Serve as an NIH Peer Reviewer to Support Scientific Discovery
NIH greatly appreciates the valuable time and scholarly generosity our reviewers dedicate to scientific stewardship. Peer review is an essential service to the research community and helps shape the future of biomedical research.
We rely on scientists from across the research community to provide fair, independent, expert, and timely peer review. Reviewers’ assessments of scientific and technical merit are central to informed NIH funding decisions, helping uphold rigorous scientific standards and identify innovative, meritorious research ideas that advance NIH’s mission. Relatedly, peer review is foundational to implementing our Unified Funding Strategy, which continues to depend on the assessment of merit made by these experts.
As NIH manages record application volumes, having qualified reviewers is critically important to ensuring rigorous and timely review of the proposed idea’s scientific and technical merit. NIH continues to need reviewers with a broad range of scientific expertise to provide objective assessment of research ideas seeking NIH support. These areas span scientific disciplines, research stages, priorities defined by NIH Institutes/Centers, and more.
And, with NIH’s focus on novel alternative methods, we are also seeking expertise in human-based models and technologies, computational approaches, and real-world data. This expertise may also help shape the future of this discipline, defining the scientific standards and methodological rigor that will guide these fields towards advancing human health and addressing disease.
Becoming an NIH peer reviewer is an opportunity to:
- Gain firsthand insight into how the NIH peer review process works (including discussing review guidelines), which may also provide critical insights for early career researchers to help enhance their grant writing skills.
- Provide scientific leadership that shapes the trajectory and integrity of biomedical research.
- Provide expert, objective judgments that inform NIH funding decisions.
- Participate in dynamic cross-disciplinary debates on the frontiers and emerging methodologies of biomedical research.
- Engage with colleagues and scientific perspectives across the research community.
- On a case-by-case basis, a possible acceptable reason for an application’s late submission due to participating in a recent review or advisory group meeting (NOT-OD-26-064).
If you are invited to serve on a review panel, we want you to take the opportunity to use your expertise to provide independent scientific assessments of applications seeking NIH support.
If you haven’t been invited and would like to serve, reach out. We seek scientists who are fair, objective, can articulate succinct views, have productive exchanges, can actively participate in and help facilitate discussions, work collegially in a group, and ensure fairness and consistency in scoring. Investigators with active, independent research programs can identify review groups that match their expertise and contact the relevant scientific review officer about opportunities to serve. Early career scientists can also enroll in the Early Career Reviewer Program.
Additional Resources