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

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, instrumentation, or interventions?
• Are the concepts, approaches or methodologies, instrumentation, or interventions novel to one field of research or novel in a broad sense?
• Is a refinement, improvement, or new application of theoretical concepts, approaches or methodologies, instrumentation, or interventions proposed?

[Acing Your Aims includes a checklist for whether your aims meet these goals.]

The translation of these answers into a grant section often falls flat in dense paragraphs of text. Consider these tips to produce a “novel” innovation section.

1) Quote NIH back to your reviewers and connect the dots.

Here’s a real example when told cohort methods are not innovative though no cohorts exist:

NIH evaluation criteria for innovation speak directly to the value of shifting “current research or clinical practice paradigms” using novel theoretical concepts, approaches or methodologies. Relatively neglected areas may be at a disadvantage if we don’t recognize the importance of laying the correct foundation. If a foundation is missing, as it is in research on fibroids and reproduction, then the novelty and value of a large, community-recruited prospective cohort is immense.

2) Bullet the key innovations to extract them from dense text format and better underscore the length of the list of new elements you are bringing to the science:

We will be the first to:

• Translate the use of an oscillation overthruster into clinical use.
• Create intermediate vector bosons from the annihilation of electrons.
• Extend this annihilation to the electron antimatter counterpart, positron.
• Travel through solid tumor matter.
• Achieve pineal tumor destruction in the eighth dimension.
• Disseminate this approach to guide research on other tumor types.
• Return funding to NIH because we’re just that good.

Verbs help convey the action even for Buckaroo Banzai.

3) Cite or provide brief excerpts from prominent texts or guidance from professional organizations that currently rely on incomplete information or biased study designs and methods. Go cautiously but it can be done gently:

Trusted sources and text books continue to report an association with pregnancy loss and support potential myomectomy to reduce miscarriage risk, in the absence of rigorous scientific evidence.[refs – case must be made in significance] This cohort will provide the largest prospective cohort to address the association of fibroids with miscarriage and has the potential to challenge an existing paradigm and reduce unnecessary surgical intervention. [See how we slipped rigor in there?]

4) Note those calling for your research:

The 2020 vision statement of the Association to Cure Everything specifically calls for exploration of new dimensions as an approach to providing therapeutics through alternate realities.

As the RFA underscores, potential for gene-by-drug analyses to reduce harms is substantial.

5) Go wild and keep the reviewers’ attention with a quote or clinical vignette:

On disrupting dogma:

As Mark Twain described: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

On why we need answers:

John Whorfin was dead on arrival to the emergency room after spending $100k. [ref] He is among more than 2,000 cases of individuals harmed by illicit oscillation overthruster use this year. Cancer is a devastating diagnosis and the public will continue to pursue extreme options. Our purpose is to translate this cutting-edge technology into a viable, safe, and affordable clinical tool.

Pure bragging:

Latin for innovation means “to renew or change”. RFTS fibroids data is well along the path to changing how we understand the role of fibroids in pregnancy. The proposed expansion of the cohort will speed us along.

Remember you are marketing your ideas. Give your pitch to colleagues, family and friends until the innovation and value-proposition are clear in plain language.

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 share a copy)?
• Who else in the country does exactly the kind of science I’m doing?
• How many grants does my NIH institute fund each year?
• Which grants did the study section I’m aiming for fund in the last several years?
• Who on campus has VA grants (VA grants are now part of RePORTER)?

(Note to trainees: Not that I mind answering your questions.  But it’s probably faster to search yourself.)

First, you’ll need to visit the site.  You’ll find a form where you can search by

• PI name
• Organization
• City, State, or Congressional District
• Project number (including parts of numbers, so for example you can retrieve a list of all R01s in the nation or at a particular institution)
• NIH institute
• Study section

And more.  At the top, you can also choose whether to search only for current (“active”) projects or grants whose funding period ended up to 20 years ago.

Say you’re writing one of those fancy new R61 grants for exploratory research and you want to know if anyone else on your campus has one.  You can find out!  Let’s take Vanderbilt for an example.  I’ll type “Vanderbilt” into the organization field, and “R61” into the application number field.

Guess what?  There is someone on campus who has one of these grants.

If I click on the title, I can see the grant abstract.  By using the “Details” tab at the top, I can view things like the project start and end date, funding for this fiscal year, study section and program officer.  The “Similar Projects” tab provides a list of NIH funded grants that have similar key words, while “Results” links to papers produced from work funded by the grant.

You can run this same kind of search by any of the other criteria on the form, including a text search that combs abstracts and key terms provided by the PI.  (You’ll want to be specific in your terms, though.  “Cancer” gets you 22,870 results.  Maybe you have time to sift through them all, but I sure don’t.)

Want RePORTER to read your mind, or at least your conference abstract?  Try the “Matchmaker” tab at the top of the search form.  You can paste in a chunk of text up to 15,000 characters—that’s pretty much a paper right there, but you can use abstracts, drafts of your aims, heck, maybe you’ve tweeted something you want to search for—and Matchmaker will analyze it for key terms and spit out the 100 most closely related projects, listing them in order from most to least similar.  HOLY COW.

If you go to the “Quick Links” tab at the top and choose “Funding Facts” or “NIH Data Book,” your brain will soon explode from all the funding data NIH is about to shove in it.

Want to know the success rate last year for K08s at any institute or the NIH as a whole?  The total amount of funding that was available for new R01’s in each of the last five years?  Funding Facts has all this and more, including info on F awards.

The Data Book will not only give you that information, but it gives it to you in GRAPHIC FORM.  For example, here’s the R01 success rate:

You can get it in table format by clicking on the “Data” tab.

The Data Book also has super-cool charts and figures on success rates and awards by new investigator status, gender, MD vs. PhD, and other criteria.

NIH RePORTER: Learn it, love it, use it.  Be nosy.  Be informed.

All research proposals – grants, dissertations, internal funding – must ace the description of aims.  Many scientific questions are interesting.  Not all are useful.  You must persuade your readers that the proposed aims/hypotheses to be tested and the related analysis will fill gaps in scientific knowledge.

Together with a thoughtful synthesis of the literature, this worksheet will help you determine if you can justify excitement about your aims for observational studies (cohorts, case-control, etc).  Interrogation of your aims will force you to clearly identify the claims you can make for exactly how you will be advancing the science if allowed to do the proposed research.

Be brutally honest with yourself in this evaluation. Your readers and reviewers are certain to be.  If you can’t defend at least one strong “Yes, I am using a superior approach to get this answer” per aim, re-think the aim. You may be lost in the land of incremental contributions and not distinctive progress.

Once you have a grid documenting powerful aims, this approach will help you tell others, in an organized way, why doing the proposed research is important, has significance in your field, and will bring innovative contributions into play. They’ll see you are on the path to discovery.