Frequently Asked Questions - General
FAQ Categories
Budget project specific travel such as trips to professional meetings to present project findings or promote the project.Travel cost formulas are available in the Foundation’s Budget Guidelines. However, we encourage you to budget less than the Foundation’s travel formulas when possible.Temple University will reimburse grantees for the cost of travel to program events, such as the annual meeting, so those travel costs should not be included in your budget.
PHLR seeks to:
- Strengthen interdisciplinary scholarship and practice in public health law.
- Fund legal analysis and research related to public health laws and their impact.
- Provide technical assistance and direction to those attempting to engage in this type of research, analysis and/or evaluation or to use this information in their practice.
- Broadly communicate learning and results to inform public health practice and policy deliberations.
Could PHLR please clarify if they anticipate funding alcohol related proposals as a part of the additional two rounds of research?
Criteria for funding future rounds of proposals have not yet been determined.
PHLR is based at the Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice, Temple University Beasley School of Law.
Applicants may contact the helpdesk at phlr@temple.edu or (215) 204-2134 with questions about their proposals. Questions by e-mail are preferred in order to facilitate accurate forwarding of the question to the appropriate staff member. Please include institution and contact information in every communication. If selected as a grantee the applicant will be assigned a program officer who can be contacted. Currently, all questions need to go through the helpdesk to ensure that all responses are captured and posted on the FAQs.
Yes, the slides from the presentation will be available on the Resource page of the program Web site, www.PublicHealthLawResearch.org.
At least one future round of funding is planned.
For short-term studies, grants of up to $150,000, including indirect costs, will be available. For complex and comprehensive studies, grants of up to $450,000 will be available. Proposals that exceed the dollar thresholds listed in the CFP will not be accepted.
This CFP supports two types of projects: short-term studies and complex and comprehensive legal studies. The purpose of short-term studies is to conduct legal research, policy analysis or empirical evaluations of actual or potential public health implications of specific laws, regulations or regulatory enforcement systems. The purpose of complex and comprehensive legal studies is to conduct analyses and in-depth evaluations of laws implemented across a variety of jurisdictions and fields, analyses of effective and ineffective components of laws and regulations, as well as analyses of implementation and enforcement challenges. This CFP focuses on three priority research areas:
(1) The impact of laws and legal practices on population health outcomes;
(2) The use of innovative policies or regulatory techniques to promote healthier individual or organizational behavior;
(3) The development, implementation and/or effectiveness of ordinances, executive orders and other legal tools used by local governments to improve public health.
The focus of this program is on the United States; studies looking at the laws or policies internationally will be considered only to the extent that they may directly inform U.S. policy and or the population's health.
Scott Burris, J.D., is the program director. Burris is Professor of Law and Director, Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice, Temple University Beasley School of Law. Dr. Heidi Grunwald is the program deputy director, she can be reached at phlr@temple.edu. The program Web site is www.PublicHealthLawResearch.org.
PHLR is a five year, $17 million RWJF national program. The goal of this program is to build the evidence for and increase the use of effective regulatory, legal and policy solutions—whether statutes, regulations, case law or other policies—to protect and improve population health and the public health system. Evidence is also vital to identify ways in which laws or their implementation may be harmful to public health. As public health practitioners, policy-makers and others consider the use of law as a tool to improve population health and the public health system, it is important to have evidence to address questions about which laws have the greatest impact on health and whether current laws can be made more effective (or less harmful) through better implementation or amendments. As a result, PHLR seeks to facilitate collaboration between legal experts and public health practitioners to help inform research questions and produce findings that improve population health and the quality of public health practice.
Would there be any preference given to national over regional or regional over state focused studies?
PHLR is committed to funding a range of projects focusing at the national, regional, state and local levels.
Would two proposals from the same organization on different topics be competing against each other or will each be considered on its own merits?
PHLR allows individual applicants and institutions to submit more than one proposal. Each would be considered on its own merits, using the selection criteria outlined in the CFP.
Short-term studies will be funded for up to 18 months. Complex and comprehensive studies will be funded for up to 30 months.
This CFP seeks proposals that have strong potential to inform policy-makers, public health practitioners, legal practitioners, academics and others who influence public health practice and/or laws that improve population health. Findings will advance RWJF efforts to support the nascent field of public health law.
This CFP seeks proposals that have strong potential to inform policy-makers, public health practitioners, legal practitioners, academics and others who influence public health practice and/or laws that improve population health. Findings will advance RWJF efforts to support the nascent field of public health law.
NPO stands for national program office. For the Public Health Law Research (PHLR) program, the NPO is located at the Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice, Temple University Beasley School of Law.
How many grants are anticipated to be awarded in the short-term studies mechanism and the complex and comprehensive legal and public health studies mechanism? Why the preference for short-term proposals?
PHLR has not set a specific number of grants to be awarded in each category and does not have a preference. However, it is anticipated that more short-term studies will be funded because the program is looking to support studies that can produce actionable evidence within the time frames specified by the call for proposals (CFP). Therefore, short-term proposals are encouraged.
Given the focus of public health, will you consider studies that propose to look at the effect of health law on outcomes that may be limited to those who have health insurance coverage?
The focus of the CFP is the impact of public health law on health behaviors, regardless of the characteristics of the population. A study that examines the impact of health insurance alone would not be favorably reviewed unless it included relevant legal and public health analyses and implications.
