In 2024, information systems Ph.D. student Ommo Clark penned an opinion piece for BusinessDay Nigeria exploring why many Nigerians diagnose and treat their medical conditions themselves, often turning to unreliable online information.

While the essay was inspired by firsthand experiences in her native country, the impulse to consult “Dr. Google” is a worrying global trend, Clark says, and one that has motivated her Ph.D. work. It’s unlikely that people will stop going online with health questions, so Clark is researching ways that AI could help patients, healthcare providers, public health officials, and content platforms better understand and evaluate the sea of medically related content on the Internet.

Ommo’s efforts were recently recognized when one of her research papers, co-authored with information systems professor Karuna Joshi, won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Digital Health 2025, held in July in Helsinki, Finland. The paper, titled “Real-Time Detection of Online Health Misinformation using an Integrated Knowledgegraph-LLM Approach,” describes the results of combining two types of AI approaches to tackle the problem of identifying online health misinformation.

Read more about their work in this UMBC News article.

Info:

NIH Will Stop Posting Notices of Funding Opportunities in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts in FY2026

Notice Number: NOT-OD-25-143

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-143.html

Purpose:

Since 2005, NIH has posted all grant and cooperative agreement notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs) in both Grants.gov, a federal-wide portal for discretionary funding opportunities, and the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts (NIH Guide). Both have served as official sources for NIH NOFOs.

This Notice informs the extramural community that, beginning in fiscal year 2026, NIH will no longer post NOFOs in the NIH Guide. Grants.gov will serve as NIH’s single official source for grant and cooperative agreement funding opportunities. The NIH Guide will continue to be used for policy and informational notices.

This effort is part of a wider strategy across NIH to simplify and streamline the application and funding process and to reduce duplication across federal systems. 

What to Expect in FY2026

·        NIH NOFOs will no longer be accessible from the NIH Guide.

·      All NIH NOFOs (expired and active) will remain searchable on Grants.gov using their Classic search or their new Simpler search.

·     NOFOs will no longer be included in the weekly NIH Guide Table of Contents subscription emails. You can use Grants.gov subscription services to receive notifications of new NIH funding opportunities.

·      NIH will continue to provide tools in the Funding section of NIH Grants & Funding to identify potential funding categories, topics, and opportunities you may be interested in. Any funding opportunity identified through our site will link to Grants.gov for the official opportunity posting.

Resources

·         Updates to Finding NIH Funding Opportunities and Information

 Please refer to the full notice linked above for further details.

Should you have any questions, please contact the Office of Sponsored Programs.