I believe that the current system of research funding is totally screwed up. Researchers spend way too much time writing grants, few of which succeed in getting the money needed to keep a research program going. This results in an endless treadmill of grant writing, and an ever-shrinking amount of time for doing the research itself. It causes a reversal of priorities from why most of us got into science in the first place.
I believe there is a better way to operate in this broken system. That way is to write clearer and more compelling grant proposals, so that the recipients of your communication get to share in your excitement and passion, and therefore want to give you funding to move forward with it. I believe the better way is quality and clarity, compared to quantity and confusion.
I help people achieve that better way by:
1) helping them understand with clarity what their core work really is;
2) helping them see why that work is important to the outside world;
3) helping them generate passion from that understanding; and
4) helping them to develop a clear and compelling message around that passion that gets reviewers and funders excited.
It is from these core beliefs about a better way in grant writing that I’ve helped generate many successes for people that I mentor (including two perfect scoring R01’s in the past two years), and that I continue to develop systems and strategies for developing proposals with increased clarity that generate tremendous enthusiasm in the reviewers and funders.
If you believe there’s a better way, join our community by subscribing to the email newsletter (it’s that little subscribe box on the upper right), and I’ll keep you in the loop with all the latest and greatest strategies for doing this in your grants.
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The author was previously a tenured professor in Microbiology & Immunology, Biomedical Engineering, and Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill. After leaving there in 2010, she joined the research faculty at Boise State University part-time, while developing a business based on her core beliefs in a better way of grant writing. Over the span of her career, she’s generated over $23.6M in funding for herself and collaborators as PI and/or Investigator on the award. She had four NIH R01’s funded in a row on the first round of submission, with no rejections or revisions on any of them. She enjoys putting her beliefs about a better way of grant writing into practice for students and in her own research.