Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Project Overviews and Specific Aims

This spring, we offered a seminar on Writing Your Project Overview and one on Writing Your Specific Aims with Chris Phiel, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology and Sonia Flores, Professor in the School of Medicine (respectively). We now have the videos from those seminars edited and up on our vimeo site. Please check them out!


Denver: Writing a Project Overview
Faculty Expert: Chris Phiel, Associate Professor, Integrative Biology

Description:
Reviewers tend to make up their minds as to whether they like or don’t like a grant proposal upon reading the first page. This makes your project overview, whether it be Specific Aims or a Project Summary, essential in terms of hooking your reviewer and getting them excited about your work. Join us for this seminar where you will learn how to craft your project overview to be clear and compelling.


AMC: Writing Your Specific Aims
Faculty Expert: Sonia Flores, Professor, School of Medicine

Description:
The Specific Aims is the most crucial component of your NIH grant proposal. It is the first thing the reviewers assigned to your proposal look at, and for those reviewers not assigned to your proposal, it is often the only thing they see of your proposal before scoring it. In this seminar, you will learn how to craft your Specific Aims and you will hear from a seasoned PI on their experience with Specific Aims from a PI and Reviewer perspective.


Thursday, May 16, 2019

Saving space in your proposal

Life is a trade-off. If you're like me, you spend the first part of your schooling thinking how am I going to fill five pages, 10, 20, 30? And once you're writing grant proposals, you ask, how am I supposed to keep this proposal to 15 pages? Well, there are plenty of bad ways to save space in your proposal, like moving the margins or shrinking the type-face. But below I offer you some good space-saving strategies:

Use active, first-person voice:
Scholars and researchers are often trained to use the passive, third-person in their academic writing.

Here's the difference:
Passive, third-person: The experiment will be conducted by the researcher.
Active, first-person: I will do the experiment.

Why do academics want to use the passive, third person? A couple of reasons: first, it alludes to the objectivity of the research and removes the researcher from the written proposal. Second, it sounds more formal, more appropriate for the expert reviewers. But, I argue that the benefits of the active, first-person outweigh those of the former. First off, it's shorter. I cheated a little bit in my example and changed the verb, but either way, it's going to end up shorter. And when you make these changes to all of your sentences, you'll save a lot of space! Second, active, first-person is easier to read. Any good technical writer worth her word processor will tell you that!

Remove hyperbole:
I recently reviewed a grant proposal where the PI described something as "very, very important." Now, I get that it's hard in a grant proposal to really make things stand out, but this is not the way! Firstly, my loyal blog readers have heard me say this before, but I once had a Technical Writing Professor who said that there is never a good reason to use the word "very," and she had long since banned it from her writing. Her point was that it didn't add anything to the sentence. If something is important, say "it's important." Adding "very," let alone, two of them doesn't articulate anything significantly different. Now, I'll take this a step further even and suggest that not only should our PI cut out the "verys," but I would ask, is there a way you can show that this is important instead of just saying it? Is there a way to structure the description to make it clear to the reader that this is important, so that you don't have to tell them? Now, I've made this argument and lost several times before and I acquiesce that sometimes using this hyperbole cues the reader to pay close attention. So, if you must, say something is important or great or incredible, but please don't say it's very, very incredible.

Cut sentences that don't have a clear purpose:
When you're running out of space in your grant proposal, you need to be brutal. This means going through the proposal line by line, and cutting sentences or phrases that aren't really making a difference. They may be eloquent, they may be poetic, but if they're not doing the work of making your case to reviewers, they have to go!

Phone a friend:
So, after you've changed everything to active, first-person, cut out hyperbole, and brutally curtailed your proposal and you still can't find enough room for your amazing diagram (that you're keeping at a size that reviewers can see), it's time to call for reinforcements. You need to find a colleague to go through and tell you what's still in your proposal that isn't necessary and where you can condense.

These tips can help you cull a mostly-written proposal, but another thing to do is create a well-organized plan of attack before you start writing your grant proposal. If you can outline and identify what you want to do in each section first, it'll help you stay out of the weeds in your first draft. That way there will be less you need to cut later on!

Resources:
Top three things to cut from your writing - Kyra Thomsen

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

PO1 and Center Grants

Last week, we held a panel on putting together PO1 and Center grants, or Large Team Grants (LTGs). Panelists included researchers who had successfully competed for LTGs and those who had facilitated putting those grant proposals together. Panelists agreed that putting an LTG together takes about 3-5 years and endeavors like these must be led by senior investigators with a substantial record of past funding. Some participants asked why it was worth the work that LTGs require when getting funded with an R01 is much easier for established investigators. Dr. John Hokanson, Professor in the Colorado School of Public Health, explained that LTGs allow you to do more innovative and collaborative science than you can do as an independent investigator. His enthusiasm was apparent as he described the cutting-edge research he'd been able to lead through developing LTG projects and proposals.

Furthermore, we're seeing funding agencies and the science community at large call for proposals that engage big questions that often call for multiple PIs from various fields coming together to offer substantial solutions and steps forward. LTGs are exciting and next level, but they are a lot of work and a lot of planning. Below are tips the panelists offered in working toward an LTG.

  • Give yourself time: As mentioned, panelists agreed that it takes 3-5 years to build your team, develop your projects, and put together your grant proposal.
  • Contact your Program Officer early and often to discuss your ideas and begin to build their understanding and buy-in for your LTG.
  • Focus on integration: It's not enough to just have a series of great projects, you need to show how the sum of the whole is greater than its parts.
  • Develop your story: You need to become a story-teller to convey the necessity and excitement of your program.
  • Establish clear communication upfront: As you develop your team, make sure you're all clear on expectations and commitments so the wheels don't come off as you build momentum.
  • Offer a diagram: When you're at the point of proposal writing, show your reviewers visually how all the parts of your program/center work together.
  • Consider submitting R01s at the same time: If you're submitting a P01, you can also submit individual projects to the NIH as R01s at the same time. This way if your P01 is not funded, but some R01s are, your project can get going and you can look to revise the P01 for the next cycle building on what's been done with the R01s.
  • Work with people who have had LTGs. Even for the most seasoned investigator, an LTG is a challenge. Be sure to reach out to those PIs who have developed an LTG successfully to get their insight, tips, and mentorship.
LTGs can sometimes seem insurmountable, but the opportunities that lie in large team science are worth the work and there is potential in receiving funding for your large endeavor for 10+ years. Think of the possibilities within that time!

Resources:

PO1 Guide for Reviewers - NIH