Mission
The Office of Research, Health Sciences (OORHS) is part of the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor of the Health Sciences, and our sole, fully institutionally supported mission is to help faculty in the six schools of the Health Sciences (the School of Public Health, the School of Dental Medicine, the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, the School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, and the School of Pharmacy) achieve success in their research program.
The key aspect of this mission is grant writing assistance, which is not a didactic course in grant writing, but rather personalized guidance focused solely on a specific proposal. The four staff in OORHS are trained, PhD-level scientists with over 35 years of collective experience whose main function is to assist faculty in developing high-quality, rigorous, and compelling research proposals. In a nutshell, this is done through iterative critical editorial and scientific review of ever-improving drafts over time. Ideally, this process will begin a couple of months before the submission deadline, with several review iterations leading to a logical, coherent and polished grant application. We review over 150 applications per year and have assisted Pitt investigators in garnering $75M over the past two fiscal years.
OORHS also assists by guiding Pitt faculty to federally and privately funded grant opportunities, managing and overseeing the Health Sciences biomedical research resources, as well as administering two of our own internal funding mechanisms – the Competitive Medical Research Fund (CMRF) and Bridge Funding.
OORHS serves the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences community by:
- Providing Information about research funding announcements, federal and University policy changes, and the latest scientific news
- Administering institutional grants programs, such as the Competitive Medical Research Fund (CMRF) and the Health Science Bridge Funding program
- Providing editorial assistance, grantsmanship advice, and scientific review of grant applications for Health Science faculty members
- Facilitating the preparation of multi-investigator and multi-disciplinary grant applications
- Providing guidance to new research faculty in the Schools of the Health Sciences
- Fostering the development and use of research resources and core facilities