Section I. Funding Opportunity Description
Background

Modern mental health-related research can require expensive instruments that are often hard to obtain through traditional funding mechanisms. The goal of the NIMH Instrumentation Program is to make such instruments available to either individual laboratories or core facilities that conduct mental health-related research. These instruments can be commercial instruments or collections of components that others have already described how to assemble into a working instrument. Upgrades of existing instruments can also be requested.

Investigators can propose instruments that will be used by their laboratory or by a collection of investigators. Investigators who are proposing to provide the instrument only to members of their laboratory must state why the instrument cannot be shared. In either case, investigators are strongly encouraged to house the requested instrument in a core facility or other shared facility to ensure that the new instrument remains functional and available to the research community over its useful lifetime.

Research Objectives

Types of instruments that might be appropriate for the NIMH Instrumentation Program include light microscopes, electron microscopes, spectrophotometers, and biomedical imagers. This list is representative and not exhaustive. Foreign-made instruments are allowed. A single application cannot request multiple unrelated instruments. In such cases, multiple applications can be submitted.

The goal of this FOA is to provide instruments to collect data rather than components for further instrument/technology development. Instrument development applications should be submitted to other FOAs on which NIMH participates or to appropriate BRAIN Initiative FOAs.

Non-Responsive Applications

Applications without a quote will be considered non-responsive and will be withdrawn prior to review.

The NIMH Instrumentation Program will not support requests for:

Purely instructional equipment
Instruments used for billable clinical care
Institutional administrative management systems
Stand-alone computer systems or software (Computers and software that are a component of an instrument, for example for an MRI console are responsive. An application containing only a stand alone computer systems or software is not responsive.)
General purpose equipment, an assortment of instruments to furnish a research facility, or equipment for routine sustaining infrastructure (such as autoclaves, hoods, cages for animal facilities, standard machine shop equipment)
Equipment or components that are part of an effort to develop new instruments rather than to collect data
Multiple unrelated instruments or components. Note: in such cases, multiple applications can be submitted.
Applications requesting such equipment will be non-responsive and will be withdrawn prior to review. Applicants are encouraged to contact program staff if they have questions about whether their instrument request is responsive.