Other : Planning and Dissemination Grants – IPPH - ICS

CIHR's mandate is to excel, according to internationally accepted standards of scientific excellence, in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health, more effective health services and products, and a strengthened health care system through a unique interdisciplinary structure made up of virtual Institutes and Initiatives.  To achieve these objectives, the Institutes promote, and build upon, Canada’s firm foundation of research excellence; and Initiatives are created to investigate pressing health issues that are of strategic importance to our country.

One of the mechanisms for the Institutes/Initiatives to achieve their mandates is by offering Planning and/or Dissemination grants within the Institute Community Support (ICS) Program. The Planning and Dissemination Grants are intended to provide support for planning and/or dissemination activities consistent with the mandate of CIHR and relevant to CIHR Institutes, or Initiatives.

As part of the Institute of Population and Public Health’s transition to new leadership, the Institute has undertaken a “Listening Tour” to engage researchers from across Canada in order to better understand existing knowledge gaps and priority areas for population and public health research and to help update IPPH’s strategic plan.  In response to these recent consultations, IPPH is launching planning grants to support initial planning around two priority areas (described below).

Research Areas

This funding opportunity will support projects relevant to the following two research areas:

• Building Healthy Cities
• IPPH is developing preliminary ideas for strategic efforts to deepen Canada’s scientific leadership in planning, designing and building healthy cities.
• As one part of initiating this process, IPPH is providing funding for researchers to develop and formally pitch ideas for large-scale “big science” intervention research projects focused on building healthy cities. The goal is to encourage bold, out-of-the-box, blue-sky thinking for ambitious research projects. The ideas should be geared towards a single study that would be feasibly completed in a 5-7year time-frame with a maximum of $10 million CAD (excluding the cost of implementing any interventions). The successful grantees will be brought together for each to pitch their ideas to inform possible future funding opportunities on healthy cities research.

Note: The $10 million CAD amount is provided as a guide for the development of comparable bold proposals and not meant as a funding commitment on the part of CIHR.

• Proposed ideas must fall within the mandate of IPPH, which aims to improve the health of populations and promote health equity in Canada and globally.

• Artificial Intelligence for Population Health
• CIHR’s current strategic plan, Health Research Roadmap II, emphasizes a commitment to building Canada’s capacity to innovate in the area of health research; enable health researchers to conduct “high-quality data-intensive research”; and “maximize opportunities for big data to advance knowledge and inform decisions that improve health, social and economic outcomes”.
• IPPH will provide funding for planning activities/events that facilitate the development of partnerships, teams and/or grant applications for research projects exploring the use of artificial intelligence to answer population health questions that could subsequently be funded by CIHR or other funders.
• Applications must be focused on developing or applying artificial intelligence approaches for the purpose of addressing population health issues that are aligned with the mandate of the Institute. Applications focused on biomedical, clinical or health services research are not eligible for this funding opportunity.