Grants & Funding – Page 6 – Edge for Scholars at Vanderbilt

Counting What Counts in Responsible Conduct of Research Training

Grants & Funding September 14, 2017

Thinking about and acting responsibly in the conduct of research (RCR) underpins all aspects of day-to-day life as a scientist. To keep RCR content fresh and to show that scholars are consuming a well-rounded diet of RCR topics, our T and K leadership group sought to broaden how we gather information about annual RCR participation from scholars. In the process, we identified important trends.

In 2009 NIH mandated (with minor updates in 2022) that training grants ensure regular training in RCR. It was the right thing to do but the bar is set fairly low: each trainee needs eight hours total over the course of their time on the grant. In contrast, our local programs ask T and K scholars (and those on non-NIH CDAs) to aim for 8 to 12 hours per year.

While there is not a required curriculum, NIH guidance notes these topics are typical:

Conflict of interest – personal, professional, and financial
Human subjects policies and ethics
Regulation and ethics of live vertebrate animal subjects in research
Safe laboratory practices
Mentor/mentee responsibilities and relationships
Collaborative research including collaborations with industry
Data acquisition and laboratory tools: management, sharing and ownership
Research misconduct and policies for handling misconduct
Responsible authorship and publication
Peer review
Scientists as members of society
Contemporary ethical issues in biomedical research
Environmental and societal impacts of scientific research

Because online courses like CITI modules cannot be the only modality, and because many of these topics can be as scintillating as watching grass grow when presented in straight seminar format, we aimed to describe and expand on the repertoire of more interactive forms of RCR experiences. We asked our CDA awardees to catalogue their exposure to RCR themes across four formats and to provide brief descriptions. We kept collecting information in this way because it allowed us to surface new topics for events like panel discussions and seminars and to better see what discussions and decisions about RCR dominate academic life.

Initial instructions for sharing individual hours of RCR exposure went something like this:

In order to best capture the range of RCR experiences you have participated in this year please complete the attached grid that indicates the number of hours of contact time you had for each of these formats. Please provide a one line description of the activity or the title of the seminar. If you are not sure what format to place an activity in or if it qualifies describe the participants in the group or the discussion and the interaction (while maintaining confidentiality of both) and we will help classify or exclude if not eligible.

Online: Annual online human subjects and animal research re-certifications. Additional specialized online courses.
Seminar/didactic: Each year Vanderbilt hosts more than 300 hours of centrally approved RCR content in this format. Related topics in the career development seminars in this grant year included: understanding effort reporting, negotiation skills, enhancing communication on teams, preparing letters of recommendation, and reproducible research and data integrity.
Group discussions/case studies: Includes participatory workshops and discussion with content such as case studies on scientific misconduct and supervising of trainees; a department discussion about making effort more transparent; tenure and promotion challenges; panel discussions on study section function and foibles; and case studies on scientific integrity including leading activities for more junior trainees including clinical fellows, medical students and undergraduates.
Individual and small discussion: Includes activities like: providing feedback to mentees (graduate students, fellows, and post-doctoral trainees) about importance of complete record keeping, professionalism and work ethic; and your conferring with more senior faculty to trouble-shoot concerns about potential conflicts of interest, disagreements among authors, and need to address behavior of collaborators and multi-site study teams.

The initial capture provided summary tallies like this table from a K12 program. Individual discussion and real-time “case studies” with small groups were common.

When we later asked more about content and leadership, we found scholars were as likely to be asking for individual discussion based on their concerns as leading the discussion for their teams or students who worked with them.

Examples of activities included:

Discussing steps to be taken when a colleague at a prior institution misstates prior study methods in a new publication while referencing methods in a prior joint publication.
Asking for a compliance review of how a division was codifying “protected time” in the context of an RVU-based performance system.
Hosting a panel on cross-generational communication styles and the importance of mentors and mentees having blunt and proactive discussions about preferences.
Developing a case study about consenting patients who could be perceived as “under duress” by using an example of an IRB application requesting to consent women in active labor.
Formulating a plan to confront an individual who skirts the rules for using shared data and conducts analyses before seeking the permission of the senior investigators when group rules indicate the senior investigators’ team should receive concept proposals for analyses before even exploratory analyses are conducted.
Identifying a need for pre-emptive discussion with students and staff in the lab about what activities and roles will lead to co-authorship via a group discussion of the ICJME authorship reporting form.
Creating a manual for the scholar’s surgical division about the regulatory environment that surrounds use of operative specimens, tissue banking, and material transfer.
Developing a referral infographic for safe university and community resources for reporting sexual harassment.
Having a facilitated meeting of an entire lab team who had a member commit suicide in order to grieve together and talk about their desire to prevent future competition, isolation, and demoralization of peers in a pressured funding environment.
Working with a mentor to draft a communication of an outside trainee who appeared to have plagiarized grant aims from a submitted but not yet funded K award.
Hosting an event for postdocs about social media as a vehicle for science communication, science advocacy, and science policy.
Planning materials for a Capitol Hill visit to legislators to emphasizing the return on investment in basic discovery research.

In almost every instance the scholar was central in identifying the topic and prompting the discussion. Fewer than half of discussions were mentor-prompted or solely led by a lab PI or mentor. Scholars were also likely to be the lead for preparing case studies, guiding related journal clubs or presentations, and teaching those more junior, in part because we had recently sponsored individualized training in creating case studies.

Not surprisingly, these summaries of the pervasiveness and breadth of topics in daily research life reinforced our belief that we can improve on content in more formal RCR training sessions like seminars when we stay plugged into challenges as they occur and provide confidential opportunities for scholars to describe concerning situations.

This form of tracking also provides a brief but clear documentation of RCR activities for individual trainees to use in their annual reporting. The sample below translates the K12 program level report into a summary for an individual K awardee. Supplemented with examples for each activity it provides a solid picture of a more well-rounded RCR experience than just listing seminar and IRB training hours.

This double win ─ compliance documentation and an acute sense of scholar involvement in hot topics ─ easily justifies continuing to collect data prospectively in this simple tool. The results keep us honest about the importance of setting aside time to seek best practices, have discussions on several scales, make decisions with trusted counsel, and emphasize that RCR topics are part of everyday life that deserve consistent and integrated attention.

Additional Resources:

Resources for Research Ethics Education is dedicated to providing resources and tools for teachers of research ethics with the goal of promoting best practices and evidence-based research ethics education.

NIH resources for Responsible Conduct of Research Training include an overview of required content as well as multiple additional resource links.

Other related Edge for Scholars posts:

5 Ways to Improve the RCR Section of Your K

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

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

Not that Kind of Visit: Tales of Preparation for Your First Interview

Grants & Funding July 19, 2017

The day has finally arrived! After all your hard work in screening through potential positions and writing compelling documents, your application has survived the mysterious candidate selection process and you have been selected to interview for a faculty position in Your Favorite Department. Here are our suggestions for things you should prepare for in the weeks leading up to your first interview. As always, n=me and a few of my friends.

Prepare the research talk: This is the most important part of your interview. Work to make it as strong as possible. Our suggestions include:

Ask about your audience: Ask the person coordinating your visit who will attend the seminar. If your audience will be biochemistry faculty and graduate students, the background and focus needs to be different than a talk to a clinical department with faculty and postdocs familiar with your Terrible Disease. Other than your scientific expertise, you want to highlight any unique techniques you acquired during your training that you can bring to the department. If your talk includes work done by collaborators, make sure you acknowledge their contributions. This lets your audience know that you are a good collaborator, demonstrates connections you already have, and most importantly, keeps the search committee from assuming that you have a skill you do not possess.

Practice your talk: Ask your mentor, your labmates, or your fellow postdocs to listen to your research talk. The wider the audience the better. Resist the urge to include everything you have ever done in the talk. Instead, focus on telling a cohesive story that sets up your future research. Take criticism graciously. Far better to be constructively eviscerated by your mentors and colleagues than present a confusing and unfocused job talk.

Ask about the chalk talk: If you are going to be doing a chalk talk on your first visit, ask the person coordinating your visit how chalk talks are done. We have done chalkboards, whiteboards, and PowerPoint presentations. Again, accept the assistance of anyone, and particularly those outside of your field, in practicing this talk. Practice facing the audience, handling interruptions, and setting up your presentation. Some of us made a one page handout to provide the audience so they could follow along.

Read up on your interviewers: Know who you are meeting with and make sure you are fluent enough in their work to keep a conversation going. Being able to tell potential colleagues why you are interested in their work, or how you can work together, is important. This will also keep the conversation focused on the science and away from more personal questions.

Identify appropriate attire: Your attire should fall between business and business casual. Clinical departments tend to be more formal, and basic science departments more casual. Find attire in which you are relatively comfortable and which continues to look professional after a day of walking all over campus. This includes a pair of business appropriate shoes that you know you can comfortably wear for up to 14 hours.

Disclose any accommodations you may require: Most, if not all, departments are happy to accommodate your needs as a candidate. If you have dietary restrictions, allergies, mobility considerations, etc., communicate them to the individual coordinating your visit. This will save everyone the awkward moment of realizing the candidate is vegetarian at the best BBQ joint in town.

Plan to manage stress: Interviews are inherently stressful. Identify ways that you can reduce your stress levels during the visit. We did everything from packing running shoes for the hotel gym to bringing our own laser pointers and markers for the chalk talk.

So what can you expect from the actual interview? In my next post, I will describe our cumulative first interview experiences. Stay tuned for more tales!

Still have questions? More confused than when you started? Need to vent about the process? Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

How to Keep Your Trainee Tables So Your Grants Manager Will Love You

Doing Research / Grants & Funding July 18, 2017

You may not have trainees yet, but when you do, you’ll need to start keeping track of them. At some point, you’ll be asked to serve as a mentor or otherwise be involved with an institutional training grant. NIH has specific characteristics and outcomes they want to know about your trainees, and they want it in particular formats. It’s more effective to track these from the start, with regular updates, than it is to scramble to complete rosters during the few weeks (or days) you have before the PI wants the tables back.

In recent years, I’ve been in charge of training tables for a K12 and a CTSA KL2 and TL1 program, all of which were funded. The CTSA grant included more than 60 participating faculty who needed to have information in the training tables. Here’s what folks like me have to fill out, and how you can help us by just keeping certain information in your records of trainees, and keeping it in a certain format.

Look at this. Doesn’t it make you want to cry?

The current training tables have several pages of very dense, very detailed instructions. One option for tracking your trainees is to keep copies of these tables for yourself. This is great if you get a request to send in pre-filled tables, because you don’t have to do anything but forward what you keep for yourself. However, the information is scattered across multiple tables in combinations that don’t make a lot of intuitive sense.

Another option is to keep everything about your trainees in a spreadsheet or Word table, or even a REDCap database. This lets you update information easily, keep an abbreviated version in your CV, and quickly respond to requests for information in new combinations or formats. (Perhaps the PI is putting together a supplemental table to highlight something extraordinary about the program, such as number of Hispanics trainees or proportion who earned K awards within ten years of graduation.) The NIH tables get redesigned from time to time as well, so this avoids having to reformat all your data when the tables change.

Here’s a template I developed that includes all the information currently being asked about mentors’ trainees. Fill out all these cells, and there’s nothing a PI can throw at you that you won’t be able to give them.

Citizenship status. Know it. Write it down. Bathe in love from your grants administrators.

What kind of information should you keep?

Well, frankly, if nothing else, please note their citizenship status when they were your trainee. NIH tracks everything based on “training grant eligibility,” which means US citizen or permanent resident. Every single table in the ones linked above requires knowledge of whether the trainees in it were training grant eligible or not. This is the most frequently missing information when I collect training table data, and it probably has the greatest effect on how the tables are arranged and filled out.

That aside, to start with, you’ll need to know:

Which trainees were predoctoral, broken into current and graduated
Which trainees were postdoctoral, broken into current and completed training (frequently this includes early career faculty for whom you’ve served as a mentor, but occasionally the grant’s table czar only wants true postdocs, so it doesn’t hurt to keep these categories separate as well)
Which of your trainees continued in research or related careers,* again broken into pre- and postdoc
The month and year each trainee started and ended their training with you
Their position at the time they started with you (i.e., resident, grad student, postdoc, instructor, assistant professor…) and their home department
Their names! Seems obvious, but there’s one table where I can’t double-count trainees. If you and your colleague both mentor someone and count that person as your trainee, I need to cross-reference the list of names and only count that person once. NIH likes middle initials, so be sure and get one from your trainees who have middle names.

* Per the instructions: “Research-related positions generally require a doctoral degree and may include activities such as teaching, administering research or higher education programs, science policy, and technology transfer.” You only have four options: research-intensive (academic PI, industry researcher), research-related (as above), further training, and other (went into private practice, left science totally).

You also need to keep track of the following characteristics:

Was/is each trainee supported by any HHS training award (such as a T32, F30, K12, etc.)?
Was/is each trainee eligible to be supported by a training grant (this means were they a citizen or permanent resident at the time they were your mentee)?
Most recent prior institution and degree, including bachelor’s, master’s, and any kind of doctoral degrees, and the year that degree was earned
Any degrees earned while they were your trainee and the year earned
Their project title or research interest
Demographic information that is only ever reported in aggregate. This should be self-reported by the trainee. (You might just pass around your spreadsheet and have them fill it in.)
- Race: Current categories are American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, Black or African American, White, More Than One Race, and Unknown or Not Reported
- Ethnicity: Hispanic/Latino or not Hispanic/Latino
- Gender: Male, Female, Unknown or Not Reported
- Disability: The official definition is having a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; this can include mobility, vision, or hearing impairments, mental or learning disabilities, or conditions such as chronic diseases.
- Disadvantaged:
  1. Individuals who come from a family with an annual income below established low-income thresholds. These thresholds are based on family size, published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census; adjusted annually for changes in the Consumer Price Index; and adjusted by the Secretary for use in all health professions programs. The Secretary periodically publishes these income levels online.
  2. Individuals who come from an educational environment such as that found in certain rural or inner-city environments that has demonstrably and directly inhibited the individual from obtaining the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to develop and participate in a research career.

Publications

Yes, you now need to keep track of every paper every trainee ever published that was based on work done in your lab. Start now and it’s much less painful than doing it for dozens of trainees years down the road.

Different PIs will want different citation styles, so keep your records in the style most comfortable to you. I promise you will not be the only participating faculty member whose publication records have to be reformatted into the style of choice.
Remember that every publication accepted after April 2007 that used any NIH grant money for the research involved must have a PMCID to be listed. Getting PMCIDs is beyond the scope of this blog, but go here to learn how you get one.
Please, please bold the trainee’s name in the citation. And if you have multiple trainees on one paper, I beg you to copy that bad boy into the record of every one of those trainees rather than assuming one suffices for all. I have to make a separate row for each trainee on the publications table, so this helps me keep things straight.
If a trainee didn’t have any publications from their time in your lab, or is too new to have publications, state “No Publications,” followed by one of these official NIH reasons: New Entrant, Leave of Absence, Change of Research Supervisor, Left Program, or Other.
Technically we’re only supposed to report publications for training grant-eligible trainees (US citizen or permanent resident), but on my grants we usually create a supplemental table for publications by non-citizens. It’s worth it to keep track of them all. Because you have also recorded their citizenship status, you or the staff member compiling the tables can easily figure out who should go where.

These are optional, because they are only reported for applicants to a training program rather than all mentees, but they can be incredibly helpful if this is a new program being proposed and the “applicant pool” consists of the mentors’ trainees:

For predocs, their undergrad GPA and months of prior full-time research experience
For postdocs, their number of publications and number of first-author publications before they became your trainee
For both, what funding they were on each year of their training, including which NIH institute the grant came from. For example, an NHLBI T32 gets listed as “HL T32.” You can also put down that they were supported by your R01 or startup funds, foundation grants, RA positions, scholarships, or other funding.

Outcomes

PLEASE KEEP TRACK OF WHAT YOUR TRAINEES DO WHEN THEY LEAVE YOU. Not only do the tables require certain information, but you or whoever’s writing the grant can brag about them in the text! At minimum, keep track of and update:

Their current position, institution, and department (or equivalent for industry jobs)
Whether they can currently be classified as “research-intensive,” “research-related,” “further training,” or “other”

This goes into the optional but very helpful bin above: External grant funding they have received since they left you, especially grants where they are PI, but also ones where they’re a Co-I or another role. The current format requires the year received, role on the grant, and, for NIH, the institute. It looks like this: HL K23/PI/2014. Or GM R01/Co-I/2017. Or CA P01/Staff Scientist/2013.

Outcomes will need updating at least once a year. Make sure you get a working email address for your trainees when they leave you!

Use this template and make it easy!

This sounds like a lot, I know. (Believe me, after compiling it for 60+ faculty in the year when the training tables changed formats and asked for a lot of new information, I know.) But much of it can be done when the trainee enters your lab, and then you don’t need to do much to it besides a once a year email. Staff can also do much of the work, especially if you need to catch up on data from past trainees. And when you submit your tables? Ask for a copy of them back with all the formatting and filling in of blanks the PI’s staff did. This will save you a lot of time for the next request.

Not that Kind of Applicant Review: Tales of Your Application in the Clutches of a Search Committee

Grants & Funding July 3, 2017

After careful document preparation and job selection, you have submitted your application. It will likely be at least two months until you hear anything positive (i.e., an invitation to interview). If it is negative, you may never hear back from the search committee. I am still waiting to hear back from Laid Back Research Behemoth and East Coast Research Powerhouse. I mean, I knew I was not the ideal candidate, but how hard is it to batch out a quick email? Especially if my application was in the first cull? But I digress. This is the application process from my experiences as both an applicant and search committee member. Here, n=me.

The highly variable application/interview timeline: The general timeline for an academic application is as follows. After your application is submitted, it will take anywhere from two weeks to four months to hear anything positive. Again, if your application is not one of the top applications, you may never hear back. Less than a third of the search committees I dealt with bothered to send out “thanks, but no thanks” letters. If the committee is interested, they will schedule your first interview, an event curious enough to warrant its own post. After your first interview, you must wait until all other applicants have interviewed and the committee makes a decision on their preferred candidate. If you are said candidate, you should hear back about a second interview in two to four weeks, and the second interview/visit will be scheduled within the next month. You should receive a job offer during the second interview or shortly thereafter.

Why it takes so long: Deciding anything by committee takes time. If you take all the problems of a committee, and add in conference travel, grant season, concern over the research direction of the department, considerable financial investment, and couple it with administrative regulations, you should actually be amazed anyone gets hired.

What happens on the other side: Once a certain number of applications are submitted to the search committee or once a certain date has passed, the committee schedules a meeting. Prior to the meeting, each application is reviewed. The mechanics of this, of course, depend on the number of applicants and the search committee’s preference. Iterations include: everyone reading all applications, each member reading a portion of applications, or multiple members reading applications. These applications may or may not already include the letters of recommendation. In my experience, with smaller applicant numbers, we request letters upfront and read all the applications. At some point, the first cull occurs, and the applicant pool is cut down to a manageable amount, as determined by the committee. Some search committees receive 300 applications per job posting, so a manageable number to discuss might be 25 or 50 applications. Usually, all committee members read and rate the top contenders, and identify their top four to six applicants. These applicants are then invited for an interview. After the interviews, the search committee convenes to rank the candidates. Once the search committee picks their favorite candidate, they invite them for the second interview, at the end of which an offer is usually extended. This process is kept largely quiet to keep other applicants interested, available, and hopeful that they remain the first pick. If the preferred candidate is no longer available or no longer interested, the search committee can either move down their list and invite other candidates, or, in the absence of suitable candidates or consensus, can declare a failed search. Considering how much time, money, and effort was invested into the search, this is the worst outcome for all parties.

What this all means to you: The first step is getting your application out of the applicant pile and into the interview pile. Increase your chances by making your application easy to read. Have a clear CV, a tight cover letter stating how you fit into the department, and a rock solid research plan. Include all requested documents. Make it easy for search committee members to make a decision. And finally, as in manuscript and grant reviews, accept that even if the search committee is wrong to reject your brilliant application and perfect fit, you are still bound by their decision.

Now that you know that there is no defined timeline for your applications, embrace the chaos and keep applying. In my next post, I will talk about first interviews, specifically how to prepare and what to expect. Stay tuned for more tales!

Three (Grant) Peeves in a Pod: Write Better

Grants & Funding June 29, 2017

Contorted sentence structure and dense text torture reviewers.

1) Give me a break.

Try to break up sentence longer than two full lines of text or 30 words. If you already have a semicolon, you know it is two sentences!

2) Don’t bury the idea.

Unfortunately, to our detriment, often in scientific writing, in order to sound more formal, we lead with empty phrases. Avoid starting sentences with qualifying clauses. Most often the modifiers will evaporate and clarity ensues.

3) Stamp out most use of the verb “to be.”

“There are” conveys nothing. Sentences get shorter and more direct with this fix. The sentence “Each year in the United States there are more than 50,000 deaths from use of prescription opioids,” becomes “Over 50,000 deaths result from prescription opioid use each year in the U.S.”

Why? Reader fatigue. If my brain slogs through wet cement to understand your ideas, my subconscious assumes they are dull or difficult ideas. Don’t torture me. If your ideas stream clearly, my subconscious communicates that I grasp and enjoy your ideas.

Write better because even if I am only subconsciously peeved it can hurt your grant score…and only nearly perfect scores clear the payline.

Grants & Funding

Not that Kind of Job Applicant: Tales of Self-Discovery in the Job Application Process

June 29, 2017

With your application documents prepared, it is now time to start applying for your first faculty position. These are some of the resources and strategies we used to find and select job postings. Our cohort includes individuals with and without K awards who all secured tenure track faculty positions. As always, n=me and a few of my friends.

Decide what your search parameters are: The number of positions available is overwhelming. Narrow down the search by defining your scientific, academic, and personal parameters. Here are some questions we considered:

Scientific: What kind of scientist are you? What is your technical expertise? Your scientific expertise? What specialized equipment or facilities do you need to complete your experiments? What kind of collaborators do you need? Do you want to be in a clinical or basic science department?

Academic: Do you want to teach? How much teaching is acceptable? Is tenure important to you? Would you like to be part of a medical school (less teaching) or arts and sciences (more teaching)?

Personal: Will you be happy living in a small town/big city/state/part of the country? Will your partner/family? After bouncing around for a number of years, my spouse was adamant about not living in certain places. Fellow applicants refused to live in cities that were less safe or had weaker school systems even if they housed an academic leader of biomedical research.

Finding positions: Now that you have identified what you are looking for in a position, it is time to screen through job positing. We found positions through the internet and our network.

Job boards: Nature Jobs, HigherEd Jobs, AAAS Careers are popular websites for faculty position postings. I highly recommend signing up for weekly alerts with fairly broad categories to capture all potential positions. Departments also post positions on their institutional websites, so if you really want to be at a particular institution, check out their academic job postings site. Pro tip: stick to the jobs posted on the institutional academic careers (or equivalent) website. Departmental websites are notoriously slow for updating completed searches. Several of us applied to positions that had been filled years ago and were simply not updated on the departmental website. Generic job websites, like Indeed, worked well for us too.

Your network: Ask your mentors or department chair if anyone in their network is looking for a faculty member like you. I have heard of departments where chairs like to know there is a promising candidate before they post a job. Use your own network of collaborators and colleagues to ask about potential positions. Some in our group emailed chairs directly to ask about potential positions, and one person was even successful in securing such a position.

The fake search: Institutions have to make their faculty job search public and post it for a number of days, even if they have a strong candidate in mind. These searches seem to be incredibly specific and have a very short application window. If you spot a potentially fake search, and you are a perfect fit, apply anyway. You might have the opportunity to visit the institution, present your science, and meet some new colleagues. There are even rumors of the preferred candidates failing in the interview process, and the runner-up securing their dream faculty position.

Application strategies: Our cohort was split between two job application strategies. We all ended up with positions, so both strategies can work. Most of us had one offer (you only need one!), although there were a couple outliers with two or three.

The numbers game: The minority of us applied to every position for which we were a reasonable fit. We submitted 30-50 applications each, and I am sure more than one search committee was puzzled by someone studying Terrible Disease applying to their Organ Development Center. However, having now written faculty position descriptions and sat on search committees, I can confidently tell you, search committees don’t really know what they’re looking for until they see it. For example, there were several positions that I applied for where I was the perfect fit, but I did not secure an interview. When I looked to see who they hired, thinking it would be a stronger version of me, I was surprised to see someone completely different. Sometimes it’s about the fit and potential, rather than a job description that was written six months ago.

Selective applications: Others in our group applied to a very limited number of institutions, somewhere in the 5-10 range. Their strategy was to either apply to positions where they were the perfect fit or to email department chairs and ask if they were looking for someone just like them. With fewer applications, these applicants spent more time tailoring their applications to the job description. Overall, this group had less offers, but you only need one!

Now that you have defined yourself and your needs, and identified some positions, start applying. The job search process is a long one. In subsequent posts, I will cover what happens to your application after you hit “submit.” Stay tuned for more tales!

Grants & Funding

Not that Kind of Summer: Tales of Preparing for Academic Job Season

June 21, 2017

The time has come. Your training is nearing completion, you have discussed your career plan with your mentor, and now you must apply for your first academic faculty position. Because academic research institutions are closely tied to university and medical school calendars, they prefer their new faculty hires in place by late summer or early fall. This is particularly true of basic science departments. Therefore, most positions are posted in the fall. If you are considering entering the job market, fall is the best time to do it, and the summer before is the perfect time to start compiling your application documents. In this first entry into the job search series, I will discuss the very first step: putting together the application.

Having been in academia this long, it should come as no surprise that every single application is different. Below are listed the possible application components and lengths that I have seen, as well as my thoughts on what to prepare ahead of time. These thoughts are based on the hundreds of job postings I have read, the 60 or so to which I applied, and the communal wisdom and suffering of my fellow job seekers. As always, n=me and a few of my friends.

Cover letter: Some applications require a cover letter. Draft a standard one page cover letter in which you introduce yourself, your science, and rattle off your pertinent experience and why you are the candidate of their dreams. When you apply to positions, edit the letter as needed to reflect the position description and department.

Curriculum vitae (CV): This is the most important document you will put together. Most institutions have a format that they recommend for their faculty. Find your home institution’s format and build your CV into it. Include everything that is relevant to your academic career, and avoid including elements that are impressive but not relevant. Ask everyone and anyone to read it and provide feedback on content, clarity, and appearance. There are quite a few search committee members who only read the CV. Prepare the document accordingly.

Letters of recommendation: All applications require letters of recommendation. Some search committees want to review the letters for every application submitted, while others wait to select their top applicant pool before requesting letters. Either way, you will need three to five individuals (referees), ranked assistant professor or higher, to write you letters of recommendation. One of these individuals should be your primary mentor. Consider referees with connections in specific departments and fields in which you are interested, and leverage their network appropriately. For example, for applications to clinical departments, I requested a letter from my clinical mentor. Start working on your referee pool now.

But how do you get five faculty members to agree to be on letter of recommendation standby for the foreseeable future? Simple. Draft their recommendation letter. I realize this is controversial in some circles. However, I would argue it is the only way to guarantee all the elements you want addressed in your letter are covered. When an individual agrees to write me a letter, I provide a solid draft of the letter and an updated CV. I have yet to receive pushback from any referee about this practice, and in the research circles I operate, this practice is common. Whether my referees use the letters as they are, edit heavily, borrow sections, or write their own, I do not know.

Teaching statement: This is a one page summary of your teaching experience and strategy. If you, like most of us, have limited teaching experience, discuss your experiences in research supervision and highlight your excitement about learning how to teach. If you are planning on doing more teaching in your new position, do the leg work and think about how you would teach your students. In our experiences, excitement about teaching can offset lack of experience.

Research statement and/or plan: The terms “research statement” and “research plan” are used interchangeably by different institutions. In some places, the research statement is a one to two page summary of your research to date, and the research plan is two to five pages of your future research plans. In some places, the contents of these two are combined into one document, while others still do not care about your past research and only want to know what you will be doing next. Most of the time you will receive guidance in the application instructions. For your pre-application prep, I would recommend writing a one page summary of your past research, and a two and four page future research plan. What you write about depends on your career development award status:

If you have a career development award: Most of the hard work is done. Simply condense your science. Consider pitching one or two smaller projects to develop as well.

If you have written an unfunded career development award: Do not be discouraged. You do not need a career development award to land a tenure track faculty position. Use the reviewer comments to guide your research plan. If your research interests have changed, allow your proposal to evolve beyond your NIH-submitted application.

If you have not written a career development award: I repeat, do not be discouraged. Again, you do not need a career development award to land a tenure track faculty position. The first thing you need to do is meet with your mentor and discuss what projects you can take with you. In an ideal world, your mentor will allow you to take your project and will not compete with you. In the real world, sometimes the project is part of an NIH-funded grant, sometimes it is the best project in the lab, and sometimes the mentor is a jerk. Figure out if you can build on your current project or if you need to develop something new and act accordingly. If you are starting from scratch, leverage your skills into an interesting problem you have always wanted to address. Write some specific aims and get some feedback from your mentors and colleagues. Without a career development award, you can tailor you research plan to the job positing, and that can be an advantage.

Diversity statement: Some institutions are beginning to require a one page diversity statement, in which you describe how you will support diversity at the institution. Although this is difficult to prepare ahead of time, my advice would be to read up on the diversity initiatives at your institution and think of ways to incorporate them into your teaching and research plan.

Contributions to science: Some institutions require additional documents in which you select some of your papers and describe their impact on science. Usually these are one page per paper. Although I would like to think these provide the search committee additional information for very prestigious and competitive positions, my gut feeling is these serve more to deter applicants from applying. Your NIH biosketch provides a good starting point for describing these contributions to science, should you need to write these components.

Online presence: While this is not strictly a component of your application, it is something at which some search committee members look. Update your academic online presence in LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Scholar, Orcid, ResearchGate, etc. If you use social media for non-academic purposes, make sure it is locked down tight.

With these tips in mind, you are now ready to start working on your application documents. As with all things in science, give yourself enough time to get feedback and revise. In my next post, I will cover our job search strategies, from finding positions to narrowing down the job applications you will submit. Stay tuned for more tales!

Grants & Funding

Not that Kind of Career Development Award: Tales of Living with the K99/R00

June 13, 2017

My previous posts have covered writing career development awards (here), tips for the K99/R00 specifically (here), and the events you await during career development award review (here). In this final post on career development awards, I will address some questions specific for the K99/R00. As always, n=me and a few of my friends.

How long should the K99 phase be? Per the program announcement, the K99 provides up to two years of funding, and trainees should complete at least one year of the K99 prior to transitioning to the R00. Most of my fellow awardees used one year plus a couple of months. The general consensus was that we did not want to run out of time to secure a position before the K99 ended, so we started applying for positions in the first year. Would we have been more productive staying an additional year and could we have had better job prospects later? Perhaps. However, none of us were willing to risk falling off the K99 cliff, and quite a few of us were ready to move on to more permanent positions. While the K99 and R00 are meant to be seamless, there is also wiggle room in the K99/R00 for a break between the two, should you need it. As always, consult your Program Officer (PO).

What do I need to learn during the K99 phase? The point of the K99 phase is to do some science and learn how to be independent. Being independent means managing every aspect of a research group, which is not something for which we are trained. Use this time to learn how to manage people and resources. Learn from the strengths and weaknesses of your mentors. How do they run their research programs? What works? What fails? How do they select graduate students, postdocs, or technicians? Meet with your departmental finance person. Ask questions. How does effort get calculated? How much can you move your budget around before you reach out to the NIH for permission? Learn how to monitor expenses. It is a lot easier to ask questions while you are still a trainee rather than a new faculty member. Take this opportunity to learn from the successful and appreciate the scope of your mentors’ responsibilities.

Should I change institutions for the R00? The K99 and R00 phases are designed to be split between institutions. For PhDs, I always recommend making the move. Your home institution is unlikely to match the start-up of a new institution, and you will struggle to become demonstrably independent from your mentor. You may have compelling reasons to stay, and you are not obligated to change institutions for the R00, but your PO must be satisfied you have the resources to succeed as an independent investigator. For MDs, your situation is complicated by your clinical commitments and the investment by your Chair in protected time, but I would still advocate exploring other institutions. The decision to stay for either PhDs or MDs must be based on data, so explore your job prospects thoroughly, collect the data, report to your PO, and make an informed decision.

Why does my PO want to see my offer letter? Most POs will want to see your job offer letters to make sure the criteria for transition into the R00 is satisfied before you accept a position. Your PO needs to believe that your new institution will give you adequate support for your research program. Your offer letter should include a tenure-track (or equivalent) position, a substantial start-up package, adequate laboratory space (if you run a wet lab), and demonstrate commitment to your research career while acknowledging that your position is not contingent upon R00 activation. Through this review, you gain a powerful ally in the negotiation process. When Chairs/Deans/Presidents are informed that a PO has concerns about protected time, size of the start-up, access to mentorship, etc., and will not transfer the award, they listen. Use this wisely.

How do I transfer the award to my new institution? In order to activate the R00 portion of the award, you will need to submit a transition application two months before your start date. This application document includes everything from an updated research strategy, to a letter of institutional support, to a plan of separation from your current mentor, and a timeline of when you will submit you first R01 (surprise, it is about a year and a half after you start). In an ideal world, your R00 will activate on your first day of your new position. In the real world, this occurs several months after your official start date.

The K99/R00 and career development awards open doors, but not all doors. In my next series of posts, I will recount tales of job applications, the job market, and the interview process compiled from friends with and without career development awards. Mini-spoiler: you do not need a career development award to get a tenure-track position at an R1 institution. Stay tuned for more tales!

Not that Kind of Grant Application: Tales of Waiting for Career Development Awards

Grants & Funding May 27, 2017

In my last posts, I covered considerations for writing career development awards, and tips specific to the K99/R00. After submitting my application, I scoured the web for information on what to do next. Alas, more people focused on the submission rather than subsequent steps. This is perhaps unsurprising since the next phase is waiting. Here, I will discuss the different events you will await. For NIH application veterans, there is nothing new here, but for first time applicants, the process is surprisingly slow. These events are based on posted NIH policies, my experiences, and the experiences of my fellow awardees, so as always, n=me and a few of my friends.

Waiting for study section review: There is a five month waiting period between grant submission and the first level of review. One positive aspect of this long wait is that you can publish additional papers or do more experiments for your potential/probable resubmission. About a month before the study section meets, you will receive an email from the Program Officer (PO) and have the opportunity to provide specific updated documents, like biosketches. Important updates include papers accepted, honors awarded, and new positions for your mentors, like promotion to full professor. One of my fellow awardees had to re-write the training section to address a mentor’s move to a new institution. Your PO can advise if you have questions.

Waiting for your scores: Your study section review date will be listed in eRA Commons, and your grant score will be posted within a couple days of the study section meeting. A score of 10 is perfect, a score of 90 is the opposite, and ND is “not discussed”. Additional details can be found here. For career development awards, grants are awarded based on their impact score. Different institutes, funding mechanisms, and years have different paylines. In our experiences, these can be difficult to track down, but in general, if your impact score is under 20, you are likely to be recommended for funding. The Writedit blog was a great resource for many of us across several institutes and funding mechanisms. Also, let your mentors know the score. I have heard mentors grumble about never knowing grant outcomes until they are asked to update a letter.

Waiting for your pink sheets: The reviews of your grant are posted within 6 weeks of the study section meeting. Our pooled average was 4 weeks. It is likely that your application will score close to or outside of the payline. Read the reviews. Process your emotions. Read the reviews again and make a list of your application’s criticisms. Reach out to your PO to discuss the application and gauge their enthusiasm. If you are close to the payline, you may still be competitive. Again, your PO will provide advice. If they tell you that you should resubmit, plan to revise and resubmit. If you are well outside the range, you will need to revise and resubmit. For both scenarios, send the reviews to your mentors, along with the list you wrote, and together define an action plan to make the application more competitive. Reading and responding to comments is painful, but it is great practice for your grant-driven career. If you are below the payline, and thus within funding range, congratulations. Send your pink sheets to your mentors too, so they can bask in good reviews. Somewhere in this timeframe, if your application has the potential to be funded, your PO will request that you submit your Just in Time (JIT) information. This includes updated Other Support for key personnel, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) approval for animal studies, and/or Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for human subjects.

Waiting for council to meet: Regardless of your score, the final fate of the grant application is recommended by the institute’s advisory council and decided by the institute director. The lower your score, the more likely you are to get funded. While a PO cannot magic a bad application into funding range, they can advocate for your application. These are usually applications that fall outside the funding range and address an unmet need in the institute’s research portfolio. In our cohort, one borderline and two out of payline applications were selected for funding.

Waiting for the grant to arrive: If your grant is selected for funding, you will still have to wait for it to arrive at your institution. When all is said and done, this process, from application submission to earliest start date, takes 10 months. Plan accordingly.

A note to unsuccessful applicants: Not all applicants will be awarded a career development award, so do not lose hope. These grants, as all grants, are incredibly competitive, and there is an element of luck in the process. For the postdocs reading, you do not need a career development award to land a tenure-track position. Our job searches with K awards were no easier than those of our friends without K awards. Your unfunded career development award is the perfect chalk talk, and you should plan on submitting a revised version as an R01 within a year of starting your new position. For the MDs looking to launch their research careers, keep applying for various grants. Your department is invested, and they will help where they can.

With some great science and solid mentoring, hopefully the day will come when your grant is awarded and you can begin your research in earnest. If you are on a traditional K award, carefully plan when you will submit your first R01 (for terrifying details, see the “Taking Flight” post). For trainees with the K99/R00 award, the grant raises a whole slew of questions. In my next post, I will address how long the K99 phase should be, whether or not you should move, and what the K99 to R00 transition looks like. Stay tuned for more tales!

Grants & Funding

Not that Kind of Career Development Award: Tales of Writing the K99/R00

May 16, 2017

In my last post, I provided some general thoughts and experiences with career development awards, having seen a number of (eventually) successful K awards be submitted. This post covers some specific considerations for writing the K99/R00. These thoughts are based on my experiences, the extracted knowledge of individuals who review K99/R00s, and a few of my fellow awardees, so as always, n=me and a few of my friends.

Eligibility and when to submit: The K99/R00 has no citizenship requirement and is open to both PhDs and MDs. However, as with most career development awards, you are only eligible until the end of your fourth year after the terminal degree. For MDs, this clocks starts when you begin doing research, and not necessarily during your clinical training. I was not sure when my eligibility would run out, so I contacted my Program Officer (PO) in my second year, and he helped me determine my last possible submission date. I then counted back, so if the grant was unfunded in the first submission (a highly probable outcome), I would have time to sit out an application cycle and submit a revised application. Due to NIH review timelines, it is nearly impossible to submit a revised application in consecutive cycles, so when you plan your submissions, give yourself enough time to address the reviewers’ comments. I also advise against submitting too early. It is rare to have solid preliminary data, a publication record on the topic, and a well-designed research plan early in the fellowship. You are better served spending the first years generating the data and publications required for a successful application.

Grant structure: The K99/R00 is a two-phase grant with two distinct goals. The K99 portion of the award provides up to two years of additional mentored time with your mentoring committee, covers your salary, and provides a nice chunk of money to execute your career development and research plans. The R00 portion of the award is the independent phase of the grant in the form of a mini-R01 spanning three years.

What the application covers: The grant application includes your five year research plan and a budget for the K99 phase. You also need to carefully outline the specific didactic and mentorship components of the K99, as well as what you plan to do in the R00 to become independent and develop your career. I always suggest including a timeline for the full five years of the award. This visualizes your plan and serves as a checklist for your annual progress report.

Addressing the disparate goals of the K99 and R00 components: Writing the K99/R00 can feel bipolar. You are the best candidate, but you need more training. You have the best mentor and mentoring committee, but you will never speak to them again when you transition to the R00. You are at the best institution to complete your K99, but you are leaving for a yet-to-be-determined institution for the R00. These transitions can feel jarring. However, unlike other K awards where you slowly progress towards independence, K99/R00 awards have a hard mentored/independent split. You must make it abundantly clear that the K99 training and mentorship are required for your success, and once you have completed the K99, then you will be ready for total independence in the R00 without the safety wheels of your home department, institution, or mentors.

Crafting the grant: My sources from the inside report that review committees for career development awards tend to favor less innovative grants with high probabilities of aim completion and subsequent successful R01 conversions. Knowing this, I made sure my science complemented the proposed training plan. I leveraged the expertise and training of my postdoc mentor in Aim 1, while receiving additional training for elements critical for Aim 2 and 3 completion. In Aim 2, when I planned to be interviewing for jobs and setting up a lab, I would apply what I learned from my mentored time. Finally, Aim 3 combined the expertise of my other mentors and placed me in a different research world from my postdoc mentor. This, along with a clear plan to leave my K99 institution, demonstrated I would be independent of my mentor in the R00.

Time management and grant cohesion: There are about 20 items in the K99/R00 application. I wrote my grant over the course of five months and still felt rushed at the end. Collecting (and likely formatting) biosketches, drafting letters, crafting resource pages, and writing human or animal use sections take time. Someone will have to build the application in the grant system, and it might be you. Also, different institutions have different levels of review in their finance departments with review time varying from days to a full month. Talk to your departmental administrator and find out how your department and institution operates. Finally, give yourself time to weave the grant application together. Reference other sections of the grant and send reviewers to the relevant section (for example: for details, see Career Development and Mentor’s Letter). As with all grant applications, your application must be seamless and not a collection of unrelated documents. For advice on breaking down the grant into manageable pieces, see the excellent blogs by Durango Kid.

Revise, revise, revise: Be prepared to revise. There are numerous people who should provide critical review for your application components. Your PO will want to see your specific aims to determine if your application is a good fit for the institute, and some POs even provide feedback on your proposed aims. Your mentors should read your draft aims and then the research strategy. Accept their comments graciously (no, this is not easy or fun but do it anyway). It is far better to have mentors identify weaknesses in your application than the study section (they will find some anyway). Again, give yourself time to respond to feedback. For example, I rewrote an aim that a mentor perceived as a fishing expedition. A former career development award reviewer outside my Terrible Disease field had concerns over a model I was using, so even though I liked the model, I replaced it. When I looked up the study section reviewing my application, I was surprised that not a single reviewer worked on my Terrible Disease. Needless to say, I revised the application to include more Terrible Disease background and removed abbreviations. Keep the application focused, hypothesis-driven, and non-controversial.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, with all this in mind, your excellent training, tremendous potential, and the wisdom of your mentors, you will have written and submitted your K99/R00 application. What happens next? In my next post, I will recount tales of subsequent adventures with the K99/R00. Stay tuned for more tales!