# NIH Grant Explorer

NIH Grant Explorer is an independent, advertising-supported research resource for the biomedical research community. The site combines live NIH RePORTER data with editorial guides so researchers, postdocs, graduate students, and research administrators can move from raw award records to practical decisions about applications, mentorship, and career planning.

## What the site does

The site provides a small set of focused tools and a longer library of explanatory writing.

The tools query the NIH RePORTER API directly and present results in views designed for specific workflows: finding labs that recently received funding, checking whether a particular investigator has active grants, scanning weekly award announcements, and comparing how funding is distributed across research topics, NIH institutes, and grant mechanisms.

The editorial library covers the practical side of grant work: how to read funding trends without overinterpreting noise, how to write a Specific Aims page that survives study section, how postdocs can use new awards as hiring signals, what the activity codes mean, and how to choose between mechanisms such as R01, R21, K99/R00, F31, and F32.

## Who the content is for

- Graduate students evaluating prospective labs, identifying training environments with active funding, and learning how to pursue F31 or F30 fellowships.
- Postdocs scouting K99/R00 mentors, F32 sponsors, faculty positions in newly funded labs, and transition strategies.
- Faculty and grant teams positioning new applications, choosing institutes, comparing mechanisms, timing submissions, and reading recent award patterns.
- Research administrators running competitor analysis, monitoring institutional funding trajectories, and producing internal reports.

## Editorial standards

Pages are sourced from NIH RePORTER, official NIH guidance pages, and publicly available federal records. When data is noisy or incomplete, the limitation is stated alongside the chart or summary rather than hidden.

The contributor and review-desk model is published. Methodology notes describe how data is queried, when it is refreshed, and which edge cases (year boundaries, name disambiguation, project supplements) require care.

## Data and refresh cadence

NIH grant records typically appear in NIH RePORTER within one to three weeks of an award decision. The tools query RePORTER on demand, so results reflect the most recent records available at request time. Long-form guides are updated when relevant NIH policy or activity-code rules change.

## Relationship to NIH

NIH Grant Explorer is not affiliated with NIH or the U.S. government. The site links back to primary federal sources so readers can verify any underlying record:

- https://reporter.nih.gov — NIH RePORTER (grant records)
- https://grants.nih.gov — NIH Grants & Funding (policy, FOAs)
- https://exporter.nih.gov — NIH ExPORTER (bulk data)

## Contact

Corrections, feedback, contributor inquiries, and case-study submissions are routed through https://www.gotgrant.com/contact.
The public contact address is admin@labcat.ai.