The Grant Development Process

This week, ORDE kicked off our 2020 Virtual Grant Writing Symposium, with an e-Seminar on the Grant Development Process with Dr. Chris Phiel, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, serving as our Faculty Expert.

Oftentimes, people think that all there is to grant-writing is finding a grant, writing a proposal, and submitting that proposal. But, to truly be competitive for a grant, it takes engagement in a more comprehensive grant development process, as outlined below.

Literature & Fund Search:

The first step of this process is to search for the grants that might be a good fit for you and your research. It's a good idea to start assessing funding opportunities when you are narrowing in on your next research project and conducting your literature review. If you wait to look for funding opportunities until you have a fully developed project, you will create more work for yourself as you try to tailor your work to the program announcement on the back end.

ID and Research Sponsor:

Once you've identified a sponsor and program for your research project, it's important to do your homework. What is the mission and vision of the agency? What are their priorities? What have they funded in the past? Who are their reviewers? What is their review process? Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to craft a proposal that is in line with and speaks to the agency's goals.

Work with the Program Officers:

Many funding agencies have POs who serve as the agency's liaison for researchers. The POs are responsible for making sure the agency is funding the best research and most important research aligned with the agency's goals. The PO is an important person to talk with as you develop your research to make sure that you and your research are a good fit!

Hone Project:

Once you've done your research on the agency and talked with a PO about what you can do to ensure that your project is a good fit, make the revisions and adaptations necessary to ensure that your proposal will be competitive.

Revise/Resubmit:

There's a reason why the image above is in a cycle instead of a line. Most times, researchers do not have their proposal funded in the first go-round. The good news is that resubmissions have a much higher rate of being funded. So, be prepared to re-work and resubmit your proposal, and remember the best-funded researchers have also generally been the most rejected.

To learn more about this process, I encourage you to watch the recording of our e-Seminar: The Grant Development Process.

Ingredients for a great grant proposal

I was recently reviewing a well-written grant proposal. The PI outlined the project and illustrated what she expected to learn from the project as well as some of the publication products she anticipated. But, as I finished reading it, I had a nagging feeling. I realized that the question I was left with after reading the proposal was "so what?" I wasn't clear on what difference the project was going to make besides just understanding something better.

I realized that building a case for a grant is really about comprehensively answering the question "so what?" To demonstrate the importance of this question, I turn to an expert, George Heilmeier. Heilmeier is the former Director of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and is known in the grant development world as he who created "Heilmeier's Catechism" for grant writing. He asserted that all good proposals answer the following questions:

1. What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
2. How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
3. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
4. Who cares? If you succeed, what difference will it make?
5. What are the risks?
6. How much will it cost?
7. How long will it take?
8. What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success? 

The fourth question gets to my "so what?" It asks, who will this project make a difference for and why is that difference important? So, given how grant funding agencies really stress the importance of the "so what?" I wanted to offer you a simple exercise to better hone your answer to this question.

Step 1: Describe why your research project is important and to whom
Step 2: Based on your response, ask yourself, "so what?"
Step 3: Repeat step 2 until you can't come up with anything else
Step 4: Integrate the key stakeholders and important contributions your research will make into your proposal 

You can do this exercise in your head, or have a colleague ask you the questions and they can vary the "so what?" type questions based on your answers. But, make sure to capture your responses so that you can use them when you're writing up your case in your proposal.

Resources:
The Heilmeier Catechism
How not to kill a grant application: The facts of the case thus far - Science

Considering Paragraph Structure

Oftentimes, writers break to a new paragraph without a lot of thought. When you have a new idea, start a new paragraph is the guideline under which most of us operate. Yet, when we think about it from the reader's perspective, when a paragraph does not contain a complete thought or when a new paragraph makes a giant leap to a new subject without warning, our heads are left spinning!

So, as writers, there are a couple of things we can do to keep our readers from getting lost or frustrated. Using the mnemonic device MEAL, we can remember what should be in most paragraphs...

M - ain idea: This is your topic sentence; it sets up your reader to know what the paragraph is about

E - vidence: Of course, most main ideas need a little justification, so your evidence portion is a couple of sentences that back up your main idea.

A - nalysis: You're writing about this topic, because you have something to say about it, so what is your take on the main idea and the evidence you've cited?

L - ink or Last thought: This is a sentence or two where you conclude your thoughts and/or provide a linking sentence to the next paragraph.

Let's look at an example from an NIH award abstract:

Main  Evidence  Analysis  Link/Last thought

Excessive anxiety and fear leads to anxiety disorders, which impact many aspects of life, from the interpersonal to professional spheres. Although each anxiety disorder has different symptoms, they all share a core feature: mal-adaptive expression of high levels of anxiety. In our study, we will study how the brain suppresses anxiety. Prior studies showed the amygdala is largely responsible for generating high anxiety and fear, while the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) decreases these behaviors, possibly by inhibiting amygdala output. Indeed, in humans higher vmPFC activation correlates with lower amygdala activation and decreased anxiety. These data suggest the vmPFC-amygdala pathway may decrease anxiety and fear, but they rely on correlative measures, and can't directly test this hypothesis. We used optogenetics to directly test if the vmPFC-amygdala projection suppresses anxiety and fear. 

Remarkably, optogenetic activation of the vmPFC-amygdala pathway robustly inhibits innate anxiety and learned fear, while inhibition of this pathway increases anxiety.... 

As with any writing rule, there are exceptions and easily-readable paragraphs that leave out one component or another. Yet, when you pull all of the paragraphs together in a section, they should include all of the MEAL components pretty regularly.

In terms of paragraph organization, Otto Yang, in his book, Guide to Effective Grant Writing: How to Write a Successful NIH Grant Application, offers a technique to better construct and organize your paragraphs.  For one section, take the first line of every paragraph and put them together to see if those lead sentences alone give you an understanding of the piece.  This is important especially for grant-writing where reviewers often skim the numerous proposals they review. Giving your reviewers clear sign posts at the start of a paragraph will be much appreciated.

Although these techniques are helpful when you're writing, often they're more useful to apply when you are re-reading and revising.  You've already gotten your thoughts down and they seem to flow, but perhaps you'll realize in making revisions that your reader will have to read half-way through many of your paragraphs before they understand your main point.  In this case, it may serve you and your reader well to apply some paragraph revisions.

Resources:
Paragraphing with the MEAL Plan - Capella University
Paragraphs - University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Writing Center