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 thanking me for the webinar.

But. One lady, we’ll call her “the nice lady” (I previously had called her something not so nice, but I reconsidered – she’s well meaning but a bit misguided) writes to me saying, basically that I should have been more dry, more pedantic, and more boring.

She tells me that I shouldn’t have told an “educational story” of one line of research that I’ve had funded consistently for 9 years through 4 different grants, that this was too “me focused.”

I think she expected me to sit there lecturing about the ABC’s (and D’s E’s and F’s) of “good grants.”

In other words, she wanted me to act like a mummy lecturing from a sarcophagus. That would have been “acceptable.”

There’s a lesson here, which is why I bother posting it. If you think, like this lady does, that writing a great proposal is all about giving a dry, boring “lecture” to your readers, you’re going to struggle. Mightily.

Grants must engage the reader with a great story about great research. In these days of 1 in 6 grants being funded, that’s the ONLY WAY you’re going to get any traction (and even then, you’ll need a bit of luck mixed in!)

Fortunately, she’s the only one who complained! Most others who wrote in, “Got it”.

Now, due to some technical glitches at the beginning (which she also complained about), I’ve decided to do an encore. It’s going to be next Tuesday, Jan 17th at 10AM PST, 1PM EST. You can sign up using the page here (ignore it if it still lists the old time): http://grantdynamo.com/tgbt-webinar/tgbt-webinarblog/

And, be prepared for a “story” where I may actually swear a time or two on a live call (gasp). If you’re not prepared for that, then you probably shouldn’t sign up!

A few years ago I gave a talk in the biochem department at UNC. Afterwards I went out for lunch with my mentor, and he berated me. (Did I mention that he can be an intimidating guy? But I listen to him, since he’s the one who helped me go from no grants to lots of grants…)

He berated me for several things, including using a difficult-to-read font, giving a software demo that took a bunch of time to get running, and, most of all, for not conveying “the point” of the talk.

I thought I’d conveyed the point clearly. I thought I’d shown how cool and nifty my new project was. But I was wrong. I hadn’t.

I was really bummed out because I used to let things like that affect me all too much.

I was soon coming up for tenure! I knew I’d have to give one or more “tenure talks” at which I had to really wow folks – including this mentor – before they’d vote me in (or out).

I figured that this was a sure sign I was going to fail. Here comes the unemployment line!

Only six months later, I gave a talk for my department, after which the same menotor came to me and said “that was a great talk.”

What changed?

After I got over my long bout with destructive self-pity, I had a few important realizations.

One of the most important of those was that I hadn’t been treating my audience with respect. I was doing the talk simply to build up my own ego and my own reputation, without paying attention to the “needs” or “wants” of the audience.

I see this all the time. I estimate that about 60-70% of all talks I see are coming from the same place. Maybe that’s why they’re often so tedious. The person is talking from a perspective of “hey, you should listen to me because I’m great and my research is great” – without any real engagement.

And here’s the one key thing I did to change it around. I discovered “love.”

Not romantic love… but love for my audience.

Around that time when I was preparing my tenure talk, I went to a friend’s wedding. There was a tremendous feeling of love at the wedding. It made me think about my talk, and I realized that I hadn’t been putting my talks together from a standpoint of caring about how my audience was feeling. And that was a big mistake.

Any human relationship that’s lacking a sense of caring or love is going to be dissatisfactory.

I applied that principle as I put my talk together. For each slide, each sentence, and each figure in the slides, I asked myself: does this help my audience to see or hear this? Or is it just another thing that I’m putting in here for selfish reasons (such as wanting to impress with how hard I’ve worked)?

In other words, I was constantly thinking to myself “I’m going to love my audience and treat them right!”

I haven’t done all of my talks that way. I’ve forgotten and then remembered this principle multiple times. But every time I do a talk or presentation based on this notion, it goes better – much better. That’s because I’m going outside of myself, thinking about the other people involved. I’m considering the time that they’re spending listening to me. I’m not just considering my own time or fame or fortune, I’m thinking about: how can I give them a great experience?

It works. It works really well. If you want to ramp up your results in front of an audience, this is the most potent way I’ve ever discovered. I hope you’ll use it!

ps – to summarize, whenever you’re preparing a talk, constantly ask yourself “am I treating my audience with love and respect?” It will ramp up your talks considerably.

pss – Do you want more tips and advice that will help you in your career? Grab your copy of the free report: “5 steps to a great science career”.

The Great Grant Crunch is coming soon…to a theatre near you.

What the heck is “The Great Grant Crunch?” It’s a term I invented to describe the perfect storm of factors that are headed our way as grant seekers:

• ARRA stimulus funds are wearing off.  This is a very big deal.  Lots of us who had that funding ramped up operations and hired staff to do projects, and given that 2 yrs is not a very long time to ramp up and do some good science, a lot of us will be seeking more funding in the future to keep that work going.  This could mean hundreds to thousands of extra funding requests in the Spring and Summer of 2011.
• This surge in new requests comes right at a time that the US Gov’t is moving towards full-on austerity mode.  In case you haven’t noticed, we’re running huge deficits, and the Tea Partyers campaigned (and won) on a platform of cutting these back.  That means the likelihood of increased science spending is about as likely as Palm Beach weather in Fairbanks Alaska during wintertime. In other words, not much.
• States are cutting back.  Many states were relying on revenues related to the housing boom to fund their budget largesse.  That ended in 2007/08.  Many keep hoping for an improved economy to replace it.  I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but look at what happened to Japan after its housing bubble collapsed in ’91.  They still haven’t recovered!  Of good news, the US corporate system is not quite as moribund, and US entrepreneurs have it better than Japanese entrepreneurs.  Regardless, a quick recovery is not on the map.  That means ongoing stagnancy or even shrinkage in state budgets – including support for academia and research.
• Foundations are struggling. They’re hit by a double-whammy of declining investments and declining donations.  I experienced this firsthand when I had a good score on a proposal with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, but that year they told me they weren’t funding ANY grants due to the troubles.  This will be slow to improve.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you’re in grant-getting mode, you should know about this.  It simply means that grants will keep getting more and more competitive over the next two years (or until the US budget situation improves, whichever is later).

What can you do about it?  I’m going to be addressing that on a free teleseminar, where Gina Hiatt, PhD of the Academic Ladder will be interviewing me, on Thursday Dec 9th at 7pm EST.  A replay will be made available for a few days after, in case you can’t make it to the live call.  You can sign-up for the free call here: https://marketyourscience.com/survivegrantcrunch.html.  Make sure to have your questions ready!

ps – please don’t let the Great Grant Crunch notion freak you out.  Though it is a big deal, the core solution to something like this is just to realize it is coming, and do the very best you can to prepare.

The US NIH recently changed the grant format, among other things adding a new section titled “Innovation.” Many of us have wondered: how can we convey innovation if we’re using standard techniques and methods? Morgan has some ideas on this, illustrated with an iPad and a razor.

Morgan was invited to participate in a meeting designed to give feedback to the NIH for the future of informatics for handling the flood of data from the “post genome” era of biology. It is a huge challenge. But in the meeting, the primary focus was all about the machines – hardware and software that it will take to get it done. I was a bit frustrated that there wasn’t more about the “people” in the meeting, for reasons I discuss on the video.

You sit down with palms sweaty against the keyboard, ready to write your next grant proposal to get your Big Idea (™) funded. You are dead serious and you let your reviewers know it, as you spew forth a stream of endless facts and figures about the wonderful work you do and will do. This is how to write a grant, right? You know that your proposal is very impressive, and therefore agencies like the NIH, NSF, and DOE will clamor to fund it, right? Morgan shatters your illusions in this episode of Meta Morgan TV.

Sometimes getting an NIH grant is like pulling teeth, because you’ll submit a proposal that you think is great, and get reviews back that just pick it apart. But grant reviewers almost never tell you what they’re really thinking. In this episode, Morgan reveals why that is, and how you can avoid it.

Hey, get some key tips on science careers, including an excerpt from my upcoming book…

The genome era is an incredible time to be in science, but also presents unprecedented challenges.   With the publishing of the first complete human genome just about 10 years ago, major questions remain, such as:

• Where are all the genes located on the genome?
• How and when are the genes regulated?
• How are those genes spliced to form different variants of genes?
• Which of the genes encode proteins, and which encode other functional RNAs?

It turns out that “sequencing a genome” was only a starting point, not an end point.  There’s a lot of work to do.

The National Institutes of Health is now supporting a project by the name “ENcyclopedia of DNA Elements,” whose goal is to ultimately solve many of these riddles, providing us with sufficient insights on genomes and their genes that we can start bringing the genome era to improve health care.

The ENCODE project is large and ambitious – and today is the kickoff of the project’s annual meeting in Washington DC.

Highlights of the first day of the meeting include: presentations from Ewan Birney and Manolis Kellis on preliminary analyses of the large data sets being generated, a presentation from Eric Green, leader of the Nat. Human Genome Research Institute about the future of the project, and highlights from a variety of researchers (including yours truly) about various data generation and analysis efforts for the project.  These data generation efforts include: transcription mapping by RNAseq, histone mapping, studies of heterocrhomatin, examination of alternative splicing, and analysis of protein expression.

While the meeting is exciting, it is clear that nobody has a handle on the data analysis challenges (no slight to Ewan, Manolis, or the other folks intended here – I’m just highlighting the huge nature of the problem).  Each research group is producing data at a tremendous clip, and while there is a “Data Coordination Center” for the project through which all the data flows and is tracked, trying to put it all together is going to take years.

Who will do that work?  I am concerned about it, because this kind of work is not suited for most university environments.  It requires a significant long-term investment in computing and software infrastructure.  Universities like my own are notoriously bad at long-term planning.  And the short funding cycles now provided by the NIH exacerbate that problem, since continuity for more than 2-3 years is almost never assured.

I think that the solution will have to be some kind of institutes and/or commercial ventures that are developed for this purpose.  These need to be separate from the pressures of academic science, which is a constant publish-or-perish affair, making it hard to focus on long-term infrastructure development.  Developing such infrastructure requires extraordinary focus and long-term thinking, and doesn’t lend itself well to the constant publishing required by academia.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason that Ewan Birney has been so successful at the European Bioinformatics Institute – it is not a traditional academic setting.  I think we need to replicate his successes here in the US.

What is one of the key secrets that a great grant writer knows, but that most other people don’t?

In middle school I was a very disengaged student. I struggled and even dropped out for a while (funny, isn’t it, that I later became a successful professor! More on that later.)

One of the reasons I struggled was the BORING teachers.

I remember the most boring one of all. I won’t name him because I’m sure he was a well meaning guy – he just had no clue how to engage his audience, a bunch of 8th and 9th graders, to learn history.

Each day, we would go into class. He would turn off the lights and turn on the overhead projector. I remember the dusty smell of that thing, and the hum of its fan.

He would proceed to place a pre-written overhead with a litany of history facts. And then another. And then another.

He would read each one. There were no pictures. There were no illustrations. Nothing but his droning voice, the droning fan, and an endless stream of names, places, events, dates.

He required that we copy down the information on the overheads. He wanted to make sure we didn’t just sleep through it, so we had to turn in our notes for a grade.

Talk about torture!

I don’t want to make light of the cruel things that people can do to each other in the name of “torture,” but this is one of the closest experiences I’ve had.

It made me hate history. I thought history was the absolutely most awful subject on the planet. (I’ve gotten over it, and enjoy history now).

Here’s and exercise: close your eyes for a minute, and imagine yourself as a restless middle schooler, forced to sit day after day copying, as fast as you could write, one after another overhead full of “facts” about history. Maybe it’s not so hard for you to imagine if you had a teacher like that. But even if you didn’t, think about how agitated about the whole affair you might be, and how turned off to the subject it would make you. “Bored to tears” is an apt description of the experience.

Now that you’ve taken a moment to imagine that, let’s do one more exercise that applies this same torturous boredom concept to grants.

Imagine that you are a grant reviewer. You open up a grant to see an endless stream of “facts” that the writer has presented to impress you. Since you’re not an expert in the exact field of the proposers, the “facts” mean nothing to you. Yet you feel obligated to read the grant carefully, because you’ve been assigned to do so by the funding agency.

So you sit there and suffer through it, trying to absorb those facts, one after another. You look up the many buzzwords and technical terms on Wikipedia. You try to cut through the litany to figure out what the writers are proposing to do, and why they want to do it. That’s what you really want to know. But the what and why is covered up by facts and more facts.

Now imagine a contrasting grant reviewing experience. You open up a proposal to review, and it is written in smoothly flowing english without buzzwords or facts to decipher. You quickly grasp why the proposers want to do what they are proposing to do, you understand what problem it will solve, and when you get into the body of the proposal, there is an interesting, readable story.  Each time they use a buzzword, they explain its meaning, so there is no hunting around on the internet.  There are great illustrations to help you figure out the concepts that you’re unfamiliar with.

You get through the grant in a short time, excited and feeling like you didn’t waste your time.

Now think about this one final thing. After reading all the proposals, you go to a grant review meeting.  You are sitting in a room full of other grant reviewers. It is your turn to rate these two grants we just discussed, and try to convince that roomful of people to vote either for or against funding for one of these proposals. Only a few proposals (or maybe only one) out of the whole group of proposals considered by the group will get funding.

Any grant that gets funding will need someone to say some great things about it. To be really enthusiastic about it.

Are you going to be enthusiastic about the fact-laden, boring proposal? Maybe they are doing great work.

But here’s the secret: many (usually at least half) of the proposals considered that day will have “great work” in them.  You’ve seen several that contained “great work”!

What makes one or two stand out from that crowd, enough to receive the coveted funding?  Enough to receive your enthusiastic praise that is strong enough to convince everyone else in the room?

The ones that not only do “great work” but also convey that great work in a reader friendly way.

It is never reader friendly to be like my history teacher was. Ever!

Don’t once think that because you can name a large array of facts about your field that people will be impressed.

If I start blathering on about “electrospray ionization coupled to a triple quadropole and an orbitrap analyzer” – do you get impressed?  Or do you just get the sense that I’m a blowhard?  Nearly anyone can learn obscure facts!  It is not going to impress anyone!

Even if you are in my field and understand these facts, you are likely to be unswayed by my use of these “facts” unless I have tied them into an engaging story that makes it clear why they are relevant to what I’m proposing to do.

A successful grant proposal is every bit as much about what you leave out as what you include!

The bottom line

Do not bore your readers with endless facts. Know when to leave them out. If you have an essential fact that you must convey, make it obvious why you have included it.

Don’t miss out on a newsletter with more insider secrets, a specific aims template, and a preview of the ground breaking book. You can sign up with your first name and email here:

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, I’m offering a complimentary live webinar that’s going to show you some of the very most ninja skills that I’ve been teaching people in my high-end grant coaching, so that you can survive 2012. Here’s where you can register for the webinar (web-based seminar). In case you’re the indecisive type, I also wrote a post about the webinar with a short video, here.

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