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

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 approach this process, but here are the things that needed addressing and how we did it. N= me and my lab.

Take pictures of your old lab before you leave: The smartest thing I ever did was document extensively the equipment, plastics, buffers, and so on that we used in my postdoc lab. This was particularly useful with my microscope purchase. I did not know the specifics of the microscope that we had used for our dissections, but I knew the model and that we needed all the zoom stops. Now, said microscope model had been out of production for years by the time I ordered it, but its new equivalent is equally great. I also spent a lot of time copying lab notebook pages I could not take, protocols in the lab, plasmid maps, primer lists, antibody logs, genotyping approaches, and chemicals. If applicable, I highly recommend copying your former lab’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols. Yes, this all takes time, but not nearly as much time as a) calling back to your old lab and requesting copies or b) recreating these documents yourself.

Complete the administrative stuff: As a postdoc, I did not appreciate the amount of administrative work my mentor did. When you start your lab, you will be responsible for developing your own laboratory chemical hygiene plan, Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) plan, IACUC protocol, and IRB protocol. You will also need to be added to all the administrative systems so you can approve employee time, place orders, submit grants, and monitor your budget expenses. This will likely include online and/or in person training. While the least fun, most of these administrative tasks need to be completed first, before you can do the science.

Evaluate your needs: The first step of setting up a lab is identifying what types of experiments you will be performing. If you are starting a lab with a career development award, this is fairly straightforward. If you are (temporarily) unfunded, this is a more existential question. What kind of a scientists are you? What equipment do you need every single day? What equipment do you use once per month? What Cores can you use instead? Are you going to use the same tried and true methods for a technique? Or are you going to update the newest quantitative methods? I should have spent a little more time contemplating whether I would use the same old technique or implement the newest technology in the lab. Had I done so, I would have likely spent a little less money on some small equipment we will rarely use.

Decide on your initial purchasing strategy: There is no ideal strategy for purchasing. You will either pay with money or time. Shopping around for the best deals saves you money, but it costs time to collect quotes, identify less expensive alternatives, and figure out purchases outside of the procurement system. The savings, however, can be substantial. Home appliance stores, Amazon, EBay, smaller vendors, and used equipment resellers offer great savings, if you are inclined to spend the time searching. For my lab, we went with the path of least resistance by purchasing through our institution’s preferred vendors. By buying multiple pieces of capital equipment from one place, I received smaller equipment (fridges, freezers, hot plates, pipettes etc.) for free. Many vendors have new lab programs that provide considerable discounts and/or bundled items when you purchase capital equipment. I do highly recommend, and your institution may in fact require, getting multiple quotes for capital equipment. Again, there is no perfect approach—just get it done.

Order capital equipment: Every capital equipment vendor you talk to sells the best, newest, and most powerful Science Machine you have ever seen. Their competitors’ Science Machines are garbage and will break tomorrow. The good news is, if you can tolerate a bit of back and forth, you can receive really competitive pricing on said equipment through evaluating multiple quotes on similar Science Machines. This is well worth your time, as are demos of said equipment. Demos are incredibly useful if you are debating implementing new technology in the lab and/or do not have a preference between Science Machine from Science Stuff and Research Resource. In addition, expensive Science Machines come with service contracts. Talk to your network about whether you need to invest in them or not.

Staff the lab: Who will work in your lab is highly dependent on your environment and your research. Since I am in a clinical department, graduate students cost as much as postdocs, and I need additional grant support before I commit to training a graduate student. A postdoc, with a shorter training window and the ability to apply for career development awards, is a much more reasonable hire. If you are in a basic science department and work with less expensive model organisms, you may be able to afford more staff or trainees. Talk to your mentors and colleagues. See what they recommend. When to hire your first technician or bring on your first trainee (graduate student or postdoc) is also a highly personal and variable decision. I was told to hire someone very early so they could help set up the lab. I decided, instead, to hire a technician when the lab was about half set up, so said technician had something scientific to do and not just unpack boxes. This has worked out well so far and the technician has diligently generated data while completing the lab set-up process.

With your lab set-up well in hand, it is time to talk about navigating some of the other aspects of your new job, including forming a mentoring committee, navigating service, and teaching. 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

1. Remove all the fluff. We don’t need for you to tell us that you are “committed to RCR at every level of your career” when you can demonstrate it through your experiences. What have you actually done that shows me that you’ve had conversations about research integrity or that you’ve grappled with difficult decisions?
2. Don’t kill me with “RCR.” I know lots of scholars who specialize in research integrity who physically shudder when people use the term “RCR.” Some of them will only allow RCR if the writer puts a “the” in front of it. Let’s hope you don’t get that reviewer. Although I’m not like that, I do get tired of reading RCR over and over again. It loses its meaning. Try switching it up a bit. Use “research integrity” or “research ethics.” You can even use “bioethics.” Use what feels right to you. It is also helpful to think about the specific content areas and the subtopics within them. Don’t just call it “human subjects research” when you could write about informed consent or data safety monitoring.
3. It’s not a grocery list. There is no need to try to squeeze in every content area in the RCR. No one is going to check to make sure you covered all the areas. It’s quality of exposure and experience, not quantity of topics. I’ve read some plans that were literally a bulleted list of all the content areas and confirmation that the author had learned about them in CITI training. Well, we at least know this scholar can copy and paste.
4. Show some progression. Your past RCR instruction should include several examples of passive RCR learning, which I refer to as being a consumer of RCR. You need to move beyond the passive and talk about how you translate that knowledge through active experimentation with research integrity in your current RCR instruction, which includes experiences in the lab or the clinic, with your mentors or as part of a peer mentoring group. Finally, you should write about your planned or future RCR instruction, in which you become an ambassador for RCR throughout biomedical academia. You should show that you will move from being simply a consumer of RCR instruction to a creator of RCR instructional materials (for example). Instead of attending a seminar or grand rounds about RCR you should be leading one. Instead of simply being mentored in the RCR you should be mentoring others. Progression is everything.
5. Be specific. Every discipline has its own hot topics in the big research ethics tent. What’s the issue for you? Maybe you’re working in liver transplant and a hot topic today is the ethical issue of paying organ donors or the ethical issues surrounding using an organ from a diseased person. Or you’re an orthopedic surgeon and you want to explore patient-centered alternatives to arthroscopic partial meniscectomy. What are the pertinent ethical issues here? Could you tease some of them into your future planned instruction? The more specific you can be in writing about your hot topic (without making it feel like a checklist, see above) the better it will read.

Author: Sam Gannon, EdD

More Resources

Counting What Counts in Responsible Conduct of Research Training 

Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR): The Importance of Ethics, Whistleblowing, and Mentoring

Designing Your Career