Four recipients of K24 Midcareer Investigator Award in Patient-Oriented Research awards shared their best advice for writing these grants that protect time for independent investigators at the Assistant or Associate Professor level to mentor. (More on why you should write a K24.)

Panelists at this Vanderbilt event:

What Is a K24, Why Do You Need One, and When Should You Apply?

Success rates for fiscal year 2021 across NIH institutes offering K24s. Data from NIH RePORT.

• A K24 is a midcareer award that protects 25-50% of your time for mentoring and learning a new skill or expanding on an existing skill.
• Eligible applicants are at the Assistant or Associate Professor level, R01 (or equivalent)-funded, and doing patient-oriented research.
• Patient-oriented research involves direct contact with patients (not just the EMR or biospecimens).
• PhDs and MDs are eligible.
• Not all institutes offer one, and those that do have different rules about renewals, allowed effort, and other components.
• Success rates are very high—typically over 45%, sometimes up to 100%. Many are funded on the first try.
• Think about timing of a K24 submission in relationship to your own grant funding cycles and promotion timeline.
• When you’re ready for the responsibility of mentoring postdocs or K scholars (which equals responsibility for someone else’s career!), this will protect your time to do it.

Do and Consider Before Writing

• Search RePORTER for funded K24s in your institute—very helpful for getting a sense of the scope of projects proposed by others and how to uniquely position yourself.
• Solicit advice from others with K24s.
• Before you apply, honestly appraise your mentoring track record. Can you show mentoring success? What kind of impact have you had on people who trained with you even for a short time?
• Know your local department and your field—how many people are like you?
• Select the specific group of people you want to mentor; make sure it fills a need and fits with institution priorities. External mentorship counts—use professional organizations’ mentoring programs.
• Make sure you have research projects available at the right level for the people you propose to train, from medical or graduate students to fellows to K scholars. You will need to show how your mentees can create a niche for themselves and propel their career, rather than simply extending your research program.
• Strategically plan for what you will give up (or negotiate to give up) if your K24 is funded so that you have protected time for mentoring.
• Get involved with national projects that show leadership and mentoring, such as organizing a Gordon conference, leading a workshop at the big meeting in your field, or blogging on Edge for Scholars. Not only can you highlight it in your application, you can also request letters of support from others involved.
• Talk with your program officer.
• Read institute goals and align your application with them. Make sure you read the most current. Institutes frequently revise these programs based on institutional priorities.
• As with R01s, sometimes your grant might fit more than one institute, and you can tweak your application for the one with a better payline. Your K24 does not have to be through the same institute as your R01.

Shape Your Mentoring and Learning Strategies

• Decide whether you want to and can best make a case for learning a new skill or technique vs. developing a logical extension of your current skillset. Make an argument about how this will drive your career.
• Your proposed research must meet the definition of patient-oriented, but consider applying even if you have a track record in basic or translational research if you can make the case for how this will propel your career development and that of your mentees.
• One panelist’s reviewers considered it a minor weakness to not list a senior mentor.
• Choosing a primary mentor:
  • Choose someone not on your K23/K08.
  • Thematically look at investigators who can provide new ideas and new approaches to your research efforts.
  • Look at mentors who are successful.
  • Consider a mentoring committee rather than a single individual.
  • Consider external expertise for members of a committee.
• Prior to writing, discuss with local training infrastructure leaders how to take advantage of both mentoring opportunities and supports available through your institution, as well as the resources your mentees can access.
• Specify how you will find mentees. Think outside your own discipline, and even outside your institution.
• Consider how mentees will be able to develop their own niche and eventually become independent.

Write the Application

• Think of this grant as one big personal statement and resume. Find your story.
• You might write this grant in a non-standard order. One panelist wrote most of the grant with a relatively underdeveloped Aims page, and then did a lot of Aims page work and realigned rather late in the grant writing process.
• Consider using the instructions or even copying the required section headers into the application, as this grant is in a non-traditional format compared with what many reviewers are accustomed to reviewing.
• Clarify what you will not do in order to focus on mentoring and research, and have your chair put this in writing in his or her letter.
• Your mentoring history is really important—be sure to showcase trainee awards, funding, publications and current (hopefully academic/research) positions. Keep up with your mentees.
• Have a clear vision of what is next. How will you use the skills you develop, and what is your next step as a mentor?
• Some propose to write a T32 or K12 while on the K24; having a K24 in hand assures reviewers of training grants that you will have time to actually mentor those trainees.
• The research plan needs to build upon your funded research program that is already in place. Describe your program, how the proposed research builds upon it, and specifically how it supports trainee projects and their careers.
• If you elect to propose new research within the research plan, be aware that funds are limited and that a new project opens you up to critiques of the research project along with critiques of everything else in the application.
• The budget allows salary support to protect your time for mentoring and use of remaining support for components of your research program that can help to support mentees.
• Consider allocating budget for statistical support and research coordinator/nurse to support trainees especially. A K24 also reduces the salary support you must take on your R01(s), which frees up funds for trainees.

Do you have other advice for writers of K24s? Tell us in the comments below.

More Mentoring Ideas

Why You Want to Mentor via NRMN Guided Virtual Mentorships

It Is Never Too Early to Be a Mentor

Speed Mentoring: Seven Steps to a Successful Session

Success rates for 2018 & 2019 from NIH RePORTER. Click to view larger image.

Midcareer faculty often wish for more support and time to mentor, but many aren’t aware that NIH has a mechanism that does exactly that. K24 awards are the NIH’s best-kept secret. Many institutes have success rates of over 50%, some up to 80% or even 100%. If you’re an MD or PhD at the Assistant or Associate Professor level with an established, independent program of patient-oriented research and a solid track record of mentoring new clinical investigators, why wouldn’t you write a K24?

Here are the top five reasons to write a K24:

1. Get salary support for mentoring.

It takes time, energy, and a lot of work to be a good mentor. You remember the qualities of the mentor that helped you. Why not emulate the best of these, and get salary support for this work? The K24 will provide salary for levels of effort between 3-6 person-months (or between 25 and 50% full-time effort). There are different levels depending on the institute. It is important to read the different guidelines provided by each participating institute.

2. Grow academically.

Stagnant thinking is an impediment to your research and professional development. The K24 gives you an opportunity to think creatively about where you want your career to go. Do you want to learn a new skill or technique, or develop a logical extension of your current skillset? You can make a case for either. The K24 supports clinical research that directly engages human subjects. This could include studies of mechanisms of human disease, therapeutic interventions, clinical trials, or… (You don’t need a track record in clinical research to apply, by the way.)

3. Develop expertise in new technologies.

Innovation is vital to research progress. New techniques and methods require time and training. Perhaps you want to take this opportunity to develop expertise in a new research technique? The NIH will provide up to $50,000 per year for research expenses, travel to research meetings, training, and statistical services.

4. Explore new research avenues.

As always, the research description should emphasize novelty, significance, creativity, approach, and your ability to carry out the proposed research. Maybe you are a basic scientist who wants to study clinical populations, or you want to study a different disease-state. Take this opportunity to reorient or expand your research focus. The candidate background and career goals section provides a great opportunity to summarize where you have been and where you are going.

5. Invest in people.

Recreating yourself is the key (IMO) to avoiding burnout. Use this grant as an opportunity to do just this. My suggestion is to take a step away from the business of life, even if it is for a morning, and reflect on the importance of investing your time and energy in someone else’s life. Writing this grant becomes an opportunity to take stock of your current and aspirational mentoring approach. When you write the “candidate approach to mentoring” section, take the opportunity to reflect on your lab structure, mentoring approach, and how you will create an environment that invests in the lives of others.

Participating Institutions
NHLBI
NIA
NIAAA
NIAMS
NIAID
NIDCD
NIDA
NIEHS
NIMH
NINR
NCCIH

RFA for clinical trials.
RFA without clinical trials.

Are you writing a K24? If so, let us know what motivates you!

MORE RESOURCES

How to Get a K24

Microaffirmations

Scholarly Activities for a Remote Lab

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 Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and author of hundreds of letters of institutional support, recently shared her top suggestions for crafting a letter that shows your department chair is invested in your success.

(And yes, you will be drafting these letters.)

The Kiss of Death. Never, ever say that institutional support is contingent on receiving the award.  See the point above about grant reviewers wanting to invest in success.

The letter should promise what you need to succeed. This is typically at least 75% protected time for research and career development activities. Spell out teaching, clinical, and administrative duties you will put down upon receipt of the award, or duties from which you will continue to be protected if you don’t have them already.  The letter should also describe the appropriate office and lab space, equipment, and other resources (including access to research populations) the division or department will provide.

Success looks like: Your becoming an independent, tenured investigator.

Open strong. The opening recommendation should include superlatives, e.g., “I write to provide my strongest support…”

Provide some (superlative) biography. This person is a star, and his/her unique qualities are…  When drafting a letter, this is where you let your ego off the leash.  Statements that may seem hyperbolic to you may be appropriate.  If this is uncomfortable for you, ask your mentor to include more superlatives when he or she revises the draft.

Include a bit about your science. The letter should convey that you’re doing important work, and your chair knows about it.

Commit. As above, spell out how your time will be protected, space provided, and other items and investments you need to succeed.  Count everything.  For example, if you work somewhere that sells access to an electron microscope in small chunks for a small fee rather than you having to buy the whole $2 million thing yourself, count how much money that’s worth, especially if it explains why your research funds may seem low.

Close with a strong summary of why you are a promising investment.

Use good etiquette. Always provide a draft. Use the right hierarchy for your department—if it should go to your mentor, then division chief, then chair, send it that way.  Allow sufficient time for busy people to read, revise, and submit the letter.  (Think weeks, not days.  And follow our guide to pacing the components of your proposal.)

Common grammatical and style errors to avoid:

• Comma rather than a colon after the greeting (a business letter always uses the colon, even if it’s to your best friend).
• Use of passive voice.
• Use of “their” as a singular pronoun (“The candidate will then select their…” vs. “The candidate will the select his or her…”)
• “Data” are plural. “Datum” is singular.
• Split infinitives: Any word in between “to [verb].” For example, “to boldly go where no man has gone before…”  Good for Star Trek.  Not for you.
• Spelling errors of any kind.

Drafting a letter of collaboration? Check out advice from collaboration pros.

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 principal investigator (PI), so I have developed a series of questions that helps me decide which ones to pick. As always these days, n=me.

The caveats: I am a year and a half into a tenure-track position in a clinical department at an R1 medical school. I have a good start-up and a fairly expensive wet lab research program. I am not an expert in time management and I have a small lab, so the amount of data and publications are limited. I still work at the bench a bit, and my main focus is covering salaries rather than supplies. I was awarded a K99/R00 as a postdoctoral research fellow, so I have an established track record of funding and additional funds in the laboratory. My goal, therefore, is to establish stable funding in the lab before I fall off the K cliff. Your priorities may be different, and the answers to these questions may weigh differently in the final calculus of whether to write an application.

The questions: When I am notified about a new request for applications, either through my institution, an email from relevant foundations, or the NIH, I work through the following questions:

Is this grant a priority? A large part of being a PI is identifying research priorities. If you have been submitting grants and reviewers keep commenting on a lack of senior author publications or quantity of preliminary data, your time might be better spent completing papers and pilot experiments. The point of a start-up package is getting your research program launched, and that includes getting the first couple papers out and completing pilot experiments with ready-to-use funding. In my R00 transition documents, I included a timeline for submitting my first R01, and I met that goal this year. Whether the reviewers will share my enthusiasm for the project, or criticize my productivity on the K99/R00, remains to be determined.

Am I eligible and in research scope? Some of these grants have very specific eligibility requirements, so confirm you satisfy all of the eligibility criteria. These grants can also have a very defined research focus. As wonderful as the ESI MIRA (R35) through NIGMS is, my research is not of interest to the NIGMS.

How big is the award? I am looking for multi-year project funding. In general, I do not apply for smaller, yearlong grants. When my start-up is gone, I expect I will be much more interested in the smaller, pilot-level awards. Decide whether these smaller grants satisfy your needs, for example establishing a track record of funding, before applying.

How long is the application? The more involved the application, the longer the funding period needs to be and the larger the award. If the grant is very very competitive, but the application is short and easy, I will apply, regardless of how small the odds.

How many applications will be awarded? The smaller the number of grant awards, the tighter the applicant pool needs to be. For example, if there will be one award made for studying Terrible Disease, I probably will not apply. If, however, there is one award being made for studying Super Important Signaling Cascade by a Lab Mouse in Terrible Disease, I will probably apply. I use this criteria to justify applying for some of the very prestigious awards, like Searle or Pew, where they are funding a limited number of applicants, but the applicant pool is quite small too.

Is there are an early investigator pool? This should be a no-brainer. If you are competing with every Terrible Disease researcher as an ESI, you are unlikely to be given the award. I am saving these grants for when I am more established.

Is the application re-usable? Some applications have a very unique format (like the MIRA or DP2) or a very specific research focus. If I am unlikely to submit the application anywhere else, I think carefully about whether I want to invest the energy in a grant whose parts will only be used once, maybe twice.

Will I get feedback? I do not rule out grant applications that do not provide feedback, but I am likely to submit the same idea somewhere else that does provide feedback. It is impossible to gauge interest in your research ideas if reviewer comments are not provided. If these are your first grants, make sure you are getting some feedback on the grants you submit.

Is this a place I can get more money in the future? I am a big believer in building relationships with funding agencies. Even though some of these prestigious foundation awards give you money and make your CV stand out, not all of them have grants for mid-career faculty. I am more interested in building my relationship with the NIH, which will hopefully fund me for many years to come.

Are there predoctoral and postdoctoral grants? I am also thinking about the future of my trainees. If I establish a funding reputation at a foundation, I want to know that my trainees can benefit from my establishment there when it comes to mentored awards in the future.

When is it due? There are a large number of grants due in September and October. Be kind to yourself and do not submit all your grants for the year in a two-month period. Submitting many grants in the same time period is stressful, but more importantly, it raises the very real possibility of multiple grant rejections during a short time frame. As new PIs, we are still working on thicker skin, so spread out the potential rejections.

The one question I do not ask: I never ask myself if I am competitive for a grant. I apply and let the reviewers decide.  I have been in this game for too long to believe what anyone tells me when it comes to what a grant awardee “looks like.”

In an ideal world, I would write all the grants. In the real world, grant writing competes with laboratory work, training, mentoring, and paper writing, which are very important parts of successful grant applications. I am sure other new PIs have different strategies and more senior PIs will have their own opinions too, but this has been my attempt to keep sane. Feel free to share yours in the comments. Stay tuned for more tales!

Did I miss an important point? Do you have questions or concerns about the post? Or perhaps an anecdote to contribute! Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

More Resources

Grant Funding Strategy: Which Grants to Apply For?

Designing Your Career

Which Study Section Should I Pick? Try the Assisted Referral Tool!

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.

Click to view larger

To use it, visit the Matchmaker portion of NIH RePORTER. (New to RePORTER? Here’s how to find out a wealth of information about grants on your campus and elsewhere.) In the text box, you can enter a paper or grant abstract, or any other text you want to search on up to 15,000 characters. Click the “Similar Program Officials” button.

In a few moments, the system will return a list of up to 175 program officers, starting with those whose grant portfolio most closely matches the text you put in. Click on a name to bring up a list of the active grants for whom that person is the PO. Are they in the same ballpark as your research? Then go back to your search results and grab the email address of that PO to start a conversation.

Why might you want to talk to your PO before submitting a grant? Several reasons:

• To find out if the institute is enthusiastic about your research area or if there might be a better fit.
• To get clarification on which study section is ideal.
• To confirm the appropriate FOA.
• To get suggestions for alternative programs, FOAs, or institutes.
• If you have questions about your budget or scope of work.

Also of note: Matchmaker will give you graphs of how many POs at each institute work with grants that look like yours, as well as how many of which grant mechanisms (R01, R03, K08, etc.) they handle.

Additional Resources

Harness the Immense Power of Nosiness in NIH RePORTER

Which Study Section Should I Pick? Try the Assisted Referral Tool!

Video: How to Use NIH Matchmaker

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 research aspirations for the longterm (and make sure that fills a niche in your field). Work backwards to establish long-term, intermediate, and short-term (i.e., K) goals.

This is your chance to tell your story. How does your background set you up to achieve your endgame goals? What else do you need to get you there?

Mentors probably can’t teach you piano, but they can open doors to resources you need.

It’s common and encouraged to have interdisciplinary mentoring committees of 3 or 4 senior faculty. For your application you need to identify scientifically accomplished investigators. This assures reviewers you can access their resources, problem-solving advice, career development coaching, and a larger network of colleagues. While peers and near peers may still be the people you walk down the hall to see when you have a question, your primary mentor(s) should be able to open doors for you. Reviewers will look up your mentors in NIH RePORTER. If they see that your mentor has only one grant and it’s running out next year, they’ll suspect, “This person can’t keep their own career together. How are they going to help someone else?” (Here’s a great description of who should be on your committee.)

Be specific about how you’ll learn and how your mentors will help you. Make explicit the learning activities (e.g., courses, regular meetings, writing a review article, carrying out scientific project, mastering a specific technique) and scholarly products (some overlap with learning activities) related to each training goal. Identify each training need with a mentor or consultant. Reviewers will focus on specifics: Coursework and whether it ties into the proposed science; special training opportunities like workshops, frequency and content of mentorship meetings; justification for the research funding outside the PI salary support.

Summarize all activities and products in a comprehensive timeline. Show reviewers how the training and science will unfold and be sure to include targets for grant submission and resubmissions.

Have someone with K review section experience review this section (even if they’re outside your subject area).

Research Strategy

Your research plan:

• has to be feasible (be careful not to be “too ambitious”)
• have strong and sellable novelty/impact
• should facilitate your training in a (set of) new method(s) or a higher level of skill

Propose research with just the right amount of complexity. If one of your figures looks like this, seek help. Maybe from a mentor!

Find the sweet spot for the complexity of the science you propose. A multisite clinical trial would be viewed as too difficult to pull off on a K, while complete reliance on an existing data set might be viewed as not ambitious enough.

Non-dependent aims are key. This applies to all grants, including K’s. If Aim 1 tests the effectiveness of Drug A vs. Drug B and Aims 2 and 3 propose to explore why Drug A works better, you’re dead in the water if it doesn’t.

Show that you know when to submit your R. A K is a five year grant to do 2.5 to 3 years of work preliminary to a more sweeping study. To ensure success, you should get enough data in the first two years of your K to write and submit your R01 or equivalent in your third year.

Tables and pithy summary-type figures are your friends. Reviewers who are not assigned readers may read only aims, abstract, tables, and figures before deciding if they will read more.

Study section choice matters. Try to direct your grant to a study section that you think will understand the grant and its merits. Your program officer can be enormously helpful here; ask if specific study sections have been responding well to similar types of research and they can usually tell you.

Funding decisions are unpredictable. Sometimes really good ideas aren’t funded.

Sometimes you have to “play the game.” Study funded K awards and give review panels what they’re looking for – don’t neglect expected content. All parts of the proposal matter.

Letters of Support

Drafting your own letters is standard. It will feel weird, but it makes the grant more of a unified package. Unleash your ego and talk yourself up. Mentors and collaborators will take your draft and modify it to give it their own voice.

Give your letter writers time. A month’s notice is standard. More is better. Two weeks is pushing it. Remember, you’ve taken the advice above and asked high-powered scientists to mentor you—this means they are busy traveling, going to meetings, and trying to fit their own science around institutional responsibilities.

Resubmissions

Resubmission in progress.

Plan to resubmit. Remember resubmission is expected. Most eventual K awardees have to resubmit their K. Think ahead about what you can accomplish between submissions.

Show productivity. Work to get a paper out or make progress on one of your aims. You might even ask for a shorter funding period in the resubmission, because you’ve made progress. This is impressive to reviewers.

Have someone new look at it. To ensure your response to reviewers strikes the right tone, ask someone uninvolved or only peripherally involved with your work or the grant to look at it and provide outside perspective.

If reviewers liked a section, keep it. Don’t court trouble by changing what worked. Some successful resubmitters have included a copy of the scores each reviewer gave on each section and noted that since Approach or RCR or whatever was criticized the most, that’s where they’ve focused their revisions.

And Last…

Start early and pace yourself.

It will take longer than you think. Start well before you think you need to. Our grant pacing guru recommends at least 16-20 weeks out.

Advice that applies to other grants (e.g., R01’s) may not be optimal for a K. R01s don’t have mentor letters or letters of recommendation, for example.

All of the sections matter, even components like RCR and Vertebrate Animals. We’ve seen grants rejected for review for inadequate RCR.

Don’t ever look at a grant score on vacation. You say you won’t, but…

Thanks to panelists Josh Fessel, PhD, MD (who also blogs at the Edge); Katherine Gotham, PhD; and Wesley Self, MD, for their great advice.

More Resources

More Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My K

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 former study section members, and/or looking up similar types of grants on RePORTER to see where they were reviewed.

However, it can often be difficult determining just where to start or where your grant may really fit in.  CSR has provided a new tool called the Assisted Referral Tool (ART) to help you find the perfect home for your grant.

ART allows you to paste in text from your grant (typically your Specific Aims) and provides a list of recommended and ranked study sections based on matches with words found in your text.  You may be surprised to find study sections you had not considered in the past (it also recommends SBIR/STRR special emphasis panels). ART is another tool to add to your arsenal when applying for NIH funding.  Visit ART.

Additional Resources

Discover What’s Getting Funded with NIH Matchmaker

Harness the Immense Power of Nosiness in NIH RePORTER

Diversify Your Funding Portfolio