Getting funded

1
Getting funded

• Scientific focus
• Writing a grant dos and donts
• Where and when to apply
• The review process
• Budgeting

2
Scientific focus

• State a specific over-arching hypothesis and
  Specific Aims that are testable and important
• Stay away from the trivial
• Balance between the do-able and the overly
  ambitious
• Pick an important problem advice for your
  scientific life
• Focus on the problem, not the method
• Not we will use a newly-developed mouse to test
  this idea but we will test this idea. One
  approach is to use a newly-developed mouse

3

• He chose poorly

4
What goes into a grant?

• The science
• Specific aims
• Background and significance
• Preliminary data
• Methods
• Other stuff that might influence a score
• The investigator
• The environment
• Stuff that doesnt usually influence a score
• The budget

5
Some grant writing dos and donts

• Reviewers are not infinitely patient.
• Make your case on page 1 abstract, Specific Aims
  Page
• Make it clearly
• Make it legibly
• Spell-check
• Learn to like to write
• Finish the first draft weeks ahead of time
• Time for you to re-review (pretend you didnt
  write it)
• Time for your mentor and other colleagues to
  review
• Daily (at least!) backups use dropbox or
  something like it

6
Grant writing dos and donts

• By the time a reviewer gets to a description of
  what you propose to do, they should already be
  convinced that
• the problem is important.
• Dont characterize, describe, etc. Rather,
  test hypothesis, identify, determine the
  role of
• Avoid elevator science A and C go up B and D go
  down
• the experiments are do-able
• you can do them

7
Some specifics

• Writing the Specific Aims section
• Background and significance
• Dont review everything there is to know review
  what is important to your proposal, introduce new
  methods. Self-citation is OK in moderation here.
• Preliminary data
• They know what you want to do. Convince them you
  can do it.
• As soon as you think you are going to write a
  grant, think about what preliminary data you will
  need. Dont leave this for later
• Methods
• My preference describe the experiments,
  pitfalls, interpretation that will address each
  Specific Aim put the details in a separate
  section at the end.

8
Form issues

• The Figure 1 Strategy
• Fonts and figures
• Every paragraph should have a header

9
5 sentences describe the preliminary data and the
question to be addressed in Specific Aim 1
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13
If you are the reviewer, what word might you use
to describe the likelihood this grant will get
funded?
14

• Inconceivable!
• I dont think that word means what you think it
  means

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A picture is worth more than a thousand words
its worth hundreds of thousands or millions of
dollars
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A visual issue in graphics generation
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A visual issue in graphics generation
20
The review process

• Imperfect
• Usually impersonal
• Participate on grant review committees if the
  opportunity arises
• Find out who will review your grant. Cite them
  (moderately) in the text.

21
A bad attitude to the review process

• Leave the gun bring the cannoli

22
NIH Review Criteria

• Significance
• Approach
• Innovation
• Environment
• Investigator
• Importance of each component varies during career
  development
• An unfunded grant is a re-submittable grant
• Also, thanks to the miracles of modern
  word-processing, a written grant need not be
  submitted to only one funding agency.

23

• It's not spaghetti, it's linguini
• Now it's garbage.

Throw enough linguini against the wall, and some
of it will stick
24
Timetables

• At the end of the Methods section
• Reviewers will pillory you for not presenting
  them
• They are near-meaningless, in my opinion.

25
Conclusions

• Successful grant competition requires attention
  to form and to content. Both need to be
  excellent.
• Variety of opportunities for support for young
  investigators.
• While review process is similar for all agencies,
  application details and eligibility vary
• I cant believe they pay me to do this.