Stacy L. Chin breaks down how NIH grants work from application to award. After you submit, expect 4-5 months of expert review and panel scoring. If you score high enough, you enter a Just-In-Time phase where NIH asks final questions about your team and budget before issuing the official award.
3 months preparing an application, you're done, you hit the submit button, you won't hear back from NIH for about 4 to 5 months. And during that 4 to 5 months, the reviewers are not there twiddling their thumbs. There's a lot going on behind the scenes. So they're getting budget applications, they're pushing it to the right review sections, they're all doing their independent reviews, and then eventually they get together to score and talk about the applications. On the best-case scenario, they want to award you, you then enter something called a just-in-time or JIT process, which is the kind of due diligence. And so they're kind of looking through the applications, they're asking you last-minute questions, they're asking you who's this person, what's the budget. So it can be a very long process. The back and forth can take maybe weeks or even months at a time until you get the, the notice of award, which is then you can relax and celebrate and break open the champagne.
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