On Thursday, our team released Grant Central, a tool to help life sciences researchers find grant opportunities, identify new collaborators, and manage the grant application process. It’s one of the things, along with Clickframes, that we’ve been working on for most of 2009.

Here are the highlights:

• Search through all US government grant opportunities for life sciences, including all HHS agencies, (including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control) as well as the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. Searches can be by keyword or award size.
• Comment on grants, enabling a conversation across the Harvard community.
• Query the Harvard faculty Profiles database for new collaborators and invite them to participate in a grant project.
• Manage grant projects using the aptly-named “Projects” module. Projects allows you to track due dates, tasks and documents, as well as maintaining an online discussion forum for your grant project. Grant Central also allows users to manage their NIH Biosketches, Other Support Forms and Lab Information documents -  no more chasing them down the day before the proposal is due!

We’ll post more about it over the next week or two. You won’t be able to see the whole application if you don’t have a Harvard Medical School eCommons account, but you can still use the grant and collaborator search engines.

And if you’re interested in Grant Central for your own institution, drop us a note. The application was developed as part of Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center – if your institution has a CTSC, you can get Grant Central too.