On a recent webinar about State of Grants in 2012, I mentioned that the personal statement part of the NIH biosketch is a great opportunity to additionally “market” your project. In my experience, most people waste this opportunity by listing a very bland and generic statement.

The most common (ineffective) approach I’ve seen seems to be to just recapitulate the publications and achievements in a narrative format. But that’s not adding any new information, it’s just repeating what’s already ...(read more)

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The NIH has thrown a lot of us into disarray over the new, shorter R01 grant format.

I’m hearing reports of scores that are wildly variable and all over the map. I’ve also had quite a few questions from people about how to deal with the new format.

The theory behind the new format is that by shortening it re-labelling the sections, writers would be forced to focus less on minutiae of their experiments, and more on the “big ...(read more)

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Last night I gave a webinar on grant writing, where I told a story of a grant. It was a story of both failure and successes, showing what things worked and what things didn’t. It was meant to be an instructional story, as many good stories are. In fact, the older I get, the more I realize that people learn far better through story than through pedantic spewing of facts.

So. A lot of people wrote to me afterwards ...(read more)

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The grant game has changed – how to adapt in 2012

January 3, 2012

It would be hard not to notice that things are changing in the world of grants. Funding rates are at an all-time low (< 1 in 6 according to NIH data). People are demoralized. I talk to them everyday, and it can be painful at times.

I have some good ideas about why things are changing and what to do about it. Instead of trying to write this up in a (very long) blog post, I’ve decided to put together ...(read more)

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