National Coordinating Center for PHSSR - Junior Investigator Award Program

Public health services and systems research (PHSSR) is an emerging field of inquiry dedicated to analysis of the organization, financing and delivery of public health services, and examining the effect these services have on population health status. One of the key aims of the National Coordinating Center for Public Health Services and Systems Research (NCC) is to build the field and expand research capacity by supporting development of junior researchers. The program is designed to attract new researchers to the field by offering junior investigator awards to doctoral students and junior faculty, including support of an established PHSSR mentor. This proposed awards program represents the sixth time the NCC (or its predecessor CPHSSR) will offer this popular award for early career researchers. In NCC’s Year 3, we propose to offer up to 10 junior investigator awards at $10,000 each, and up to five of the awards will be mentored through one of the Public Health PBRNs. The NCC will manage and re-grant the proposed awards. This separate funding mechanism is proposed to allow sufficient time to release the CFP, receive and review proposals, approve finalists and complete University of Kentucky sub-awards with the sponsoring organizations, allow sufficient time for investigators to initiate and complete proposed research, and allow enough time for subawardees’ expenses to be processed at their sponsoring organizations. Our experience is that the 12-month limit on NCC’s funding for this award program is too short to enable the investigators to complete their research and have all charges posted to their accounts