Tri-agency Interdisciplinary Peer Review Committee moves beyond pilot phase, second-year results announced

After a successful three-year-long pilot phase, Canada’s three federal research funding agencies—the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)—are pleased to announce that the Tri-agency Interdisciplinary Peer Review Committee (TAIPR) will continue as a regular feature of the three agencies’ flagship funding opportunities. This signals the three agencies’ continued commitment to supporting interdisciplinary research that spans the disciplines and research areas supported by at least two of the three funding agencies.

In spring 2021, the agencies launched TAIPR as a one-year pilot program. This built on the agencies’ world-class peer review processes and commitment to supporting interdisciplinary research, by bringing together researchers with expertise from across the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, engineering and health sciences to review proposals for interdisciplinary, investigator-initiated research projects.

Researchers applying to SSHRC’s Insight Grants and Insight Development Grants competitions, CIHR’s fall and spring Project Grant competitions and NSERC’s Discovery Horizons competition can continue to direct their interdisciplinary applications to this committee for review.

See the TAIPR web page for more information, including on eligibility and how to apply.

The agencies are also pleased to share the results of the second year:

Second-year facts and figures

• Fifty-two interdisciplinary researchers served on TAIPR.
• The committee reviewed 131 applications, including 24 Insight Grants, 23 Insight Development Grants, 14 fall 2022 and 20 spring 2023 Project Grant, and 50 Discovery Horizons project applications.
• Forty-three projects were awarded in total, including 10 Insight Grants, seven Insight Development Grants, five (three full and two priority announcement / bridge grants) fall 2022 and five (full) spring 2023 Project Grants, and 16 Discovery Horizons projects.

Projects funded through the Tri-agency Interdisciplinary Peer Review Committee’s second year

SSHRC Insight Grants:

• A Data-Driven Decision Support System for Managing Patient Flow in Emergency Departments
• Canadian Disaster Rapid Response Research (3R) Enhancement: Initiating a Researcher Platform and Coordination Network (Can-3R)
• Development and Validation of Enabling Quality Interactions with Parents (EQUIP): An Automated Software that Codes Parent-Child Interaction Quality
• Identifying the social determinants of lead poisoning in British colonial populations of the Caribbean.
• Improving readability in the digital age: Optimizing variable fonts for individual readers
• Le codesign des technologies numériques en santé mentale
• Nursing and Humanities: An Evolving Relationship
• On the nature of concepts: a psycholinguistic investigation of verb meaning
• Social Simulation on Refugee Resettlement and Canada’s Policy Making
• Supporting a Compassionate Experience for Transition-Aged Youth Seeking Support through Digital Technologies

SSHRC Insight Development Grants:

• LIVinG with ChrONIc cancer TrEatments (LONGEVITI)
• Necessities and Challenges: Initiating Veterinary Social Work (VSW) Practice in Canadian Veterinary Healthcare
• Reducing Canada’s Plastics Waste: Exploring the Potential of a Contextual Engineering Approach to Engineering Plastics Design
• Social hierarchies and the non-verbal communication of pain
• Sociocultural Foodomics of Heritage Preserved Salmon
• Supporting work participation and return to work outcomes in individuals with post-concussive syndrome: A mixed-methods sequential explanatory study
• Understanding collaborative design problem framing by novice engineers: implications for engineering design education

NSERC Discovery Horizons:

• A mechanistic computational framework for modelling a pandemic and socio-economic response against new virus variants
• An Autonomous Robot for Quantitative UltraSound (ARQUS) Measurements
• Application of robotic tools and virtual fixtures for minimally invasive craniosynostosis
• Archival Parchments Rejuvenation: Re-engineering native collagen crosslinks for the test of time
• Bright start, grow strong: analytic tools and resources for the study of early adversity and brain developmental trajectories
• Co-Producing Inuit Knowledge and Scientific Understanding of Seabird-Harvester-Climate Interactions to Support Inuit Food Security
• Design and validation of blood sampling microdevices for oxylipins and hormone peptides
• Development of low-cost digital radiography systems for low-resource settings
• Improving allocation and supporting clinical decision-making for deceased donor kidney offers
• “Looking outside the cup”: Community-led monitoring of hydro-related impacts on northern environments, cultural keystone indicators, and human wellbeing using both Indigenous and western science
• Machine learning approach for sustainable clothing and textile waste management: Evidence-based policy and circular economy framework in the fashion industry
• Next Generation of Surgical Microscopes for Real-time Virtual Histopathology
• Reprogramming lung macrophages using inhalable immunomodulatory microparticles for the treatment of lung fibrosis
• The impact of social adversity on cardiovascular aging
• Ultrasound-based longitudinal analysis of the articulatory kinematics of the tongue in second language learning
• Weaving Indigenous and Western Knowledge Systems for Wildlife Ecology

CIHR Project Grants:

Fall 2022

• A collaborative, One Health approach to zoonotic virus detection and risk assessment at the wildlife-human nexus
• New possible pharmacotherapy for the treatment of osteoarthritic joints
• Resolving Periventricular Brain Deformation as a Mechanism in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury
• Canadian Mines/Global Issues: An Examination of Policy Context and the Social, Health, and Environmental Effects of Canadian Mining in Three Focal Communities in Brazil, the Kyrgyz Republic, and the Philippines
• System-level approaches to increasing living donor kidney transplantation

Spring 2023

• A deep-learning approach to identify inhibitors of adherent-invasive Escherichia coli in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease
• Data-driven theory: adversarial immunodynamics, modelling and machine learning for engineered lymphocytes in the context of cancer immunotherapy
• Feasibility evaluation of WEAR-IT (Wearable Assistive and Rehabilitation robot facilitating Intensive Telerehabilitation) for hand therapy after stroke
• Improving reproducibility in experimental research by using shared data—a use case in spinal cord injury
• Modelling cell dynamics and epigenetic changes in 3D spheroids with custom-made hydrogels

Contact

For more information, contact:

SSHRC
Email: research@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca
Toll-free: 1-855-275-2861

CIHR
Email: support-soutien@cihr-irsc.gc.ca
Toll-free: 1-888-603-4178

NSERC
Email: horizons@nserc-crsng.gc.ca
Toll-free: 1-855-275-2861

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