Erik Ullian, PhD, assistant professor of ophthalmology and physiology at UCSF, was in Brazil to give a talk on his research when he got the big news: He had been conditionally offered a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award. Designed to promote "ideas that have the potential to catapult fields forward," the grants provide $1.5 million over five years to promising new investigators who typically lack the preliminary data and available expert reviewers required to get traditional NIH grants. This news was very exciting. But it came with a hitch. Ullian wanted to study how astrocytes, a very abundant – but understudied – type of brain cell, might be involved in regulating plasticity in the developing brain and how this, in turn, might both play a role in autism spectrum disorders and help researchers develop drugs to target the pathways and receptors involved. In order to actually get the funding for this project, Ullian had to fulfill a number of regulatory and compliance requirements, which pose a challenge for scientists who want to apply laboratory research to human subjects and conduct clinical and translational research. Ullian had only 10 days to accomplish this, he had no staff, he was in Brazil and he had never gone through the process before. When Ullian shared his plight with Mike Deiner, an analyst in the Department of Ophthalmology, he learned about the Consultation Services program offered by UCSF’s Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI). The program is designed to help UCSF researchers deal with questions, challenges or requirements they encounter in the course of their work, including a broad range of topics such as regulatory and compliance issues, research design, biostatistics, ethics, and many other research aspects. Keep reading