- Not that Kind of Grant Application: Tales of Career Development Awards
Our department in my former institution has a very strong track record of securing career development awards for PhD and MD trainees, both on the basic and clinical research fronts. Aside from the strong science in the department and the substantial resources of the institution,...
- Responding to Manuscript Reviews While Avoiding Cerebral Aneurysms
On first receiving a set of manuscript reviews, you might feel that your reviewers must be either hopelessly ignorant of the field, actively malevolent, purposefully obtuse, or all three. The thing you must remember, though, is that a request for revisions is as good as accepta...
- What’s in Your Bucket(s)?
Once you’ve defined the buckets of work for your grant submission and placed them on your timeline, you are ready for the second step in the work breakdown process.
Recall that the purpose of work breakdown is to divide a large amount of work into manageable chunks. The first ...
- Buckets of Fun (Work?)
Proposed research project is feasible? Check. Timeline formatted? Check. Milestones added? Check. Now it’s time to break the work into manageable chunks, a process cleverly called work breakdown.
Breaking the work down enables you to spread your grant writing over time and sti...
- Researchers—Start Your Timelines
Your feasibility assessment is complete. You have made necessary adjustments and you are confident your proposed research project is feasible. Now what?
Constructing your timeline is the next step in building your plan for proposal submission. Review the earlier images of comp...
- 500 Mile(stones)
How will you know you are progressing satisfactorily toward your chosen date for submitting your grant proposal? Defining milestones will help.
Earlier blogs have addressed why doing a plan for your submission is a good idea, key concepts in project planning, how to assess the...
- Can You (Really) Do Your Proposed Study?
…a deceptively simple question that can be interpreted in several ways.
For purposes of planning your proposed research study, answering the question (read: assessing feasibility) means looking at your idea from three perspectives—scope, cost, and time.
The scope of your pr...
- Fresh Ideas for Writing Innovation in Your NIH Grants
NIH information for grant authors prompts researchers to ask these questions as they describe innovation:
Does the application challenge and seek to shift current research or clinical practice paradigms by utilizing novel theoretical concepts, approaches or methodologies, in...
- Harness the Immense Power of Nosiness in NIH RePORTER
As a manager for our career development programs, many questions I get from trainees and faculty can actually be answered by using NIH RePORTER. You can find out all kinds of nosy things like:
Who else on campus has the kind of grant I’m writing (so I can ask if they’d shar...
- Planning to Plan: Gathering Materials for Your Grant Pacing Plan
You’ve decided that maybe a plan for doing your grant submission is a good idea. Check! But how to start?
Here are four concepts (borrowed from the project management profession) to help you get started: 1) assessing feasibility, 2) timelines, 3) milestones, and 4) work breakd...
