Advanced Laboratories for Accelerating the Reach and Impact of Treatments for Youth and Adults with Mental Illness (ALACRITY) Research Centers

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) intends to publish a notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) to solicit research applications for practice-based research centers to support interdisciplinary teams of mental health researchers to engage in high-impact studies that will significantly advance clinical practice and generate knowledge to fuel the transformation of mental health care in the United States. Advanced Laboratories for Accelerating the Reach and Impact of Treatments for Youth and Adults with Mental Illness (ALACRITY) Research Centers support research projects aimed at the rapid development, testing, and refinement of novel and integrative approaches for (1) optimizing the effectiveness of therapeutic or preventive interventions for mental disorders; (2) developing and testing empirically informed patient-, provider- and system-level interventions to improve mental health care access, engagement, continuity, efficiency, and quality; and (3) continuously improving the quality, impact, and durability of optimized interventions and health for individuals with or at risk for mental health problems, including those with serious mental illness. Notice is being provided to allow potential applicants sufficient time to develop meaningful collaborations and responsive research projects. This NOFO will utilize the P50 activity code. Applications must propose research that maximizes synergies across various components of the mental health research ecosystem, including new discoveries in clinical research, transformative health care technologies, advances in information science, and new federal and state mechanisms for organizing mental health care. Applicants with interdisciplinary expertise, such as behavioral science, health information and data science, health systems engineering, decision science, implementation science, and related fields, whose practice-based research needs cannot be met through standard research project grant mechanisms, should consider applying to this NOFO. Applications are also expected to include research activities that facilitate the widespread sharing of data, methods, and resources to accelerate clinical research and to provide opportunities for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career investigators to participate in interdisciplinary research-to-practice translational mental health research.