The NIH Research Education Cooperative Agreement Program (UE5)supports research education activities in the mission areas of the NIH. The overarching goal of this National Cancer Institute (NCI) UE5 program is to support educational activities that complement and/or enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs.
To accomplish the stated over-arching goal, this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) will support creative educational activities with a primary focus on Courses for Skills Development.
This UE5 FOA is a part of the NCI’s Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program (https://itcr.cancer.gov/). The UE5 awardee to be supported under this FOA will serve as an ITCR Education Resource for educational activities that will help their participants to enhance the use and usability of the informatics tools and other resources developed and supported by the ITCR program.
Specifically, it is anticipated that the UE5 awardee will provide short courses for both cancer researchers and developers of informatics tools for cancer research.
The proposed UE5 Resource will provide focused education courses in each of the following two areas:
(1) Cancer informatics (for cancer researchers, who are end users of informatics tools); and
(2) Optimizing informatics tool usability and user support (for informatics tool developers).
The courses supporting education in cancer informatics should cover the variety of cancer research domains supported by ITCR tools (https://itcr.cancer.gov/informatics-tools). These cancer informatics courses should incorporate ITCR tools as exemplars for applying informatics methods, including, as appropriate, hands-on training on the associated tools and analysis workflows for participants.
The courses in optimizing informatics tool usability and user support should focus on activities that target the needs of currently funded ITCR development teams. These educational activities should provide guidance on how the ITCR development teams can enhance the usability and user support of their tools. Whereas understanding of the ITCR initiative is essential, the applicants need not be current ITCR awardees.