You may be wondering – like many researchers – how in the world am I going to fit all that data into the 12 pages required by the new grant format?

One key is to tell a story.  That is more vital now than ever.  By telling a story of what you want to do, how you want to do it, and why you are the right person to do it, you don’t need a long list of facts about your work.

If you want to learn more about how to do that, sign up for a free teleseminar (telephone/web seminar) with Dr. Adrienne Cox, from the Dept. of Radiation Oncology at UNC Chapel Hill (she’s one smart lady).

Don’t wait too long … the seminar is tomorrow, Thursday Feb 25th, in the evening.

I opened up the score sheet and almost fell out of my chair…

A bit over a year ago, I got into the office one day, and had an email from the NIH saying that the score sheet was ready for my R01 renewal that had been submitted a few months before.

My stomach had butterflies. My lab was depending on me – my R01 was running out in just a few short months, and without a renewal, I would have to ramp down the project and let people go.

I didn’t expect it to go well. It was the first round of submission for this competitive renewal, and all I’d heard were horror stories about rejection after rejection from colleagues. Worse yet, I’d only had 2 years since the last renewal to the time I wrote it – not much time to make significant progress! So I felt behind the ball and that we had little chance of getting this one.

But I had to know. It was a busy day, and I knew I’d go through it in a sour mood after reading about a rejection or bad score. But curiosity got the best of me.

I browsed to the NIH site. I browsed the long list of past proposals to this one. I clicked on it and scrolled down.

WHAT???!!!???!! “NO WAY!” I screamed. My lab tech immediately came to my door and said, “what’s wrong??? are you ok?” (I’m not normally one for hysterics – I’ve run 30 foot waterfalls in my whitewater kayak, and that requires nerves of steel)

I wasn’t ok, simply because I was sure that someone made a mistake. The next few days I kept checking back on the page to see if they’d corrected it. To make sure that I had a grip on reality. I waited for the conversation with my program officer.

When I finally talked to him, he confirmed it. I was stunned and shocked. In one of the most competitive years for getting proposals reviewed (2008) I had pulled a score significantly better than the top 5%.

And this was the second time in a row. Just a year before, I’d pulled a competitive renewal of my other R01 at a very similar score, on the first round.

What was going on? Well, my lab does some great work. But there’s more to it than that. Somehow, I had figured out the “secret formula” that seems to work for communicating that great science to our reviewers.

And now is your opportunity to hear about it directly from me.

Special announcement: One of the subscribers on my email list wrote that they were “freaking out” about the new grant proposal format with NIH.  So I’m going to spend 10 minutes covering that on tonight’s call, and I’ll be covering that in more detail in the upcoming course.

It’s going to be tonight, on Tuesday, January 19th at 8pm EST, 7pm CST, 6pm MST, and 5pm PST.  Subscribers will be able to call in and ask questions, or listen in on the web.

If you want to get on the call, along with getting other powerful information on grants and careers, make sure to sign up for my mailing list using the “subscribe” box on the upper left of the page, or go to: http://marketingyourscience.com

Since the call is coming up tonight, if you subscribe to my list, make sure to drop me a line right away, and I’ll send you the details of the call!

I got a curious email this morning, from a person asking me to delete a comment from his address on my post about the grant writing class contest.  It had been posted by someone else posing as him.

I checked it out, and the comment hadn’t gone onto the blog yet (note to spammers: give it up, I don’t approve your spam comments, they just get deleted).

Here is part of what the malicious comment said:

Writing and applying for grants is akin to begging…help me in becoming a Master Begger!(sic)

Ok, a few things to our uneducated, malicious, spammer.

First, your ip address was recorded, and I know exactly which machine this was posted from.  In many countries it is a felony level crime to impersonate someone else.

Second, you show an inexcusable lack of education in these days of google.  For example, wikipedia says:

Begging (or panhandling) is to request a donation in a supplicating manner.

But that’s not the whole story.  Begging is asking for money without giving anything back.  There is no value exchanged, there is only value given (to the beggar).  It is not an equal exchange.

I know some uneducated people think that grant writing is all about asking for “free money” so that you can sit on your butt and do nothing with it (or take a vacation).  People who think that are dumb enough to equate it with begging.

But if you think that a “beggar” is going to get grants, choke on this: in the USA right now, only about 1 in 10 grant proposals to NIH get funded. In many other countries, it is even harder than that. Do you think that any panel of serious scientists is going to send grant money to someone who writes a proposal that says “please, please give me money for my research, I really really need it?”  Do you think they’re going to take away the chance of someone else to do great science, in order to send money to you, just because you’re pathetic?

If you think that, you’re smoking crack. Quit it with your bad habits.

The only science I know of that gets grant funding these days is that which offers  the promise of exceptional value in return for the funding. (hey, I just gave away one of the “secrets” of grant writing. take note.)

If you know of institutions that respond to “begging,” please, let me know.  I want some of that free money so that I can sit on my butt too (actually, I have too much energy to sit around on my butt posting malicious comments and smoking crack like our spammer – I would use the money for something useful, like actually helping people).

So, spammer, the joke is on you.  Keep going through life thinking that someday you too can get to a point where people will be giving you “free money” just because you’re a good beggar.  See where it gets you (to your local street corner).  Then look around and compare your results to the other people who actually work hard to give some value back to the world in return (people who will have houses and jobs).

Why is the format changing?

Starting in January, NIH is implementing a shortened grant format for all of the main grant types, including R01’s and K awards.  This came from very long and involved deliberation with many members of the research community, spanning years. The key message that prompted the NIH to do this was that everyone felt like the whole grant writing and grant reviewing endeavor was wasting far too much time. On that point I am in complete agreement!

Whether or not the new format will fix this problem remains to be seen.

What is the new format?

First, the length is much shorter.  The old R01 format was 25 pages for the research plan, whereas the new one is 12 pages. That is a significant change. (See Page I-15 of the new PHS 398 forms for details on the new length requirements for various grant types.)

But there is another change that is also important, the reformulation of the “Research Plan” from the old format into a “Research Strategy” in the new format.

The research plan in the old format consisted of the following subsections: Background & Significance, Preliminary Studies and Progress Report, Research Design and Methodology.

The rules for the new format ask for a different set of subsections: “Significance, Innovation, Approach” (see page I-41 of the phs398 guidelines).  This is an important change. I discovered this when I attempted to write a few proposals using the new format for ARRA grants.  My old methodology for putting together a proposal had to be significantly revamped to make it work.

Perhaps the most important attribute of this change is that the “Preliminary Studies and Progress Report” is gone!  All preliminary studies and progress are wrapped into the approach section.  So, this one little section must convey, in about 5-6 pages, what 15 or more pages would have conveyed in the old format.

In my submitted proposal using the new format, I got hammered for “lack of detail” provided.  But apparently, everyone else must have been hammered for that, too, because I got funded.

Another important difference is the inclusion of a complete subsection addressing “innovation”.  In the old format, while “innovation” was supposed to be there, it wasn’t made so explicit as this.

This seems like an experimental gambit on the part of NIH, to try to force the system to provide more funding for truly novel and innovative work.  It attempts to address one of the biggest critiques of the NIH review process in the past, which is its rampant conservatism.  The saying has always gone something like: “You can’t get funding to do the work until you’ve already done most of the work.”

Will the inclusion of an “innovation” subsection help with this?  I think it is a baby step in the right direction, but I doubt it will overcome the overall conservatism of the NIH review process.  Nonetheless, in formulating a proposal, it will be important to start out with a clear picture of “what is innovative” about your work from the start.  I suspect that proposals lacking a clear statement addressing this won’t do too well.

Perhaps the most minor change is the switch of the subsection “Background and Significance” into just a “Significance” section.  This can be boiled down to the NIH saying something like: “We want to hear more about why the work is important than we do about the history of the science leading up to it.”

Given the low available page count, that makes sense.

How will it impact you?

There was a recent article in The Scientist about concerns that the new format would harm young investigators:

Specifically, some critics say the new, shorter forms — down from 25 to 12 pages for R01 grants — will favor better writers, making it more difficult for younger investigators to compete for NIH funding.

The argument of this article is that if you are a young scientist, then you aren’t as capable of writing a concise, focused proposal, and so you are less likely to succeed.

I’m not sure that I agree with that viewpoint.

On the one hand, young scientists seem to often have a harder time conveying the big-picture value of their work to the audience (which is one of the main reasons for this blog and the book I am writing).

On the other hand, the old format allowed for sometimes excruciating experimental detail and methodologies.  I believe that benefitted established investigators who already had this stuff worked out (i.e. “who had already done the work”).

The first few major proposals I submitted were rejected, until I submitted one where I had already made the major innovative leap (i.e. done the most important work), and the proposal was just to fill in the details around it.  The old format allowed me to describe in quite gory detail how we had made it work, and how we would extend that.

This new format wouldn’t allow this.  With its combination of much shorter length, and focus on an “innovation” section, it will make it much harder to take work that has a long history and provide a bunch of impressive detail about that work.  This should actually remove some of the traditional advantage that experienced investigators have had over their newer colleagues.

Further, there is some benefit for young investigators in not being habituated to the old format.  My first ARRA proposal in the new format was a lot harder for me, because I am so habituated to the old format that I first attempted to write that proposal the way I would have written a regular R01.  After writing 15 pages of stuff, and still having a lot more to go, I realized that I had to completely re-think my approach.  I ended up rewriting a lot of it.  In this sense, a new investigator has little disadvantage over someone like me, because we are both new to the format.

So on balance, I don’t agree with The Scientist that this new format harms young investigators disproportionately.

Being a stellar writer is a key to science career success

I was somewhat offended by the article’s implication that young scientists weren’t as capable at writing as their more senior counterparts.

Any young scientist who wants a successful scientific career must absolutely learn how to write well, regardless of the whims of the current grant formatting requirements.  This is a vital foundation for nearly all scientific career success.

To imply that this is only something that can be gained after many years of grant writing experience is silly.  It can be learned – if you pay attention to learning it and focus your efforts on doing so.  The reason most people don’t learn this until later in their careers is because nobody teaches it to them.  Most seem to go into new positions not realizing that their lack of training in critical skills like this is a problem, and so they have to learn about their own deficits in training the hard way (e.g. grant rejections).

I am a good example of that.  When I wrote about my experiences with my colleague giving me major critical feedback on my specific aims, there was a key point I was making, without being explicit about it: that the experience with my colleague forced me to realize that I had a lot of learning to do, and that I needed to get my butt in gear to do it.

And so I did.  Since that single decision I made, my proposals have had much better track record than before.  I was able to learn how to do it, simply because I decided that I needed to learn how to do it better. I sought out a mix of resources, some of which I’ll be talking about in future posts.  But the key is in wanting to learn to improve.

The first step is acknowledging there is a deficiency.

But for young scientists who acknowledge their own limitations with respect to writing well, and who work hard to overcome them, I don’t think that senior scientists will have an advantage over them. I’ve seen some not so great writing from many senior scientists (perhaps because things weren’t so competitive when they got started).  On a skill as important as this, it is better to start learning earlier than later.  The brain seems a bit more flexible when young.

Additional resources

First, if you are about to prepare a proposal, have a look at the new phs398 forms and documents earlier rather than later.  Writing to the new format requires a different approach.

Second, you can sign up here to gain free access to a foundational preview chapter from the book I am writing, “Marketing Your Science,” that will help you see any scientific communication you produce in a new and more effective way. You’ll also get access to a video covering one of the key points of grant writing: “You have 60 seconds”.

If I run across any other good discussions of the new format, I’ll send them out to my list members or post them here.

Tip #1: The specific aims

I’ve been writing grants for about 20 years.  The first one I wrote was as a graduate student.  I came up with an idea for a distributed-object system for DNA sequencing data management, and went to my advisor Lloyd Smith with it.  He said, “great, why don’t you write a grant proposal to get it funded?”

I didn’t know where to start.  I struggled with it, but eventually managed to come up with a plan.  I gave it to him, and he reworked it quite a bit, then submitted it to the NIH.  It got a decent score on the first round but it wasn’t funded.  So we reworked it and resubmitted it.  That time it got funded.  My career of grant writing was launched.

Fast forward to about ten years later, and I was now at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as an assistant professor in Microbiology & Immunology and Biomedical Engineering.  I’d done a reasonable job of getting grants funded up to that point, with a prestigious “genome scholar” K22 award under my belt, and a handful of other grants that I wrote or co-wrote that had been funded.

So it was much to my dismay that the first few proposals I wrote as a new faculty member were failures. I use that strong word intentionally.  The sole purpose of a grant is to get your research funded.  These proposals I wrote in 2002 and 2003 – to both NSF and NIH – failed to do that.  I started worrying.

I managed to get connected with a senior colleague here who is a very successful scientist.  He also teaches a rigorous grant-writing class at UNC called “research concepts”.  I asked him for help to read over a draft of a new proposal I was cooking up.

His response was, “send me the specific aims.”

What? You only want the specific aims?  Why not the rest of it?

“I only want to see the specific aims.”

Ok, I played along.  I sent him the specific aims.

A week went by and I heard nothing.  Then I got an email.  It went something like this:

“I’ve read your aims and we should meet to discuss them.”

Here was a senior colleague who, instead of just marking up the aims and sending them back to me, wanted to meet.  It sounded serious.  I remember that meeting.

We went for lunch.  We sat down with a bit of chit-chat.  Then it got to business.  He pulled out a copy of the specific aims that he’d marked up with a pen.  It was nearly all red, with most of my writing crossed out.  He went point by point through my grant’s aims, tearing down nearly everything I had written.  I felt both angry and scared.  I felt like he was telling me that my work was crap.  And in fact, he was right – it was crap.

He handed me a “template” that he gives to his class for how to write aims.  He told me to use that in rewriting my aims, and that he’d be happy to review a revised version.

I felt so lame, going back to my computer and using a “template” that he uses with his students to write my R01 grant to the NIH.  I was a respected assistant professor at a major university!  I shouldn’t need that kind of basic training!

Except that I did.  And it worked. (Do you want a template like that?  If you subscribe to my email list, you’ll get one, along with a draft chapter of my upcoming book, “Marketing Your Science”).

We went another two rounds with the aims.  Only after they were fleshed out did I start writing the rest of the grant, and I found that it flowed incredibly well – much better than any previous grant proposal.  That’s because my aims were clear.  I knew where I was going, and the destination was known. I was no longer driving in the dark without headlights.  That’s what I had been doing previously, before this encounter.

That grant was submitted, and on its first round of submission, it got a score around 5th percentile.  My colleague helped me turn my grant proposal from junk into a more than fundable proposal – simply by looking at my specific aims, and nothing else.

That one encounter led to a complete turnaround in my grant writing.  Since that time I’ve had about 70% of all my proposals funded.  My two most recent R01’s were funded on the first round of submission, with scores better than the top 5th percentile (in the highly competitive years of 2007 and 2008).  I just received a rare RC2 award for my genome annotation work.  And I can trace all of this to that one encounter with my mentor.

It all starts with the specific aims.

I’ve had a number of post docs over the years.  I try to get them involved with grant writing, since it helps them learn about the process.  Here’s a key thing I’ve noticed: if left to their own devices, they almost always start writing some other part of the proposal, and leave the aims until last.

It was actually several years after the aforementioned encounter that I realized the problem that this presented.  A post-doc and I were working together on a proposal related to our antibiotic resistance work.  He would work on the introduction or research design & methodology section, and then after working on those parts, I’d try to summarize them in the aims.

We went round after round of modifying the proposal, then the aims.  Then changing the proposal again, then changing the aims again.  I should have realized much sooner what I had begun doing in my own work – always starting with the aims.

Until they are completely water tight, there’s no reason to work on any other part of the proposal.

The aims contain three key things about your proposal: why you want to do the work, what you want to do, and how you want to do it.  If those things can’t be pinned down within the one-page specific aims statement, they certainly can’t be pinned down in a larger proposal.  In fact, trying to write a proposal without those three things having been clearly delineated is just a waste of time.  You will spend time, like I did on many occasions, messing around with shifting goals and priorities.  You will be driving towards an unknown destination.  And the likelihood of success in such instances is quite low.

That is exactly the problem my post doc and I were having.  I had given him too little guidance about where to start, so he started where most of us naturally do, by writing the things that are “easiest” first.  Writing a water tight specific aims page is actually quite hard.  Few people would naturally start there unless trained to do so (I wasn’t until the encounter mentioned above).  But at this point, I’ll never proceed to write any other part of a proposal until my aims are so good that they make me excited to want to begin writing the rest of it.  And I’m not kidding – a good specific aims statement should generate that kind of enthusiasm.

Back to the post-doc story, the first version of the proposal – which hadn’t started with the aims – didn’t receive a fundable score (though didn’t miss it by too far).

For the revision, I had him start from scratch with the specific aims.  That process went much more smoothly than the first attempt. It took about one half of the time, even though it had been completely rewritten.  And on that round, it received what would have been a fundable score.  Sadly, however, the foundation we submitted that to ran into great financial difficulties that year, and didn’t fund any grants.  So despite the improved score, we had no luck.

So the take home message should be clear: start with the aims.  Write them, then have your colleagues read them and tear them apart.  Then rewrite them.  Try to get them torn apart again.  And rewrite again.  Until it is virtually impossible to poke holes in them.  If you’re starting from that platform, writing the rest of the grant is pretty straightforward (though not necessarily easy).

Update 12/16/09: I have posted a specific aims template based upon the successful format I used in all my proposals over the past four years.  It is a template derived and expanded from the one I mention in this article, with some extra input by Dr. Peter Drain at U. Pitt. It is in the member’s only area, so you’ll need to subscribe to the mailing list for access (see the subscribe box on the upper left of the page).

I had a fun evening reviewing some grant proposals for graduate students taking a grant writing class.

None of the proposals got me excited. I’m sure this was because the assignment specified that the students had to come up with a proposal unrelated to their research. They had to use one specific paper to come up with ideas for its extension into new areas (having to do with innate immunity and gut microflora).

But here’s the thing. If I were a grant reviewer of real grant proposals and they were this uninspiring, I’d have given them all poor scores. Yet it is clear that most of the students worked hard on the assignment. They get an “A” for effort. But that doesn’t translate into funding. The real world is not like the classroom.

A real grant proposal has to have emotion. That emotion should include enthusiasm. Intrigue/suspense doesn’t hurt either. Inspiration is great.

If a reviewer is faced with a stack of 10 grants in front of her, she needs a way to sort them aside from just technical merit. At least half of them will have technical merit. But only 10-15% will get funded (at least through the NIH). How to sort? Those that get the reviewer the most jazzed up take home the prize.

If I were running this grant writing class, I’d find a way to get the students more pumped up and enthusiastic. I think they are writing from a place of wanting to avoid criticism, rather than from a place of “hey, check out my awesome science ideas – they will solve major problems.” But alas, I am only a volunteer grader this year (besides, I don’t have time to run this class, my bioinformatics class consumes enough time).

Grant proposals must contain emotion. That is lesson number one in Morgan’s bag of grant writing tricks.