phd / graduate student stuff, research | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL