2019 Award Activations Program Descriptions

2019 Innovative Project Award Letter of Intent Instructions

Log on to ProposalCentral and navigate as follows:
Application Administration > Create New Application
From the “Select Program” drop down list, choose "2019 Innovative Project Award".
Complete the Pre-Submission Questionnaire (8 questions)
These questions help determine your eligibility to apply for this award.
1. If your eligibility is confirmed with the answers you provide, you will be granted immediate access to complete a LOI.
2. If you miss a question, you will receive a message that you provided an unacceptable response (or responses) to the questionnaire. You will be asked to clarify response(s), which will be monitored by an AHA staff member. AHA will contact you regarding the explanation you provided for the incorrect response. If the explanation is acceptable, you will be allowed to continue with the LOI.
Advanced Profile
In this section of the application, you will provide information about yourself, your academic career, professional time, citizenship, location of work for the research project and college degrees.; Save each section as you complete it.
Project Summary
1. Enter the percent effort you will devote to this project
2. Enter a Project Title
3. Complete the Project Summary
  Write a concise description or abstract describing the work proposed, focusing on innovation and impact (see Peer Review Criteria for this program). This should be as brief as possible, since you also will be required to upload a separate one-page Letter of Intent/pre-proposal.
  Note: This field is limited to 2,500 characters and will not accept special characters or keystrokes (e.g., β, π, etc.).
Science Classifications and Research Classification
These classifications are independent of each other and will not affect the peer review of your application.
1. Research Classification Type: Select the Research Type that best fits the research being conducted in your lab (basic, clinical, or population).
  1. Indicate whether your research is translational in nature.
2. Major Science Classification: Choose BOTH a Major Class 1 and a Major Class 2.
  1. For each major classification, you may select up to six sub-classifications to identify the appropriate scientific expertise.
  2. Current science classifications are listed on the AHA website.
Personnel
1. Enter supervisor’s and department head’s information.
2. Select the Grants Officer and Fiscal Officer from your Sponsoring Institution
  The Grants Officer and Fiscal Officer must be selected from the list of registered users. Contact your institution’s grants office if you are unsure of which person to select from the list. It is important to select the correct Grants Officer as he or she is responsible for the final submission of your LOI to the AHA.
Lay Summary
Applications for research funding will be assessed for their potential impact on the AHA Mission, and on the applicant’s ability to effectively describe the proposal and its potential outcomes to non-scientists. This potential impact assessment will be based primarily on the Summary for Non-scientists. This assessment will be factored into the Impact peer review criterion, which will account for 5-10% of the overall priority score. The summary will be reviewed by the study section and may be assessed by a lay reviewer. A lay reviewer is an individual who does not have formal training as a scientist, and who has strong interest in advancing the prevention and/or management of cardiovascular and/or cerebrovascular disease. Lay reviewers specifically help evaluate how well the applicant explains the potential impact of the proposal. Describe your work in a way that it will be understood by people who do not have scientific or medical backgrounds. Be clear and avoid technical and scientific terms when possible. It might help to imagine that you are explaining your work to a new acquaintance who does not work in the science field.

NOTE: You must then use an online tool to analyze the grade level of your summary, striving for an eighth-grade equivalent. Type in the grade level that the online tool you used rated your summary.
Funds Available
Enter details for active and pending research support that is available to you.
Science/Evaluation Information
1. Upload your Letter of Intent/Pre-proposal as a pdf document (1-page limit). See below for guidelines.
2. Upload a list of your 15 most impactful and/or foundational publications that are relevant to the proposed research focus or this program in a pdf document (limited to 2 pages). When selecting, consider those which are foundational papers that support your research program; those that are most cited; and for more recent publications, those in the most high-impact journals or that you predict will elicit the most citations.
3. Submit your biosketch (5-page limit)
Submit to Grants Officer
The LOI Application must be submitted to your institution’s Grants Officer. Allow your Grants Officer enough time to review and submit it to the AHA by the stated deadline.

Letter of Intent (Pre-proposal) Guidelines

A Letter of Intent (LOI), limited to one (1) page, will be required. This pre-proposal should briefly address the following points.

Clearly and explicitly articulate the project's innovation and the potential impact on cardiovascular and/or cerebrovascular research.
The Innovative Project Award (IPA) promotes unexplored ideas; therefore, If you include information about preliminary work, then the proposal is not innovative. You may refer to previous projects you have conducted to demonstrate that you possess a competency or technique that equips you to take on this new direction. Proposals may also refer to existing, unanalyzed datasets and the types of data they contain (e.g., geospatial, demographic, billing, molecular) that could be leveraged in conducting the proposed work, but there should be no preliminary descriptive summaries of the data itself.
How your proposed project will introduce a new paradigm, challenge current paradigms, look at existing problems from new perspectives, or exhibit other uniquely creative qualities.
Provide a solid rationale for the work.
Discuss new avenues of investigation that will be revealed, if successful.

Format/Type Requirements

You must comply exactly with the AHA's format/type requirements and page limits. Failure to comply will result in the administrative withdrawal (disqualification) of the application.

Only Portable Document Format (PDF) files will be accepted.
LOI must be single-spaced.
No more than 15 characters per inch (cpi) or an average of no more than 15 cpi (cpi includes symbols, punctuation and spaces).
No less than ¾" margins allowed.
Sixty lines per page are the maximum allowed. The average number of lines per page using the font and point size below will be approximately 50-55 lines.
- Windows users: Arial Font style, 12 point font size
- Macintosh users: Helvetica Font style, 12 point font size
Figures, charts, tables, graphics and legends may be smaller in size but must be clear and legible.
One-page limit, after converting your document to a pdf.

Note: the ProposalCentral electronic system will reject a document that exceeds the page limit.

Users of other Word-processing programs must adjust settings appropriately and should measure text after saving and printing as a PDF. Type requirements should be checked using a standard measuring device (such as a ruler), rather than relying on the font selected for a particular word processing/printer combination. Type size specifications must be observed in the text of your research plan or the application will not be reviewed and will be withdrawn. Adherence to font and margin requirements is necessary. No applicant should have an advantage over other applicants by providing more content in his/her application by using smaller, denser type. The AHA has the responsibility to make the final determination of conformance to format requirements and the authority to withdraw applications. This decision is final and not subject to appeal.

Internet Web site addresses (URLs) may not be used to provide information necessary to the review. Reviewers are under no obligation to view the Internet sites. Moreover, reviewers are cautioned not to directly access an Internet site, as it could compromise their anonymity.

The only place a URL may be used is in the biographical sketch as described in the instructions for that form. Provide a URL to a full list of your published work as found in a publicly available digital database such as SciENcv or My Bibliography, which are maintained by the US National Library of Medicine.