Skip to main content

NCITE Just Closed Its RFP. What Happens Now?

NCITE closed its Year 5 request for proposals last week. Here, Director Gina Ligon explains how the Center goes about selecting next year's projects.

image

By Gina Ligon, Ph.D.
NCITE Director

I’m excited to share that NCITE has just completed its annual request for proposals (RFP). This marks NCITE’s halfway point through our 10-year cooperative agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. Under the agreement, NCITE manages the Center of Excellence for terrorism prevention and counterterrorism research as established by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s Office of University Programs. Our Year 5 period runs from July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2025.

We have decided to use most of the DHS grant funding our university receives to build a consortium of scholars from across the globe to join our work here at NCITE. Since being selected as the COE director in 2020, I personally have grown in my role to facilitate collaborative innovation with some 60 academics across 30 institutions. About two-thirds of our grant goes to support terrorism researchers outside the University of Nebraska.

Because NCITE unfortunately must turn away more project ideas than it can fund, I wanted to offer some clarity about the selection process.

First, I’d like to start with how we obtain projects to fund. We begin with a public request for proposals that we post on our website and promote through various channels, including the DHS S&T website. Prospective researchers serving as principal investigators must be affiliated with an academic institution and must submit their ideas in the template format outlined here. We explain that they can submit ideas without caps on budget or number of collaborators. They must, however, follow guidelines outlined in the DHS Terms and Conditions and further explained here.

NCITE opened its latest RFP on Dec. 18. It closed at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Friday.

Now, onto selection! When NCITE launched in 2020, we did so with a full slate of new projects – 16 in total. The idea of forming a consortium that included researchers at multiple institutions was something I felt strongly about. Centers of Excellence can structure their awards however they see fit. Some choose to keep the whole award within their home institution, while others have 2-3 key collaborators.

But I wanted to try something different.

As my training as an organizational psychologist has shown me, the most creative ideas come from interdisciplinary teams with diverse expertise. Thus, when I proposed to win the Center of Excellence for Nebraska, I committed to using the funds to build the largest consortium of terrorism researchers that has existed to date, even though running an RFP is not a requirement.

Because terrorism is such a complicated topic, I want to find a wide variety of talent in a fair evaluation process that prioritizes scientific quality and research relevance in its awardees. Each year, there are many worthy projects we are not able to fund, but I am confident in the process we have refined and the teams that have joined the NCITE consortium.

I am committed to:

  • Recruiting scholars from fields that don’t always publish in terrorism outlets but do have much to contribute to generating new knowledge about this thorny topic.
  • Identifying early career researchers who have never managed a federal grant but deserve a chance to try.
  • Rewarding teams who commit the largest part of their budgets to supporting students.

Since we have run yearly RFPs beginning in 2021, we have received 96 proposals from leading scholars and institutions. We have been able to fund approximately 10% of those given our budget. We do not receive additional funding each year to commission new work, but we do seek to identify new projects when older projects sunset or receive follow-on funding from other sources (our goal).

For Year 5, NCITE has received 17 proposals. As we are just beginning the selection process, we don’t yet know how many we’ll select but are planning for up to three.

How do we choose?

As my training as an organizational psychologist has shown me, the most creative ideas come from interdisciplinary teams with diverse expertise.

 Gina Ligon, NCITE Director

1. As the principal investigator of the NCITE cooperative agreement award, I review every proposal as it is submitted because at the end of the day, I am responsible for the success of every dollar we award. I read each proposal to see first how it fits with NCITE’s current portfolio. As a steward of the federal government’s limited grant funding, I have made the decision to ensure we are not funding multiple teams on the same topic. To do this, I deconflict with the current portfolio — which includes projects on the cooperative agreement and those on our direct basic ordering agreement (BOA) with the federal government. I also serve on the board of the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST), which is our sister center in the U.K. that funds similar projects. I work closely to ensure our proposals are not redundant to their portfolio, nor with any other Centers of Excellence in the OUP family. Finally, I review awards from other funding sources in our field, such as the National Institute of Justice RFP or the DHS S&T Broad Agency Announcement.

We have made some tough choices about who we want in the NCITE consortium. For example, we do not fund the development or maintenance of terrorism prevention programs because the DHS Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) grant program awards $20 million in federal funds each year to do just that. We also do not fund the development of databases, nor basic research, as the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds that type of research at much higher rates.

2. At this stage, I also examine the method closely to determine how it comports to civil rights and civil liberties protections. For example, we do not fund projects that include social media monitoring of private conversations in chat rooms or direct messages. If a project does not add unique value to our lines of effort in a way that protects civil rights and civil liberties of all involved, I do not advance it for scientific review.

3. Next, all proposals are reviewed by three-to-four person teams of our consortium members who themselves must have methodological expertise but do not have conflicts of interest with any part of the proposal team. Similar to the code of ethics to which reviewers of academic journals adhere, reviewers do not disclose any proposal information beyond the formal review panel. Teams independently rate projects based on criteria using a five-point scale for items such as methodological rigor, innovativeness of study design, and investigator qualifications. We model this to match the same level of scrutiny with which DHS evaluates our portfolio every two years. All projects that average three or higher on scientific quality move on in the review process.

4. The next round of review is a relevancy review. This involves our Board of Directors, who represent a diverse set of government senior leaders from each component of DHS, the Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Our program manager supervises this process, and reviewers provide feedback to questions such as: Will this project generate knowledge important to my mission? Will someone from my office serve as the government stakeholder to provide support and feedback to the research team? Are you aware of similar efforts that are already underway?

In short, this step ensures that our work is relevant and applicable to the people charged with preventing terrorism and targeted violence across our federal government. I am on pins and needles for this step, as many of the proposals we want to fund are stopped at this stage for reasons beyond the scientific merit and outside of the research team’s control.

5. Once the relevancy reviews come back, if there are more projects that remain than we are able to fund, we evaluate the remaining project scores across the importance of topic, uniqueness (of topic and method), and budget (how do the deliverables line up compared to similar workplans that had same cost). We ask: What can we afford to fund? And for projects we can’t afford to fund but want to still do, we ask: Can we find additional funding for these?

6. Once we land on our final selection, we submit a workplan to our program manager at the Office of University Programs at DHS S&T, where each project undergoes another civil rights and civil liberties (CRCL) evaluation and feasibility and risk assessment review (e.g., does the institution that will receive the sub-award from us have any outstanding issues with managing federal grants?). This is due in April this year, but the deadline has changed every year since 2020. Only after the projects are approved from DHS, do we alert all principal investigators that they have been selected as part of the NCITE portfolio for Year 5. Those whose proposals were not selected are invited to submit next year.

7. We make a public announcement on social media and through the news media only after all principal investigators have been notified.

8. Awardees then have a chance to revise their budgets if any personnel or parts of their workplans have changed. This is a quick turnaround as we seek to award teams for a July 1 start date. Once that occurs, teams are onboarded with required security, CRCL rules, and human subject research requirements as their projects undergo another round of compliance reviews from the federal government. Each project must develop a data acquisition and management plan, and we work closely with schools to ensure that we are protecting their intellectual property.

9. Projects are supported by professional research staff from NCITE – we hold kickoffs with the government, end-user working groups where they get to share their interim findings and ask questions, and work with our communications team to make plain-language summaries to share their findings with the public. Every project product undergoes a peer review from other consortium members before our delivery to the federal government. This ensures that if it carries our grant number and logo, our partners can trust that the science underlying the project is rigorous.

10. We start the cycle over in December, posting what will be our Year 6 RFP.

As NCITE grows, we consider what has worked for our end users, how we need to focus our efforts, and what new and emerging threats must be met with fresh approaches.

Each year, we thank all the talented researchers who took the time to apply. We know that the application process itself can be arduous, and we want those who apply to know that we value their time and their commitment to advancing knowledge in this important space. We look forward to announcing this latest batch of research in early summer 2024.

NCITE strives to provide actionable research for our government partners. We aim to provide clear and effective management of these projects to keep them on schedule and to transition findings to our government end users, the scientific community, and the public.