The FARE 2008 competition is open to:

• intramural postdoctoral fellows, such as IRTA, Clinical, and Visiting Fellows, who have no more than 5 years total postdoctoral experience in the NIH intramural research program as of April 16, 2007. Visiting Scientists/Fellows must not have been tenured at their home institute.
• postdoctoral-level Special Volunteers (e.g., those with NRC, NRSA, or Jane Coffin Childs fellowships).
• pre-IRTAs currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program and conducting their doctoral dissertation research at an NIH lab.

Previous FARE winners may apply to FARE 2008 (for details see below). Since FARE awards must be used while you are still at NIH, if you know that you will no longer be at NIH during fiscal year 2008 (October 1, 2007 to September 30, 2008), please do not apply. FARE committee members are not eligible for FARE awards. Other questions about eligibility should be addressed to FARE@mail.nih.gov, or to your Institute's Scientific Director.

The abstract you submit to FARE 2008 should reflect your own current, first-author data, collected while you have been at NIH. The data must be recent: either unpublished, submitted, accepted, in press, or published in 2007. Please check with your co-authors and mentor before submitting your abstract. FARE abstracts may need to have more background than would be usual in an abstract for a scientific meeting. Remember that the people evaluating your FARE abstract may not be as knowledgeable as you are in your specific area of research.

A link to the online application will be available on the Felcom FARE webpage. There will also be an announcement on the Events webpage.

Electronic applications must be submitted by April 16, 2007 at 5:00 PM EDT. Mentor approvals must be submitted by April 23, 2007 at 5:00 PM EDT. No extensions will be granted.

All applicants submit their application and abstract online between March 12 - April 16, 2007 (5:00 PM, EDT). The abstract may have a maximum length of 2500 characters, including spaces. The submitted abstract will be automatically emailed to your mentor, who will have until April 23 to approve it. Approved abstracts are stripped of identifying information, divided into study sections, and judged by a panel of three postdoctoral fellows and two senior scientists. Winners will be notified after September 1, 2007. Awardees receive a certificate and $1000 in support to attend a scientific conference of their choice. The travel award must be used between October 1, 2007, and September 30, 2008.

After we receive the abstracts, we delete all identifying information except for an internal tracking number, and divide them among the 50 study sections. We attempt to place each abstract in the first-choice study section. The abstracts in each section are judged by a panel of five scientists--three postdocs and two tenured/tenure-track NIH investigators. The postdoc judges are either members of the NIH Fellows Committee or a previous year FARE winner. Tenured/tenure-track investigators were nominated by their Scientific Director. Every effort will be made to adhere to this panel; however, in the event that all five judges are not able to sumbit a review in a timely manner, a minimum of three judges will be considered a complete review when necessary. We do not release the names of individual judges. If a judge recognizes an abstract, the abstract will be rated by an alternate judge. The judges will meet to agree on the FARE winners, the top 25% of the abstracts from each study section.

The NIH Fellows Committee feels that FARE is part of the mentor/trainee experience, and both will benefit from working together on the abstract. Mentor sign-off is also intended to avoid the possibility of authorship disputes. Mentor approval is carried out electronically. Your mentor will receive a copy of your application via email after you submit it. S/he will be instructed to use an online form to approve or reject your application. Your mentor's approval must be received by April 23, 2007 at 5:00 PM EDT. Any application not approved by that date will be deleted from our database. You will receive an email notifying you of whether your mentor has approved or rejected your abstract.

If that happens, you have until April 16 (5:00 PM EDT) to submit a revised abstract. Your mentor has until April 23 to accept or reject it. However, after April 16 (5:00 PM EDT), no abstracts will be accepted. This means that if your mentor fails to approve your abstract you cannot resubmit. It is to your advantage, therefore, to submit your abstract well enough in advance of the April 16 deadline to allow for the possibility of rejection.

The NIH Library. The other location is Bldg. 31/On-Campus Work Center on the first floor near the cafeteria.

Your abstract must be 2500 characters or less, including spaces and carriage returns. Some word processing software (e.g., MS Word 6 for Macintosh) does not include spaces in its character count.

The electronic application is only able to process ASCII characters. Thus, if your abstract contains Greek letters, please spell them out (e.g., write "alpha" and "beta" rather than using the Greek letters). In most cases, subscripts and superscripts can be understood if they are in the body of the text, so, for example, G_i and G_o should be written as Gi and Go. It is probably easiest if you compose your abstract in your normal word processor, then cut and paste it into the box provided on the application. Contact FARE@mail.nih.gov for more information.

There can be only one author per FARE abstract. Remember that you are writing an abstract that describes your current research efforts at the NIH. While you may describe the data from a larger research project (i.e., one in which multiple scientists participate on specific parts) you should emphasize the contribution you have made.

No. The abstract (and abstract title) should not contain any information that could be used to identify you. Do not include any identifying information about yourself in your title or abstract. Include it only in the Author Information fields on the first page of the application.

No. The abstract and title cannot contain any information which might be used to identify you, such as references.

No. Each qualifying fellow may submit only one FARE abstract.

Yes. However, the abstract you submit to FARE 2008 should reflect your own current, first-author data, collected while you have been at NIH. The data must be recent: either unpublished, submitted, accepted, in press, or published in 2007.

No. Your abstract can concern the same topic as last year's abstract, but the new abstract must be significantly different (at least 50% of the content and wording) from last year's (i.e., it should reflect current data, not just a re-hash of last year's data).

Yes! All previous FARE winners are encouraged to apply again this year. However, FARE 2007 winners are also being asked to serve as judges for FARE 2008. Since judges are not allowed to evaluate their own abstracts, we ask that FARE 2007 winners who apply to FARE 2008 submit their abstract to a different study section from the one they will be judging. For example, submit your abstract to a study section relevant to your postdoctoral work, and offer to judge a section related to your graduate work.

The Scientific Directors have generously decided to reward 25% of the fellows who apply. Thus, the number of winners is not fixed, but depends on the number of fellows who submit an abstract.

Your abstract may not have been written appropriately for the FARE competition. Remember that the people evaluating your FARE abstract may not be as knowledgeable as you in your specific area of research. Thus, FARE abstracts may need to have more background than would be usual in an abstract for a scientific meeting or a journal article. Look at the score sheet used to evaluate FARE abstracts and at winning abstracts from previous competitions. We welcome you to submit your new data to FARE 2008.

The process differs from Institute to Institute. Winners should contact either their Branch Secretary, their Administrative Officer, or the office of their Scientific Director to learn how to activate their FARE award.

Your FARE award should be used to cover costs related to attending a scientific meeting in the United States during the 2008 fiscal year (October 1, 2007 through September 30, 2008). In order for you to use your award, we ask that you present your abstract, either as a poster or a seminar, at this meeting. FARE 2008 winners will also be asked to present their work at a FARE poster session during the NIH research festival, and to serve as a judge for FARE 2009.

You must use your FARE award while you are at NIH. You cannot use it after you leave. If you change institutes, check with your current and previous Scientific Director to see if you can still use your award, and which institute will fund it. Your FARE award must be used between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008. If you already know that you will not be able to use the award during that time frame, please do not apply.

Send mail to FARE@mail.nih.gov, and someone will get back to you within 24 hours.