Funding Opportunities

The Yale Pepper Center is soliciting letters of intent from full-time faculty members at Yale with interests and expertise relevant to aging research who would be interested in submitting a career development proposal (if within 5 years of total faculty appointment) or a pilot project proposal. The scope of work to be supported by the Yale Pepper Center encompasses basic, translational, epidemiological, clinical trial, health services, informatics, and gerontologic biostatistics research. See instructions on the Pepper Center website for details regarding eligibility and types of awards.

**Important: The National Institute on Aging requires each Pepper Center to declare a theme and the proposed research must fit within that theme. Our theme is described below. In your letter of intent, you will need to describe how your proposed research fits within this theme. In addition, applicants selected for career development awards should expect to participate in seminars and didactic sessions organized by the Yale Pepper Seminar. These are conducted in person and occur throughout the academic year.

The broad unifying theme of the Yale Pepper Center is the investigation of multifactorial geriatric conditions. This theme encompasses (1) single conditions resulting from multiple contributing factors or affecting multiple outcomes and (2) multiple conditions occurring simultaneously. A defining criterion for Yale Pepper Center support is that, regardless of the condition or type of research, the work acknowledges, and accounts for, multiple factors and/or outcomes. The conceptual underpinning of this theme is that geriatric conditions are determined by the co-occurrence of multiple predisposing and precipitating factors. These conditions and factors, in turn, affect a range of health outcomes. The predisposing factors may be at the genetic, molecular, physiologic, impairment, disease, or socio-demographic level, while the precipitating factors may be behavioral, environmental, social, medical, or psychological. The Yale OAIC theme requires designs and models (e.g. molecular, animal, and statistical) that inform the study of multiple, simultaneously interactive factors and outcomes. It is not sufficient to state that the condition you are studying is multifactorial. Rather, you must explicitly describe how your approach is multifactorial. As a related subtheme, the Yale Pepper Center also aims to advance the science of clinical decision making in the face of trade-offs and multiple competing outcomes. This includes developing strategies to elicit older persons’ health outcome priorities.

• Letter of intent due: October 2, 2023 by 5:00 PM
• Invitation for full proposal issued: October 25, 2023
• Due date for full application: December 13, 2023 by 5:00 PM
• Funding begins: July 1, 2024