Award Overview

What is the NIH Director's Transformative Research Award?

The NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (R01 mechanism), established in 2009, supports exceptionally innovative and/or unconventional research projects with the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms. Multiple Principal Investigators and large budget applications are welcome. Though the application uses the standard R01 application, the requested information is very different from the standard R01. No detailed experimental plan or preliminary data are required. In the “Research Strategy” component, the investigators are asked to describe the challenge or problem being addressed, why it is important, and why the proposed approaches to addressing this major challenge or problem are unusually innovative. In addition, the investigators are asked to use the “Specific Aims” component to distill their proposal into a one-page summary in which they explicitly address the challenge, innovation, and impact of what they propose and the rationale of their approach.