Getting funded

Getting funded

•If at first you don’t succeed

•How the process works

•How to write a good grant

If at first you don’t succeed

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What to apply to?

Apply early, apply often

If a grant is accepted at an agency, send another grant to that agency ….

If a grant is rejected, send it somewhere else.

Make sure your grant fits the agency scope and you meet the criteria

What is a study section?

•NIH study sections are managed by a scientific review administrator (SRA), a professional at the M.D. or Ph.D. level•with a scientific background close to the study section’s area of expertise.•Have 12 to 24 members recruited by the SRA, most of whom are from academia—some have•long-term appointments and others are temporary members.•Review as many as 60 to 100 applications per meeting.•Usually assign three reviewers to each application.•Are supported by a grants technical assistant, who reports to the SRA.

What happens in a study section?

• Orientation (discussion of general business)• Provisional approval of list of streamlined applications• Discussion of remaining applicationsThe discussion of applications includes the following:• Reviewers with a conflict of interest are excused.• Assigned reviewers present strengths, weaknesses, and their preliminary scores.• Other members discuss scientific and technical merit.• Range of scores is expressed (every member scores every application).• Codes for gender, minority, and children and human subjects are assigned (NIH has requirements for inclusion of women, minorities, and children in clinical research and strict criteria for research involving human subjects and animals).• Recommended budget changes are discussed.• After each meeting, the SRA documents the results in a summary statement, which is forwarded to both the I/C and the principal investigator.

What is a summary statement?

Overall summary of review discussion (for applications that were discussed and scored)

• Essentially unedited critiques by the assigned reviewers• Priority score and percentile ranking• Budget recommendations• Administrative notes (e.g., comments on human subjects or animal welfare)

SignificanceInvestigator(s) Innovation ApproachEnvironment

Common reasons for poor priority score

• Lack of original ideas• Absence of an acceptable scientific rationale• Lack of experience in the essential methodology• Questionable reasoning in experimental approach• Diffuse, superficial, or unfocused research plan• Lack of sufficient experimental detail• Lack of knowledge of published relevant work• Unrealistically large amount of work for the given time frame or funding level• Uncertainty about future directions

How to write a good grant• Write an appropriate grant for your funding agency (& make sure you get the right study section)

•Think about your reader – including the expertise of the study section/Board of Directors

• Finish it early and put it away for 2 week

• Your grant is only as good as the worst aim

• Get 2 experienced colleagues to read it

• Never argue with the reviewers (never never never)

1. Carefully research the application processBe sure to know all of the ins and outs of the application process. Scour the funding announcement and the website, paying close attention to the evaluation criteria. Read the solicitation carefully, and frame your grant to address it. Ask previous winners in your department for advice — but take it all (even mine!) with a grain of salt.

10 tips for the NSF application process

2. Write, rewrite, then rewrite againThis is perhaps the most important rule. Strong writing comes from rewriting. So start writing early enough to leave time for several revisions. It may take two or three complete drafts before you have a tight, streamlined application.3. Have as many editors as you can manageGive several readers the best application you can produce. Be prepared for them to say, “It’s a good start, but you have a long way to go.” Good editors include your advisor, other NSF applicants from your school, labmates, and anyone else you trust to be critical. Many schools also have resources such as writing centers where you can get additional help from gifted writers who are not in your field. Even if they are not familiar with your science, their perspective may be similar that of reviewers whose expertise is outside of your topic area.

10 tips for the NSF application process

4. Write clearly and conciselyAll scientists should consult Rule 17 of Strunk and White (1979): “Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” Chapter Three of the American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual also has style suggestions. The two-point summary: Avoid jargon, and write so an undergraduate can understand.

10 tips for the NSF application process

5. Tell a compelling storyRather than listing accomplishments, tell a story about how you became interested in psychology, how your academic experiences have prepared you for rigorous science, and what questions you are interested in answering. Specific skills, talents, and goals should be integrated into the narrative of your academic and professional life.

10 tips for the NSF application process

6. Brag subtlyMention your accomplishments in the context of talking about your previous experiences. It can be difficult to highlight your strengths without sounding cocky or overly confident, but you do want to state your accomplishments clearly. One solution to this predicament is to mention abstract lessons you have learned in the context of talking about concrete experiences. For example, you might mention how you learned about the importance of perseverance and precision in scientific research when you were learning how to calibrate eye trackers.7. Balance what you have done with what you will doAddress both what you have done and what you plan to do. A clear project proposal and career trajectory are essential. At the same time, you must prove that you are capable of undertaking the proposed research and that you have the relevant background to help achieve your broader impact goals. Claiming you want to do science outreach is a much easier sell when you already have a long history of outreach work.

10 tips for the NSF application process

8. Make your application visually appealingAvoid the temptation to cram as many words as possible into your two pages (e.g., single-spacing lines, tightening the kerning and tracking, narrowing the margins). Your application is only one among thousands. Reviewers will be tired and reading quickly, so do everything in your power to make it easier for them. Use elegant figures on each page (especially if you do neuroscience — see McCabe & Castel, 2008.) Leave white space on the page with healthy margins and an extra line break between paragraphs. Choose your font wisely. The application has loose formatting requirements, so enjoy the chance to break away from APA style.

10 tips for the NSF application process

9. Emphasize broad impactReviewers will be assessing both your academic merit and your potential for broad impact. Keep in mind that everyone applying for the fellowship is either already in or applying for graduate school. As a result, broad impact is often what separates the honorable mentions from the winners. The NSF website suggests the kind of activities in which they are most interested, such as communicating scientific findings broadly and mentoring minority students. Highlight previous relevant experiences, mention what you would like to do in the future, and, if at all possible, propose a research project that includes broad-impact goals, such as exploring how memory research can enhance classroom education.

10 tips for the NSF application process

10. If at first you don’t succeed…get more experiencePlan on applying for the fellowship multiple times. If you do not win (which is likely), you will get some feedback about the strengths and weaknesses of your application. Over the next year you can seek out additional experiences that will bolster your portfolio. Take on leadership positions within your department or a national organization (such as APS), mentor undergraduate students, and add presentations and publications to your CV. Most importantly, use the extra six months to continue rewriting and thinking about your new application.Every graduate student should apply for external funding. Aside from the obvious benefits mentioned above, writing an application forces you to analyze your research career, to think about what kind of questions interest you, and to examine why you are engaged with science. Reflecting on your future career and research projects can be a useful activity on its own.And who knows, you might actually win!

10 tips for the NSF application process

Top Tips from Awardees

• Start early, taking significant time to compose essays, and rewrite.• Demonstrate your personal motivation and excitement for research.• Spend time to thoroughly research your topic.• Integrate essays to create singular theme, link the content together.• Keep essays clear and simple to read.• Give essays to many people for review.• Get input from professors or university administration.• Get input from previous applicants or winners.• Thoroughly address both Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts.• Be sure you adequately address the Broader Impacts criterion.• Be sure to include all volunteer, leadership, and extracurricular activities.• Highlight the significance of your research and how it will impact society.• Pay close attention to language in the Program Solicitation.• Focus on getting strong recommendation letters.• Mention what sets you apart from a typical applicant - be unique!

Top Tips from Reviewers

• Gain research experience, especially at the undergrad level (for example, see NSF's REU program).

• Become involved in leadership roles and community service.• Write clear and scientifically-sound essays.• Strive for scientific publications and presentations.• Have a strong academic record.• Be sure to demonstrate the Broader Impacts criteria well.• Select strong recommenders.• Link your teaching and research experiences.• Ensure you display a history of accomplishments.• Thoroughly address both Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts. • Highlight any international experience you may have.• Display your passion and motivation in the essays.• Be knowledgeable of your research topic.• Demonstrate the significance of your proposed work.• Make sure the proposed research is realistic.

The short list

• Tell a story • Simple• Clear • Motivated• Define every term• Plausible w. plans for dead ends & preliminary

data• Realistic budget/time-wise• Answer the reviewers

Feature based attention in human visual cortex John Serences (1) Specific Aims

Every second, the eye sends more than 106 bits of information into the brain. The amount of information entering the brain at any given moment becomes even more overwhelming when all senses are considered in combination. Consequently, we only consciously perceive a fraction of this sensory information; a large amount of input must be selectively filtered at preconscious stages of processing [1]. For instance, as you read this proposal, you can choose to selectively perceive the pressure of the paper on your fingers and the background hum of the air conditioner, but you probably weren’t aware of either piece of sensory information until you were reminded of them. It requires an overt act of selective attention to bring these percepts into awareness.

In everyday perception, many factors play a role in biasing selection in favor of behaviorally relevant stimuli, including the evolutionary history of the organism, current task instructions, and the reward history associated with a particular stimulus or decision. In most cases, a weighted combination of these factors will determine the stimulus with the highest attentional priority at any given time. My goal is to learn about how the human brain attentively selects and represents behaviorally relevant information in the following specific aims:

Feature based attention in human visual cortex continuedJohn Serences

Specific Aim 1. Behavioral significance of attentional modulations in parietal and frontal cortexRegions of parietal cortex (the intraparietal sulcus, or IPS) and frontal cortex (the Frontal Eye Fields, or FEF) are thought to

represent behaviorally relevant stimuli in spatiotopically organized attentional priority maps. For instance, regions of right IPS become more active when attention is directed to left visual hemifield and regions of left IPS become more active when attention is directed to the right hemifield. A similar pattern is observed in right and left FEF [2]. In Specific Aim 1, a conjunction of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and psychophysics will be used to quantitatively associate behavioral performance with attentional modulations in IPS and FEF. A random-dot stimulus of variable coherence will be used to cue the location of an upcoming target. High coherence motion signals an unambiguous target location, whereas low coherence motion provides a more ambiguous cue to target location. When the attention cue is composed of high coherence motion, attention should be rapidly and effectively allocated to the target location. If neural activity in IPS/FEF is directly linked to the attentional priority of the cued location, then the high coherence/unambiguous cue should lead to a robust neural response in contralateral IPS/FEF. In contrast, the low coherence/ambiguous motion attention cue should require more time to resolve, delaying the deployment of attention and the corresponding ramp-up of activity in contralateral IPS/FEF. The quantitative relationship between contralateral IPS/FEF activity and behaviorally measured attentional enhancement will be mapped out by varying cue coherence levels over a wide range of values.Specific Aim 2. Resolving competition between perceptual states in parietal and frontal cortex

Under Specific Aim 1, neural modulations in IPS/FEF will be linked to behavioral performance as subjects attend to a single location in space. However, attention plays a critical role in determining which of many possible stimuli will have the most influence on conscious perception and behavior. According to both neural integrator and biased competition models, competition between opposing perceptual states is resolved within high level visual areas as they integrate information from sensory neurons selectively tuned to different low-level visual features [3-5]. Key to both models is the notion that competition between alternative perceptual states must be resolved before a stable internal representation of the world is achieved. Research under Specific Aim 2 will track neural modulations linked to multiple competing stimuli while observers judge the degree of motion coherence in two random-dot fields. The stimuli will be positioned on opposite sides of fixation so that they are represented in contralateral visual areas. Neural activity will be measured in left and right MT and IPS/FEF and we will parametrically manipulate the amount of competition between the dot fields by varying the ratio of coherent motion present in the left and right stimuli. Both neural integrator and biased competition models predict that within visual areas involved in resolving competition between the potential target locations, there should be a correlation between behavioral performance and the relative (as opposed to absolute) level of activation.Specific Aim 3. Dissociating cortical biasing effects due to attention and reward

Task instructions can induce an observer to selectively attend to a subset of available information; however, the prior reward history associated with a stimulus also biases cortical representations [6]. While the effects of attention and reward are usually studied in isolation, the neural mechanisms thought to mediate each process are similar. There are no studies to date which have explicitly attempted to dissociate attention and reward, and examine their potentially separable role in biasing competition between stimuli in the visual field. Experiments in Specific Aim 3 will simultaneously manipulate spatial and featural attention, and the reward value associated with competing stimuli, to assess the degree of independence between attention and reward in influencing perceptual experience.

IntroductionFigure 1Context has a dramatic effect on how we perceive size. For example, in Figure 1, the two spheres are exactly the same physical size – they occupy the same size on the page and cover the same amount of space on the retina. However, we cannot help but perceive the sphere at the back of the hallway as being larger than the sphere at the front of the hallway. This illusion makes perfect sense for a visual system that has evolved to interpret a three-dimensional (3D) world. The depth cues in the image give rise to a difference in perceived distance between the two spheres, and our visual system takes this into account when arriving at an estimate of object size. This example is a powerful illustration of how identical input at the retina can be transformed into very different perceptions depending on the 3D contextual information present in an image. The goal of this research proposal is to understand the neurophysiological basis of the transformation from retinal information to representations of 3D object properties. Understanding the mechanisms by which contextual information is incorporated into neural responses is essential for understanding how our visual system makes sense of the 3D world in which we live.

The effects of context on visual perceptionScott Murray - NSF

The role of cholinergic pathways in mediating cross-modal plasticity as a result of blindness.

Loss of vision early in life leads to cross-modal plasticity - deprived occipital cortex (normally devoted to visual processing) becomes responsive to audition and touch. There is strong interest in cross-modal plasticity within both scientific and blind communities because it is believed that this cross-modal plasticity may underlie the superb use of "cross-modal technologies" (e.g. navigating using the tapping of a cane, or Braille reading) often found in early blind individuals. In contrast, individuals blinded later in life tend to show far weaker cross-modal plasticity, and tend to be less fluent in the use of cross-modal technologies. This lack of fluency often significantly limits the ability of late blind individuals to adjust to sight loss.While it has been demonstrated that occipital cortex responds to a wide range tactile and auditory stimuli in early blind individuals, the neuroanatomical changes that underlie this cross-modal plasticity are still unclear. Last year, we used P1PH magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to measure the concentrations of various metabolites in early blind and normally sighted individuals. MRS is a rapidly developing technique, similar to standard MR imaging, that can be used to non-invasively measure changes in neurochemistry as a result of blindness. As such, MRS provides a powerful way of examining neurophysiology in human subjects rather than animal models. We found that early blindness resulted in significantly increased levels of choline and myo-Inositol within both left and right occipital cortex. No differences in these metabolites between subject groups were found in a control voxel placed in motor cortex.

Pfeiffer Research Foundation

A. SPECIFIC AIMS"Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere … Suppose then … the blind man made to see … Query: whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could distinguish and tell which is the globe, which is the cube?" Despite the philosophical and psychological interest of Molyneux’s question1, cases of sight restoration are so rare that little is known about perceptual experience after long-term visual deprivation. A novel surgical procedure, limbal stem cell replacement, now permits corneal replacement in patients who were previously ineligible for surgery. Many of these patients suffered long-term visual deprivation, thus providing a rare opportunity to examine neural plasticity. There are two types of plasticity that interact in cases of visual deprivation: (1) deterioration as a consequence of deprivation, and (2) postoperative recovery; and both are likely to be strongly age-dependent. Deterioration and recovery may differ in more aspects than whether their effects are positive or negative: it takes more skill to hook up a computer than it does to unhook it.

Studies of the effects of bilateral amblyopia have found it difficult to tease apart the separate effects of deprivation and recovery since the vast majority of bilateral amblyopes are diagnosed and treated before 8 months of age. Consequently it only becomes straightforward to test the effects of amblyopia several years postoperatively, once significant recovery has also masked the effects of deprivation. Cases of long-term deprivation offer a unique opportunity for studying isolated effects of deterioration and recovery and for investigating how they interact with age. We will compare the following three types of observers, which will be discussed in more detail in section D.

The effects of visual deprivation

The effects of visual attentionGeoffrey Boynton

The term ‘attention’ is typically defined as the process of selecting a subset of incoming sensory information for further processing. Attention is normally allocated either to a particular location in space (spatial attention), or to a specific feature, such as color or motion, at that location (feature-based attention), or to some combination of the two. Spatial attention seems to operate by enhancing the responses of neurons with receptive fields at the attended location. Featural attention can be described as either local, or global. When two stimuli are presented at the same spatial location, feature-based attention to one of two stimuli seems to bias the neuronal response to the pair towards the response of the neuron to the attended stimulus presented in isolation [1]. We define this as local feature-based attention, since it operates locally at the attended spatial location. More recently, it has been shown that attention to a feature (such as color or motion) at one location affects the response to visual stimuli well outside the focus of attention [2]. We define this as global feature-based attention because it influences the representation of stimuli throughout the visual field. Global feature-based attention is an unusual, but interesting, form of attention because it acts on stimuli that, being outside the spatial locus of attention, can be thought of as being ignored. It may play an important role in perceptual grouping and visual search. A major motivation of the proposed experiments is to obtain a better understanding of this relatively unstudied attentional mechanism. Recent studies from our group and others show how spatial attention [3], local feature-based attention [4], and global feature-based attention [5] affect fMRI responses in the human visual system. These three forms of attention are typically studied separately, so little is known about how they interact. A second goal of the proposed studies is to examine the relationship between local and global feature-based attention, and spatial attention. Our experiments are guided by a model of attention that integrates findings from a variety of the major macaque electrophysiological studies of spatial, local, and global feature-based attention. This model has been generalized to make predictions for the population-based fMRI response. These predictions will be tested using a combination of fMRI and psychophysical methods in the following three specific aims:

The effects of visual attention continued …Geoffrey Boynton

Specific Aim 1: The relationship between spatial and feature-based attentionA surprising amount of electrophysiology data can be predicted from the following two assumptions: (1) global and local feature-based attention are mediated by the same mechanism, and (2) this general feature-based mechanism acts independently of spatial attention. The experiments described in the first aim are designed to test these two assumptions. For example, we will test the prediction that spatial and feature-based attention should modulate fMRI responses in a separable manner. Specific Aim 2: Properties of global feature-based attention Global feature-based attention links disparate stimuli that share common properties. What defines a ‘common’ property in the visual system? We will test whether all features of an attended stimulus influence the response to an unattended stimulus, or only the attended feature. Is the spread of global featural attention established through experience? We will see if feature-based attention can be influenced through exposure to arbitrary associations of stimulus features, such as color and direction of motion. Specific Aim 3: Cross-modal feature-based attentionIf local and global featural attention are driven by a common mechanism, then this same mechanism might also mediate feature-based attention across modalities. For example, does attention to an auditory stimulus moving in a particular direction affect fMRI responses to an unattended visual stimulus that shares the same direction of motion? We will also examine whether cross-modal ‘features’ can be established through experience by testing whether prolonged exposure to a novel pairing of cross-modal features leads to a cross-modal feature-based attentional effect.The proposed research will lead to a better understanding of how attended and unattended information is integrated within and across modalities. This will increase our understanding of attentional disorders such as ADHD, which involve an inability to filter out distracting sensory information.