NIH S10 Instrumentation Programs: Shared Instrumentation Grant Program (SIG) & High-End Instrumentation Grant Program (HEI)
Institutionally coordinated submission - Contact RDS to apply
R. Liang (Optical Sciences) - S10 SIG PAR-22-080
ORIP's S10 Instrumentation Grant Programs support purchases of state-of-the-art commercially available instruments to enhance research of NIH-funded investigators. Instruments that are awarded are typically too expensive to be obtained by an individual investigator with a research project grant. Every instrument awarded by an S10 grant is to be used on a shared basis, which makes the programs cost-efficient and beneficial to thousands of investigators in hundreds of institutions nationwide.
S10 awards are made to domestic public and private institutions of higher education, as well as nonprofit domestic institutions, such as hospitals, health professional schools, and research organizations. To be eligible for an S10 award, an institution must identify three or more principal investigators with active NIH research awards who demonstrate a substantial need for the requested instrument.
Awards are issued for 1 year, and matching funds are not required. However, ORIP expects institutions that compete for S10 awards to provide an appropriate level of support for the associated infrastructure, such as the space to house the instrument, technical personnel, and post-award service contracts for instrument maintenance and operation.
Types of instruments supported by S10 funding include, but are not limited to, X-ray diffraction systems, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometers, DNA and protein sequencers, biosensors, electron and confocal microscopes, cell-analyzers, and biomedical imagers.
Active RFPs are:
- Basic Instrumentation Grant Program (BIG) – UArizona is not eligible to apply to this funding program
- Shared Instrumentation Grant Program (SIG) – The SIG Program funds grant awards in the $50,000 to $600,000 range.
- High-End Instrumentation Grant Program (HEI) – The HEI Program funds grant awards in the $600,001 to $2,000,000 range.
There is no restriction on the number of applications an institution (as identified by a specific Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) can submit to the companion funding opportunities (Shared Instrumentation Grants (SIG) and/or High-End Instrumentation (HEI) Grant Programs) each year, provided the applications request different types of equipment. Concurrent BIG, SIG or HEI applications for the same instrument (or the same type of instrument with added special accessories – for example, to meet the HEI budget requirement) are not allowed unless documentation from a high-level institutional official is provided, stating that this is not an unintended duplication, but part of a campus-wide instrumentation plan. Applicants are advised to discuss with the BIG Scientific/Research Contact (Section VII) potential duplicates before submitting two applications for the same type of instrument. A single application requesting more than one type of instrument (for example, a spectrometer and a microscope) is not responsive to this FOA and will not be reviewed.