Why does NIH allow multiple-PD/PIs on individual research awards?
This effort represents an NIH Roadmap initiative as well as a response to a Federal-wide directive to formally allow more than one PD/PI on individual research awards. In addition, a major recommendation from the 2003 NIH Bioengineering Consortium Symposium on Catalyzing Team Science was to allow more than one PI on individual grants. The policy offers approaches to maximize the potential of team science efforts. The multiple-PD/PI model supplements, and does not replace, the traditional single-PD/PI model. Although the single-PD/PI model clearly continues to work well and encourages creativity and productivity, it does not always facilitate multidisciplinary efforts and collaboration. Increasingly, health-related research involves teams that vary in terms of size, hierarchy, location of participants, goals, disciplines, and structure. The selection of the multiple-PD/PI versus single-PD/PI option is the decision of the applicant institution and investigators, and must be based on the
