This blog post accompanies the “SFARI’s 2018 funding priorities” post. In it, the SFARI science team discusses the application and review process for 2018 Pilot and Research Awards.

In this blog post, the SFARI science team provides insight into SFARI’s scientific priorities. A number of experimental design issues to consider when preparing a grant application in response to the 2018 Pilot and Research Awards RFA are also discussed.

In this blog post, the SFARI science team provides insight into SFARI’s scientific priorities. A number of experimental design issues to consider when preparing a grant application in response to the 2017 Pilot and Research Awards RFA are also discussed.

This blog post accompanies the “SFARI’s 2017 funding priorities” post. In it, the SFARI science team discusses the application and review process for Pilot and Research Awards.

Alan Packer, senior scientist at SFARI, discusses a number of recent review articles that provide interesting and complementary overviews of what we currently know about the neurobiology of autism. Together, these reviews reveal how much basic research on autism has grown over the past decade.

SFARI’s deputy scientific director, John Spiro, outlines two important changes that have been implemented in light of SFARI’s support for preprints of life science research findings. SFARI Investigators are encouraged to post preprints on recognized servers ahead of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. In addition, the SFARI biosketch form has been updated to include space for grant applicants to list manuscripts deposited in preprint servers. SFARI hopes that these changes will help to accelerate the pace of autism research.

SFARI launched a request for applications in early 2015 that sought proposals to develop medium- and high-throughput screens to test the functional effects of de novo missense variants identified in the Simons Simplex Collection and other autism cohorts. Here, SFARI Senior Scientist Alan Packer discusses the proposals that were selected for funding as well as highlighting recent papers that have provided functional evidence for missense variants contributing to autism and other disorders.

Today, we’re announcing our annual request for applications (RFA) for SFARI Pilot and Research Awards. Letters of intent (LOIs), the short statements that precede full applications, are due no later than 9 October, 2015. As we do every year, we’ve updated this column to provide a better picture of how the SFARI science team makes decisions on research proposals.