Hey all you NIH savvy readers… I just checked up on the status of my R01 submission to see which institute it went to and to check for a study section assignment. I was a bit surprised to see that it got a double institute assignment with NINDS listed as primary and NIDA as secondary. The study section was the one I asked for in the cover letter with the program officer for that study section. Is this normal? Good news that I have two potential institutes for funding? A new aspect of the funding new investigators initiatives?
JUNIORPROF 
Relatively common, chief. Study sections are technically independent of institutes and often review grants assigned to more than one (although most focus on grants for one institute). When your work cuts across programmatic priorities for more than one institute, you often get a dual assignment. After scoring, if NINDS doesn’t fund you, you’ll get referred to NIDA at the Program level. It used to matter a lot more when institutes had vastly different paylines. However, if your project is programmatically more important to one or the other, you just might get bumped up.
In my experience, a dual assignment never helped me but, then again, I was never the cutting-edge young buck that you are!
Good luck and continue to keep us posted.
what Abel said. Totally common and I’ve yet to see it make a difference.
Interesting new thing I’ve learned with CRISP. A 9 code starting the grant number means an IC switch for a continuation app. Fun to wildcard 9R01% and see which grants had to find a new home.
I have never heard of a single motherfucking grant that didn’t get paid by the primary IC getting paid by the secondary. Anyone got anything to the contrary?
According to the CSR website:
“The frequency of a dual assignment leading to a change to primary and award is less than 2%.”
News to me! Thanks for blogging it!