Welcome to the Grant Jungle

Spencer Muse

Department of Statistics

Bioinformatics Research Center

NC State University

Most important message

Find a good mentor or two to guide you through this process the first time. Or probably even the first few times.

Why should you take my advice on this?

• I just flew back last night from an NIH grant review panel.• I’ve served on over 50 such panels over the last decade, mostly for

NIH but also for NSF and USDA.• My research has been continuously funded since I got my first NSF

grant in 1997.• I’ve had a variety of funding: individual NSF and NIH grants; multi-

site collaborative NSF grants; NIH training grants; equipment grants; a private foundation young investigator grant; an NIH postdoctoral fellowship

What you should really take from that shameless slide

There are many different types of grants, for many different purposes, from many different agencies.

You should prepare yourself to compete for a variety of awards, not just (for example) NSF grants.

Why do we write grants?

• To advance knowledge in our chosen fields• Resources (equipment, supplies, labor, TIME)• Contribute to the research enterprise of your institution• To provide training opportunities at all levels• Because you want tenure

What can grants pay for?

• Your time (release from teaching, administration, consulting, etc)

• Part of your salary (summer support)• Equipment (computers, lab gadgets, Tardises)• Supplies (reagents, software, lab animals)• Labor (grad/undergrad students, postdocs, technicians)• Travel (for field work, collaboration, conferences)• Publication costs

When should you write a grant?

• As soon as possible, but only after– You have a stable position that includes facilities and

time to let you conduct the research– You have a body of work and preliminary results

What agency/organization should you apply to?

• Most of the major federal agencies offer funding opportunities suitable for young investigators (NSF, NIH, DOE, USDA, etc)

• There are many private organizations that fund research supporting their mission, and many have programs specifically for young investigators (Sloan Foundation, Google, Gates Foundation)

This is a place where excellent mentoring comes into play

What makes a good grant proposal?

• The science must be good• The science must be important• The science must be topical

Agencies have agendas for selecting what they fund. Being “good” is not good enough on its own.

What makes a good grant proposal?

• The proposed work must be explained clearly• The proposed work must be feasible• The proposed work must match the funding opportunity

Bad writing and organization doom more grants than any other cause.

What makes a good grant proposal?

• The investigator(s) must be good• The investigator(s) must have the appropriate expertise• The investigator(s) must have a track record

It is becoming less and less common for grants to be submitted by single investigators. Research teams are now the norm.

The Review Process

Understanding the review process may be the single thing that can increase your chance of success the most.

• Look up the details for the agency• Talk to people who have been successful• Talk to people who have been on review panels• If you get a chance to review grants, take it!

NIH Review Process

• Grants are reviewed by groups of scientists, mostly from academia. These are called study sections

• Study sections are organized based on scientific area, and may include grants of several types, responding to many funding opportunities.

• A typical study section includes 20-40 reviewers.

Scoring NIH Grants

• Each grant is assigned to 3 primary reviewers• Primary reviewers read and assign scores• At the study section meeting, they present the grant to

the rest of the panel, describing the work and pointing out strengths and weaknesses– The description of your proposed work will take

less than 5 minutes (we’ll revisit this)• ALL study section members then give a score, and the

proposal score is the average of those.

Funding NIH Grants

• Most proposals are assigned a percentile based on the history of the study section (ie, what % of recent proposals received a score better than mine in the past few years?)

• Individual NIH institutes each have their own way of choosing which grants to fund, but most have something resembling a “payline”

• http://www.einstein.yu.edu/administration/grant-support/nih-paylines.aspx

Help the Reviewers Write the Reviews You Want to Get!

• Find the scoring criteria for your agency/funding opportunity – http://grants.nih.gov/grants/peer/guidelines_general/

Review_Criteria_at_a_glance.pdf• Talk to the agency program officer assigned to the

funding oppportunity, study section, etc.• Organize your proposal around this information

– Highlighting, bullet lists– Give reviewers pieces to “plagiarize”- this is exactly

what you want to happen

Project Summary/Specific Aims

This is your only real chance to get a successful score. It is virtually impossible to recover from a poorly crafted Specific Aims page.

For many (most) reviewers, your maximum score is established after they read this page.

Remember the 5-minute (max) project summary? This is where the reviewers will get it.

Hand the primary reviewer a short, simple list of your aims.

Specific Aims

• 2-4 Aims max– Sub-aims are OK, but be brief

• Each aim should be stated in at most 2 sentences. A single sentence or phrase is even better.

• Be careful about latter aims depending on the success of previous aims

General Writing Suggestions

Who is going to review your proposal, in order of probability:

1. Smart people who are familiar with the general field, but probably know little about the specific literature of your proposal

2. Smart people who know nothing about your research area, but are likely to know about the uses of the work

3. Experts in your specific research area are "unicorns”

Don't primarily write to group 3.

General Writing Guidelines

Don't give reviewers an easy weakness to pick on. These can snowball in the panel discussion and significantly lower your final scores. If you think you must point out a weakness of your approach, always provide an alternate solution or strategy.

General Writing Guidelines

Emphasize impact- who has used your work in the past, who will use the results of the proposed work.

Include collaborators in the grant WITH ALLOCATED (ie, paid) EFFORT.

A caution about super-duper-techy stuff

It is almost certain that no reviewer is going to carefully work through your math, so use it sparingly and wisely. Think "elevator talk".

Common Causes of Poor Scores

• Unfocused research strategy (2-4 specific aims!)• More attention to what HAS been done than to what WILL be done• Lack of innovation (don’t just suggest basic extensions to prior work)• Lack of expertise (if you can’t demonstrate your own via past work

or training, either drop the aim or bring in a collaborator)• Failure to demonstrate knowledge of the literature• Handing reviewers a “weakness on a plate”