On June 6, 2019, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) hosted the 12th NIH Matilda White Riley Behavioral and Social Sciences Honors. Each year, this honors event commemorates the contributions of Dr. Matilda White Riley (PDF, 684 KB), who advanced health-related behavioral and social sciences research at the NIH and served many of the functions of the OBSSR before the Office was created nearly 25 years ago.

The National Institutes of Health Health High-Risk, High-Reward program (HRHR) is a Common Fund effort created to accelerate the pace of biomedical, behavioral, and social science discoveries by supporting exceptionally creative scientists conducting highly innovative research. The program seeks to identify scientists with high-impact ideas that may be risky or at a stage too early to fare well in the traditional peer review process. The program encourages creative, outside-the-box thinkers to pursue exciting and innovative ideas in any area of biomedical, behavioral, or social sciences resear…

For a number of years, the OBSSR has made available a fact sheet (PDF, 1,071 KB) that lists some key accomplishments of health-related behavioral and social sciences research. That fact sheet, developed in 2013, is becoming dated and is a short list of only a few key accomplishments resulting from behavioral and social sciences research. The NIH behavioral and social sciences staff could generate an updated list, but we can generate a much more extensive and diverse list of accomplishments if we enlist the help of the larger behavioral and social sciences research community. Plus, your crowdso…

A few months ago, back in August 2018, we authored a blog letting the community know that we were working on a new resource for behavioral and social science researchers to prepare research protocols for human studies measuring a behavioral or social outcome or testing a behavioral or social science-based intervention. We are now happy to report back that the template has been finalized and is ready for researchers to utilize. Even better news is that the template has been fully integrated into the NIH’s Clinical e-Protocol Writing Tool!

In the State of the Union Address, the President announced the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) initiative on Ending the HIV Epidemic. The goals are bold, to reduce new infections by 75 percent in 5 years and by 90 percent in 10 years, but are possible due to advances in two areas of research supported by the NIH. First, extensive research on HIV has produced an armamentarium of testing strategies and treatments that have extended the lives and quality of life of people infected with HIV and provided effective prevention strategies. Second, for over a decade, NIH has supported im…

On January 2, 2019, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) released a Request for Information (RFI) seeking input on its Strategic Plan 2020–2024. From a collaborative process involving external and internal stakeholders, six themes have emerged for which NICHD is seeking public input.

The behavioral and social sciences continue to play an integral role in the mission of the NIH. In fiscal year (FY) 2018, NIH funding for grants meeting the RCDC criteria for behavioral and social sciences research was $4.83 billion, an increase from $4.55 billion in FY 2017. All of the NIH Institutes and Centers support the behavioral and social sciences to some degree, with the National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Healt…

NIH released new funding opportunity announcements for Basic Experimental Studies Involving Humans. These funding opportunities are for studies that meet the definition of basic research and are subject to clinical trials policies based on the NIH definition of a clinical trial.

On November 27, 2018, the NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) will host the third NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Festival. This one-day festival provides the opportunity to highlight some of the impactful behavioral and social science research funded by the various NIH Institutes and Centers and gives the NIH staff a day to network and focus on the science we all work to advance.

Last month, a group of researchers representing labs from five institutions and the Center for Open Science published findings on the replication of 21 studies previously published in Nature and Science.