Letter Report to the Florida Department of Citrus on the Review of Research Proposals on Citrus Greening, December, 2008 (2008)

NRC-appointed ad hoc panels of experts will serve as reviewers of proposals requesting support from the Florida Department of Citrus for research on different aspects of Citrus Greening, an insect-borne plant disease affecting citrus trees in Florida. The chairpersons of the panels will be appointed as the parent committee that will develop a common method for evaluating proposals and ensure consistency across the reviews.

Each panel is tasked with reviewing a set of proposals in its research area of focus and evaluating each of them for relevance and scientific merit. The panels may conduct a preliminary screening of the pertinent proposals by conference call. Although all members of a given panel will read all proposals being reviewed by that panel, each member of a panel will be assigned as a primary, secondary, or tertiary reviewer of different proposals. The final evaluation of the proposals will take place at a face-to-face meeting of each of the panels, where the proposals will be presented, discussed, and scored. Each panel will prepare a brief report to the parent committee with recommendations for proposals according to their relevance and scientific merit. The panel reports may provide comments on the overall quality and direction of the proposals. After the completion of panel reviews, the parent committee will meet to consider the panels’ recommendations and to identify a single set of proposals most worthy of consideration for funding by the Florida Department of Citrus. The parent committee will prepare a report that describes the process of evaluation and provides a prioritized list of proposals recommended for consideration.