- Even More Cranky
Since the holy trinity important things have come in threes—listen up. Not all beautiful things are functional or practical. Think white upholstery, stiletto heels in the lab, bilateral justification of your grants. Bilateral justification is from the devil. It’s a cognitive drai...
- Don’t Let Your Research Questions Go Out Without PICOTS
All the best aims are wearing PICOTS (pronounced “peacoats”). Specification of your PICOTS* is the minimum outerwear required to prevent your research question from being caught in a downpour of questions. Having these details tucked in gets you ready to have a meaningful convers...
- Conveying Institutional Support
Grant reviewers want to invest in success. If you’re applying for a career development award, you must convey the support of your institution. If your chair doesn’t want to invest in you, why should the NIH or other funding agencies?
Dr. Nancy J. Brown, chair of the Departme...
- Not that Kind of Selection: Tales of Picking Which Grants to Write
In my last post, I blogged about the different types of grants that are available to early stage investigators (ESIs) and the benefits of these awards. If you are like me, you were overwhelmed when you saw the list the first time. There are too many grants to write as a new princ...
- Not that Kind of Grant: Tales of Early Career Investigator Grants
As a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, my mentors wrote National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Terrible Disease Foundation grants. That was it. Imagine my surprise when I started as a new principal investigator (PI), and I was inundated with grants of which I had never h...
- Using NIH RePORTER to Find Your Guide
In much the same way the Assisted Referral Tool can help you pick a study section, the Program Official option for NIH’s Matchmaker tool provides insight into the Program Officer who works with the most projects that look like yours.
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- What I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My K
Three K awardees (K01, K08, K23) share the advice they wish they'd received before preparing career development awards. Writing your K? Listen up.
Training Plan and Mentors
Have an endgame, and goals to get there. In your training plan, you should be able to articulate your res...
- Which Study Section Should I Pick? Try the Assisted Referral Tool!
One important aspect of submitting grants to the NIH is selecting an appropriate study section. While the general descriptions on the CSR website can be helpful, they often require further investigation, which can (and should) include contacting SROs, talking to current or forme...
- Three (Grant) Peeves in a Pod: Appearance Matters
Since the holy trinity important things have come in threes—listen up. Beauty is in the eye of the reviewer and we like simple elegance:
1) Avoid gratuitous attention grabbing.
Really? All caps, bold, italics, and underlining in the same paragraph? If your use of emphasis i...
- Not that Kind of Progress: Tales of Setting up a New Laboratory
If you are amongst the truly lucky job applicants, you are probably setting up a laboratory as we speak. Having recently concluded our set-up, I can tell you what worked for us, and what we could have done differently. As with many things in science, there are many ways to approa...
