A five-day workshop on research project management and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants has been held at Coconut Groove Hotel in Elmina with a call on participants to strive to secure NIH grants.
The workshop, which commenced Wednesday, July 10, and ended Tuesday, July 16, brought together key faculty members from the College of Health and Allied Sciences (CoHAS) of the University of Cape Coast (UCC).
It was organised by the Biomedical and Clinical Research Centre at UCC and the Africa Centre of Excellence for Population Health and Policy (ACEPHAP), Bayero University, Kano.
Participants were taken through the introduction to NIH and its funding, landscape, and overview of the different types of NIH (R01, R02, among others), as well as identifying the right funding opportunity using the RePORTER programme.
An Associate Professor at Bayero University, Kano in Nigeria, Professor Baba Maiyaki Musa, at the workshop, said NIH grants are one of the most competitive research grants in the world, and attract thousands of applications from leading researchers in the United States and other countries.
The participants during an interaction
The major grant awards of the NIH, according to him, were divided into Research Grants (R series), Career Development Awards (K series), Research Training and Fellowships (T & F series), Programme Project/Centre Grants (P series), and miscellaneous programmes.
Prof. Musa observed that the majority of NIH funding comes from US Congress, as well as from philanthropists.
An Associate Professor of Environmental and Nutritional Epidemiology at the UCC, Prof. Adeladza Kofi Amegah, speaking on project management, asked participants to use social media to make their publications known to the world. He said he got a lot of collaborators through social media.
The Provost of the College of Health and Allied Sciences, Prof. Martins Ekor, urged faculty members to make impactful research to attract NIH grants.
In a remark, the Director of the Biomedical and Clinical Research Centre at UCC, Prof. Samuel Kyei, encouraged participants to utilise the knowledge gained from the various facilitators.
Source: Documentation and Information Section-UCC