The NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (ORIP) has released its 2016-2020 Strategic Plan. ORIP's mission is to support trans-NIH research infrastructure and resource programs and to coordinate NIH's science education efforts.

The strategic plan is divided into three thematic areas:

• Developing models of human diseases
• Accelerating research discoveries by providing access to state-of-the-art instrumentation
• Training and diversifying the biomedical workforce

Last year, ASPET joined the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) in providing comments to ORIP  in response to a Request for Information on the scope of ORIP's programs and future directions. Several of these suggestions were incorporated in the strategic plan, including providing sustained support for traditional and nontraditional animal models, promoting phenotyping and annotation of animal models, supporting specialized animal facilities to meet emerging research needs, and creating mechanisms to increase the number of veterinarians trained in biomedical sciences.

Last updated: May 23, 2016