What is the difference between a solicited and an unsolicited or investigator-initiated grant application?
All applications to NIH must now identify a specific funding opportunity announcement. However some FOAs are generic to a funding mechanism (e.g. an unsolicited R01, R21, R03 application) and some FOAs are specific to given Institute/Center(s) or announcement (e.g. a solicited R01, R21, R03 with a specific NIDA theme). All NIDA funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) are available at the NIDA website, NIH Guide, and Grants.gov websites provided above. Solicited applications that use FOAs that are announced priority areas for NIDA include Requests for Applications (RFAs) or Program Announcements (PAs) in which NIDA participates. If your application theme can fit well within one of these (again, discussion with NIDA Program Staff is recommended), use the SF 424 R&R form available for that FOA. Remember that each grant funding mechanism supported by NIH has a more general parent funding opportunity announcement that is also used for unsolicited (aka investigator-initiated) applications a
