NIEHS Is Forecasting 10 Children's Environmental Health Centers Where It Funded 6 — and the Map Tells You Where
September 27, 2026 · 6 min read
Granted Research Team · Editorial policy
A forecasted funding opportunity is the most underused document in federal grantseeking. It has no deadline, no full announcement, and no application package — which is exactly why almost nobody acts on one. The applicants who do act win, because the work that decides a center-grant competition takes eight months and the announcement gives you three.
On September 24, 2026, NIEHS posted RFA-ES-28-004, Collaborative Centers in Children's Environmental Health Research and Translation (P2C — Clinical Trial Optional) as a forecast. Close date: TBD. Award range: $500,000 to $750,000. Expected awards: 10. Cost sharing: not required.
That number is the story. The program NIEHS is recompeting currently funds six translation centers plus one national coordinating center.
What exists today, and what expires
The current CEHRT network was built from RFA-ES-20-001, which invited institutions to establish Collaborative Centers in Children's Environmental Health Research and Translation — infrastructure centers charged with translating children's environmental health research findings to partners in community, academic, and practice settings. That RFA allowed direct costs up to $500,000 per year, offered an additional $100,000 in direct costs to whichever applicant took on the optional coordinating-center role, and capped project periods at five years.
The resulting network, funded for 2021–2026:
| Center | Host institution | Primary focus |
|---|---|---|
| ASP3IRE | Oregon State University | Air quality, wildfire smoke, childcare settings |
| BREATHE | Johns Hopkins University | Respiratory health, indoor air quality |
| CHARTER | Emory University | Health communication, equity, maternal and child health |
| NYU Collaborative Center | New York University | Intervention testing, implementation science, economic evaluation |
| PRCCEH | University of Pennsylvania | Asthma, lead, air pollution, endocrine disruptors |
| SC-CEHRT | University of Southern California | Air pollution, environmental justice, urban exposures |
| National Coordinating Center | Children's Environmental Health Network | Network coordination and evaluation |
Six research translation centers. One coordinator. The funding period ends this year.
The geographic argument for four more slots
Lay those six institutions on a map and the pattern is immediate. Two on the West Coast — Oregon and Southern California. Three in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic corridor — New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore. One in the Southeast, in Atlanta.
Now list what is not represented: the Mountain West. The Great Plains. Texas. the industrial Midwest — Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Milwaukee. the Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor. Appalachia. Alaska, Hawaii, and the territories. Tribal lands across the interior West and Southwest.
Those are not incidental omissions. They contain a large share of the country's highest-burden pediatric environmental exposures: agricultural pesticide drift, refinery and petrochemical emissions, legacy mining contamination, arsenic and uranium in private wells, extreme heat, coal ash, and colonias without water infrastructure. A translation network whose job is reaching "communities with disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards" has no center anywhere near several of the most disproportionately exposed regions in the United States.
If NIEHS expects 10 awards where it made 7, the most defensible reading is that it intends to extend coverage rather than thicken it. Applicants in the uncovered regions are competing against a much weaker field than applicants proposing a seventh center in the Northeast.
Reading the money carefully
The forecast lists $500,000 to $750,000 per award. What it does not say is whether that is direct costs or total costs — and that distinction changes the size of the program you can build by a factor approaching two at institutions with a 55 percent indirect rate.
The predecessor RFA was explicit: up to $500,000 direct costs per year. If RFA-ES-28-004's $500,000 to $750,000 is also direct costs, the ceiling rose 50 percent for the top band and the program genuinely got bigger per center. If it is total costs, the effective research budget shrank substantially against the 2020 baseline. Forecast records are frequently imprecise on exactly this field, and one weekly federal opportunity tracker has already circulated a $10 million total-program figure and an anticipated close date around March 2, 2027 — neither of which appears in the official record yet.
Treat all three numbers as provisional. Build your budget model with a switch in it, and resolve the question with the program officer rather than guessing.
What a P2C actually demands
The P2C activity code is an infrastructure award, not a research project award, and applicants who write it as a large R01 lose. The mechanism funds the capacity to do translation — cores, personnel, convening, pilot funding, and evaluation — rather than a set of hypotheses.
The existing centers make the expected structure legible. Each operates some combination of a research translation core, a community engagement core, and a pilot project program that issues small, fast, time-sensitive subawards to local investigators and partners. NIEHS has described the network's function as providing infrastructure, training, data science tools, partner engagement, and time-sensitive pilot grants to develop and disseminate evidence-informed interventions that protect children where they live, learn, and play.
Two implications follow.
Your community partnerships are the application. A P2C reviewer is evaluating whether you already have standing relationships with the health departments, school districts, tribal governments, clinics, and community organizations that would receive your translated findings. Letters of support solicited in February for a March deadline read as exactly what they are. Partnerships documented with two years of joint work read as capacity.
You need a pipeline of findings to translate. This mechanism does not fund discovery. It funds moving existing children's environmental health science into practice. Applicants without an underlying body of relevant research — their own or their region's — have nothing to put through the machine they are proposing to build.
The coordinating center question
RFA-ES-20-001 treated the coordinating role as optional and attached $100,000 in additional direct costs to it. The Children's Environmental Health Network took it, and has run the national hub since.
Whether the recompete separates the coordinating center into its own award — and whether it is open or limited to the incumbent — is one of the highest-value unknowns in the forecast. If 10 awards means 10 research translation centers plus a separately funded coordinator, the network grows by four. If it means 9 plus 1, it grows by three. And if the coordinating competition is open, a nonprofit or academic center with national convening capacity has a path into this program that does not require a regional exposure portfolio at all.
What to do in the forecast window
The gap between a forecast and a full announcement is typically three to six months. Here is what that time is for.
Get the program officer on the phone this quarter. Ask three questions: direct or total costs; whether the coordinating center is a separate award and whether it is open competition; and whether NIEHS has stated geographic-coverage intentions. Forecast-stage conversations are the most candid ones in the entire cycle, because the announcement is not yet locked and staff are still shaping it.
Assume incumbents are recompeting and beat them on something structural. All six current centers will apply again, with five years of deliverables, an established partner network, and reviewers who know their work. You do not beat that on polish. You beat it by covering a region the network does not reach, serving a population it does not serve, or addressing an exposure class — heat, agricultural chemicals, mining legacy, well-water contamination — that the current six do not own.
Start the partnership paperwork now. Memoranda of understanding, data use agreements, and IRB relationships with community partners take months. Six months out, they are achievable. Six weeks out, they are letters.
Build the pilot program design early. The pilot project core is where reviewers test whether you actually understand translation. A credible design specifies the solicitation cadence, the review process, the community role in selecting projects, and how pilot results feed back into the network. Vague pilot cores sink otherwise strong center applications.
Watch for the sequencing gap. If the current period ends in 2026 and the recompete closes in early 2027, awards land in late 2027 — which implies either a bridge mechanism or a funding gap for incumbents. That gap is an opening. A new applicant is not disadvantaged by a lapse; an incumbent running a community engagement core with no money for a year is.
The broader lesson generalizes past this one RFA. Federal center-grant recompetes are decided by relationships and regional positioning that cannot be assembled after the announcement drops, and the forecast is the only notice you get in time to do anything about it. If you want forecasted opportunities in your field surfaced while there is still runway to act, Granted tracks them alongside open competitions rather than waiting for the deadline to exist.