We'll start the research grant writing workshop. The four of us have prepared slides to talk about today. We have nuggets of information for people who are writing for the first time. Since we have a small group, perhaps it's better to just openly discuss some of the key takeaways. But I do want to start by acknowledging Toby and Denise in and as for joining this panel and working on organizing a session with me today. So I think the first area to start in is if you're thinking about writing your first time. Is that what everyone here is doing? Writing your first grant? Where are you in the process? Where are you in the process? Okay. We're very, very rubber-trapped, but it's really strengthening. She's just having the time of her life. about what type of grant application that you would write. So we have a lot of diversity in the types of grant applications that are being pursued by the folks. So Tony and Antony and I have had far more than just have active grants. I've had the whole. As I was saying, it's important to identify where you are in the career path and know which mechanism works best for you. So that's step number one. I think number two is to, in my mind, is to identify a peer group who can help you identify is your question that you're going to ask in a grant application contemporary to your field or is it just some sort of small extension of what's already known. So identifying people in your community, at your institution, to help you craft a good application is really important because you're going to have to identify people who will provide you unbiased advice. And that's one key takeaway that I have in my slides today. And it's important because if you go to your friends, your peers in your group, they hear you complain. They hear about your biology very frequently. And they hear about your, I wrote an R01, I didn't get the score I wanted or it's near the payline, it won't be funded. They hear about that. And so ultimately there's some unconscious bias that comes which limits their ability to provide very honest feedback. So make sure that you find people who can read your grant all the way through and not just edit it. If someone just edits your grant application in terms of proofreading for grammar, it's not that helpful. There are plenty of services, Grammarly is one. You can find ways to correct grammar, okay? And that doesn't diminish the importance of having a clean grant application. Your grant application should be free of grammar and syntax errors. Because ultimately if those errors are within the text, it's going to make your application look sloppy. And so think ahead of time about how you will budget your calendar so that you can invest time appropriately to prepare a well-crafted, organized application. Okay. We can switch the slides. All right. We're going to make another executive decision and switch the slides now. So I'll go and get started. Okay. So, each of us prefer just a few slides to hit on major points as you're taking steps towards writing your own application. This is my contact information, and I think it's also important that I'll leave it up for a second. I always offer advice to people who reach out to me. If you have something you're thinking about, specific aims or something like that, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to always provide input and give some tips if I can provide them. And as I said, I want to acknowledge the panel that we assembled today and their time and effort in working with me on this program. I think it's also important, as I said, as you're thinking about grant applications, to really consider your environment, who's in your environment that's helping you navigate the grant writing process. So, in my case, I had one senior guru who really helped me hone and sharpen ideas. I had additional people who were highly experienced to really help me form ideas and write them well. Because when I was starting out, my writing was just pure junk. It was just trash. And I thought that I knew what I was doing, which was probably my biggest mistake. And actually, I had to relearn how to write well. And so, I'll talk briefly about how I think about writing my own applications. This is not uniform advice. I think everybody on the panel has their own nuggets that they will share with you today. But this is how I think about writing a grant application. If I define the problem, so something like obesity is a problem, right? It's a disease that affects many people. Everyone has their own health problem that they're addressing. You've ultimately winnowed that problem down to some key molecule that's involved in the process. And you'd like to really state explicitly why is your molecule, your hormone, your protein, your animal model, why is that important? And the second layer of questions I ask myself is, where is that process important? Is it important in the liver? Is it important in the fat tissue? Is it important in the macrophages, et cetera? That helps me really narrow down what something might do, but then also where it's important. And then lastly, last two bullets I think about is, how is it regulated? So is it transcriptional regulation in my field? Is it some sort of adapter binding event that's important for protein turnover? So those two last points I really think about in tandem. So when I think about developing my R01, I think about why, where, and how. Very basic investigative questions. The same thing that you might do if you were writing a newspaper article. And in fact, some of the best advice I got on grant writing was... from people who thought about grant writing as in the same way they write a newspaper article. You wanna capture people very quickly with your problem and your words. I think one other issue I frequently see in people that reach out to me in other grant applications is super complicated models. So a figure that has like 50 pieces to it, arrows going everywhere, molecules all over the place. AIM-1 has 10 components and AIM-3 has another 10. It's really hard to digest as a person who's read that for the first time where it's all going. And you should be able to condense your model into something simple that can be digested by people. Okay, so a few research plan tips. Good writing is maybe the most important thing to develop. It sounds vague, but if you can work on basic sentence formation, avoiding the passive voice is one key piece of advice. If you can use action verbs that really capture the reader's attention, those are the ways to get things read. Other basic tips like make sure a sentence goes further than half a page. Because if you have one word on a line by itself, human beings usually miss that word on a line by itself when they're reading from left to right. In good writing, a good story can often overcome preliminary data issues. Not saying your preliminary data can't be rigorous, but you don't have to have 30 preliminary data figures if your writing is clearly described. I like to use repetition when I'm grant writing because I want the message that I'm relaying to be really hammered in a person's head. I want them to see the key sentences more than once. Realistic experimental approaches. You cannot propose everything that you want to do. Really think carefully about how a four to five year grant application will work. If you've done your vertebrate animals calculations and you're a new PI and you're proposing to have 5,000 mice it's probably not gonna make a lot of sense. You are A, gonna run out of money very quickly and B, you are gonna find it very difficult to complete those studies. Preliminary data should support the hypothesis and establish the rationale for your experiments. We often hear from people that we need a lot of preliminary data for a grant. I think it's really more important to think about the quality of your preliminary data. What it actually says. Having more preliminary data is not always a great piece of advice. You want your preliminary data to be important, key, and obvious to people. Have them clearly outlined. I like to generate the most and absolutely essential tool and go and try to do the killer experiment to establish the key result. So if I do, I make, in my lab we make a lot of knockout mouse strains using CRISPR-Cas. That's one thing that we like to do. So if this mouse model doesn't exist, we like to go ahead and make it. Demonstrate that it exists and demonstrate that there's something occurring that we would like to pursue. Other examples are RNA-Seq of XYZ where you identify some key molecule that no one's heard of. And in my opinion, the way that I like to think about the aims is aim one is the most important aim. This is the aim that's most well-supported. Aim two can be the logical follow-up, something that really makes sense coming from the first aim. And then aim three is the aim where I have, where I feel like I can engage the most creativity. It's something I'm not speculating about, but it's the direction I ultimately wanna go in the next renewal cycle or in the next series of grant applications. Some other tips for people who are just starting out. If you can secure pilot grant funding or any sort of seed support, this demonstrates that your institution has a commitment to your career. Otherwise, reviewers will see, well, does he have the space? Does the person have a track record of managing a budget? Those are all, I think, important aspects of whether the PI and the environment are qualified enough to support the award. I always try to get feedback from my chairperson. I do that because I want that person to know what I'm working on. So it helps me get on the chairperson's map. And so that when the time comes to, hopefully not, but to revise the grant, they understand what I'm doing, what I'm working on, why it's important. So if I need some bridge support to do a key experiment, like, oh yeah, I know about what you're doing. And here's, I don't know, $20,000 to do this or that to do the key experiment. Entry-level faculty candidates, faculty appointments. So if you're at an institution where you have instructor, entry-level faculty positions that show that you have gone beyond the postdoc, that's an important consideration. And do you have independent space and protected time? Vertebrate animals, I think this is a key thing where people get it wrong, try to make it realistic and make it make sense. When I write a grant, that's the first thing I do. I have the aims, of course, and the basic premise of what I want to do, but I go and I think about how many animals am I gonna need for this type of experiment? Because it helps narrow a lot of my science in a way that makes it more practical. Sex as a biological variable comes up in grant applications now. I put a question mark on there because I still struggle with that myself. I think that nowadays, you can ask for a non-modular budget. A modular R01 is the place to start when you're thinking about how to write the grant. But if you think about inflation over the last 20 years, $250,000 per year is probably not gonna be enough to complete everything. So think carefully about having a non-modular budget. Have a good budget justification for the things that you want to do. And try to be mindful of salary encumbrances on grant applications. So if you have a grant application where you're asking for 80% salary support, on a modular R01 of $250,000, plus some other expenses to support 5% of this critical collaborator or 10% of another person, you're gonna run out of money very quickly. And it's gonna become clear that you may not be able to complete the proposed experiments under that budget outline. And I'll also say there's some randomness. People in study section panels are human. We're not chat GBT yet. So some reviewers may see your grant differently than others. And so that doesn't mean there aren't some uniform things to take away from this session, but readers are human. Make it able to be read so that people can understand the importance of your idea. Okay, and so a couple notes on finalizing the grant. As I said, technical and grammatical errors. Please work hard to eliminate them. I mentioned the close friends and the bias associated with close friends reading your grant proposal. And people that are only correcting grammar, this is not helpful for you. You want them to dig in and tell you, hey, this is a stupid idea. And you should really think about doing something else. Honest reviews are essential. And I work hard to develop a system so that every word of my grant proposal is read. So that usually involves, you know, taking somebody out to dinner afterwards or, you know, trying to help them out down the road with their own grant applications. And I try to have a complete idea, complete idea, not draft, one month early. And most of us are at critical periods of life where we have kids at home, family obligations. You know, we hear from sometimes senior people, oh, you gotta get it done six months ahead of time. It's like, oh, it's not that practical, right? So be kind to yourself and give yourself some time to get something good together. And don't beat yourself up about it. Okay. And then lastly, one thing I wanna say is put in a grant application when you're ready. You know, there are a lot of pressures that we feel from leadership in your college, perhaps. And, you know, if you aren't excited about the idea, you're just submitting a grant for the sake of submitting it, it's gonna show up in the writing. If you are not excited about what you're writing about, neither is a reviewer. And it's gonna come out very clearly. Okay, so those are my thoughts. So I'll let Inez take over and let her share hers. Yes, it's a very important trait to be able to listen and have your ears functioning properly. Okay, hi guys. So we tried to eliminate the redundancies between our little presentations, but there will be redundancies. And I also should say that we're all coming from different backgrounds and we have different opinions and I'm sure my colleagues here would disagree with some of the takes that I have based on my personal experiences, but that probably also reflects what ultimately happens to a grant in the study section because it's a large group of people and everybody has different opinions and reviewers do not necessarily agree on everything. So this is sort of a part of a normal process. So yeah, I kind of got it together. This is not meant to be some developing story. This is just bullet points, just like what Sean was doing on a specific sort of steps in this grant application process and how to deal with reviews and how to put budgets together. Designed mostly for people who are fairly new to the whole NIH application process and mostly for the R01s, I guess, not the smaller or career development awards. So let me see here. Okay, so what happens chronologically? So long before there is a grant, there are two things that need to sort of click in. There is shaping of your science, so the proposal, and then where this proposal is going to go. And I would argue that this is not something that you decide upon when your proposal is written up because there's a lot of customizing that needs to happen depending on who you expect your audience to be. So with respect to the proposal itself, so we have the research question. It's the most important question in the world, in your view anyway, right? So you need to sell it. So you generate the preliminary data, that's where the time goes, and you start collecting some feedback, not on the proposal yet, but just on the ideas that you may have for this proposal, bounce it against some people in your department or even against your graduate students or postdocs or more senior people in the group. With respect to the targeting, so the two big questions are study section and institute. So you go online, you figure out which study section by name sort of fits, and you read a little bit about the description of the science that it covers. What you do want to do is to see who are the standing members of the study section. So what kind of expertise is actually there? In other words, you really do not want to dump all that science on the SRO who will be recruiting ad hocs to cover your grant and bring the necessary expertise. You want at least some of the expertise to be in the group. And another thing that you may want to figure out is what type of science scores well. If you look at the abstracts of proposals that have been funded and you see which study sections reviewed those proposals, it means that this is the type of science that this group of people reviews and that type of science does well in that group of reviewers. So this is where your choice is, right? The other one is the institute. And of course, all institutes have sort of, you know, I work on macrophages, so conceivably some of my work can be reviewed in AID and get funding from there. The other obvious direction is NIDDK. What you look for is the pay lines. That's where everybody starts looking at. If you are an early stage investigator, that's another point. How many sort of extra points you get in that pay line if you are an early stage investigator. Is it 10 and 12 or is it 10 and 14? So this can be a very meaningful and sort of a deciding decision, right? This is something that's not really advertised, but not every institute supports five-year awards unless. And this is something that you can find out by talking to people who had their grants funded by specific institutes. This information is out there as long as you actively seek this information, and you will find out that at that institute, unless you have A, B, and human studies, and whatever, only gives you four years. This is something that you want to know. And same goes for modular versus non-modular badges. There are certain institutes that will, modular, no matter what you write, okay? This is something that you want to know. If this is an R21, you absolutely need to figure out because not every institute officially supports the R21 mechanism these days, okay? So there is this common misconception that there is a connection between the study section and the institute. Actually, there isn't any. You can find the study section where you think your application fits and the institute where you think your science fits. And nothing prevents you really from asking for what seems to be a really weird assignment. And I actually was in that situation a number of years ago. I was shopping around, and then I kind of thought that I had the right combination, but it seemed really odd to me. And I spoke with SRO, and I spoke with a program officer, and they're both, this is fine. Nothing prevents you from doing it, right? So if it works for you, you should absolutely do it as long as it's properly justified. On the other hand, there is definitely a connection between the science that you're doing and where it's going to be reviewed and funded. And that's why I'm sort of stressing this point. You need to think who your audience is going to be. Even if your experiments are similar, you're selling it to a different group of people, and you need to be sort of paying attention while you're working on the grant where you want to send it. Okay, so writing the proposal. So Sean spoke already about getting feedback from friends and family and colleagues. So yes, you need more than proofreading for sure. And even if you find a fantastic group of people who are very open-minded and can ask real questions, if you tell them that you need the grant back in three days, you're gonna get proofreading, right? And then you just give it to your graduate students. They will do just as great a job. So you do need to give those folks enough time so you have enough time to sort of think it over and rework it accordingly. I would also argue, however, that you probably remain the most qualified person to judge the science that you're proposing, right? Because nobody is doing exactly what you're doing, otherwise you wouldn't be proposing it. So that means that when you get that feedback, I would not start panicking and reworking the time proposal in that one week. That's only gonna hurt you. I think what I'm looking for personally in the feedback is where did everybody had a problem, right? Multiple people stumbled. That suggests that that particular aim or experiment really didn't fly. So irrespective of what the background of the person was, this thing just didn't go well. Okay, so find those and iron them out. If one reader tells you that this section has too much detail and the other one that it's not enough detail, you know, these two don't cancel each other out. It means that this part sucked, right? You need to rework it. And probably it was just wrong packaging or perhaps you need to give it another thought. But, you know, the critique of the same section of the proposal by multiple people usually indicates that wasn't well thought through. So in terms of proposal organization, just, you know, a few, it could be, you know, pages written about this, but a few bullet points. So specific aims page, yes, it is the most important part of the application because it's probably gonna be read by most people on the panel. I think the important thing to remember is that every goal should kind of focus more on why you are proposing and a little bit of how as opposed to what exactly is going to be done. Do not cram experimental detail into your specific aims unless it is a technology grant and technology is a selling point, then obviously the goal is sort of different. Let's see, balance of aims. Yes, so what Sean said is absolutely right. I'd say we usually look for some sort of balance between aims. They have to have roughly similar weight in terms of the ideas, in terms of, you know, writing that goes into it. It doesn't matter whether it is two aims with three sub aims or three aims with two sub aims each. That actually, I don't think that makes a difference. Okay, please make sure, this is like from reviewer point of view, please make sure that aims and specific aims and the research strategy are actually identical because I do see grants when people go through this editing process and then suddenly there's a disconnect. One thing is in the proposal, a specific aims page says something completely different. You're like, oh my God. Okay, so there has been some discussion about published data and maybe Lata can correct me, but so if it is published, it can still be in your preliminary data as long as it is clearly indicated that the data was actually published and the citation provided, okay? Because some reviewers are unhappy if something is in preliminary data, but it's no longer preliminary, it's been reviewed and published. Okay, now by archives is officially preliminary. Let's see. Writing the proposal. Yes, please be nice to the reviewers and by that I mean try to make reviewers' job easier. It's in the best interest of you, right? So use all the tools available to you to achieve that perfect clarity, right? So colors, fonts, diagrams, anything to sort of simplify the job of the reviewer. I think it's safer to assume that your reviewers are outsiders. You want to reemphasize the critical points in more than one section because say I read your preliminary data the day before yesterday, I'm coming back now to really start reading the experimental design and I don't remember necessarily all the background and all the connection. So repetition, what Sean said is exactly right. You want to put like a sentence, opening sentence stating why you're doing what you're doing. And again, there is such a thing as too much data or detail and it will hurt you. So like think about the people at the receiving end, right? If we're going through seven pages, packed, dense pages of preliminary data, we are going to be asking ourselves how much of this I actually should remember by the time the experimental design starts. Do I need to really understand every little panel and memorize it in order for me to understand the experimental design? And if something is more peripheral to your project, I'd say don't include it unless it is, you know, feasibility is important but not every successful experiment that you've done in the past three years needs to be in the preliminary data of your application. And so, you know, the obvious things, do not shrink fonts. Like some people still print applications out. If on a printed page, this font is too small, it is too small. Don't count on us sitting there zooming onto the PDFs, okay? So let's see. These were all kind of, you know, common sense things. So outcomes. Okay, there are three. Funded, great, congratulations. Discussed but didn't quite make the payline and not discussed. So this is a common outcome. It's a good one. So reading the summary statement and the critique, um, what things I personally pay attention to? Is there a or two major issues that reviewers had a problem with but otherwise like the proposal, right? Then you kind of know what you need to polish. Would you be able to address concerns with more preliminary data? In other words, are there questions with feasibility or premise? Then again, it's hopefully an easy one to address. For all I know, you already have this data by the time you receive the scores. Okay, this one is painful. Do we need to remove an aim? We're all married to our aims. They're all so important. But if multiple people had a problem with an aim, you know, think it over. So I would say that the word incremental and lots of smallish criticisms is not an enthusiastic, it's cosmetic changes will not help you, right? So this is usually not a good sign. Intro into revised application. One page, right? This is not a lot of space. So do not spend a third of that page reciting all the good things that reviewers have to say about your application. Don't waste the time and the space. Try to be concise and specific. Address comments to summary statement first. Another thing, again, if multiple reviewers brought up the same thing, you can combine whatever you want to say to address the critique and it saves space. That's great. It's good to indicate how changes are marked in your revised application, whether it is you use a blue font as opposed to black one or whether you have a vertical line on the margin. I'd also say if you are adding something totally new, which was not specifically requested by the reviewers, but you feel it really strengthens the application, mention it. It doesn't hurt. It's a good idea. Okay, yeah, yeah, there's that. So everybody, well, we'll all hope for better outcomes, but then there is, you know, half of the grants are in the non-discussed category, right? So what do you do? So my personal opinion, do a new application. And I know that many of my colleagues may disagree, but I would say a new application is a better way to go. So why do I say that? So there is no summary statement to highlight the major highs and lows of the proposal. Another thing is your proposal was not discussed in a group and that means that your reviewers did not get a second chance to think it over, perhaps modify their critique, iron out their reviews. So you kind of don't, the feedback is not as great. It's really less of it altogether, right? The advantage of putting a new application together is you don't have to address points that you think were completely off the wall, right? Because nobody will see that. You still get useful tips on which parts of the application were problematic. And then your new reviewers will not see all the terrible comments that you've seen. And you know, we're all human. We are affected by the opinions of the previous round of our reviewers. So that's my take on it. So yes, and I was asked to talk a little bit about the budget. So this is for R1s only, obviously because R21s, the budget is fixed. So modular versus non-modular. So as I said, you do want to figure out whether your institute actually does fund non-modular grants. If it does, yes, it is absolutely worth spending a little bit more time and effort to put this non-modular budget together. How much do you ask for? Well, do not ask for 499K a year, especially if you're a junior API, regardless of whatever justifications you may have. I'd say it's very much study section dependent. What we see, I think most grants average in 300 something a year, somewhere in there. And remember, study section does not score budgets. It only makes a recommendation, such as recommend as requested, or reduced by 20K a year, or reduced by a single FTE. You know, the rest is up to the institute, and they're gonna be making all your funding decisions, anyway. Study sections look, well, not very carefully, but the general balance between personnel versus supplies, reagents, core costs. I'd say putting 75% of your budget into personnel costs does look a little bit odd. More on the personnel costs. This is something that Sean just brought up. So a usually high percent effort for the API may raise questions about your institutional support, about your environment, and that parameter is scored by the study section. So it could be a little bit of a flag. You know, everyone realizes it takes more than one or two people, you know, a technician or a postdoc to run a project. However, do not try to put four postdocs on a project. It's just not going to fly. In the end of the day, I think the budget is greatly affected by your institution, and it is between you and your institution, but it's also not set in stone. Like, once you get the money, there is an opportunity to rebudget things as long as your institution is okay with this within certain limits, right? So that's all I wanted to say, and I will be happy to answer any questions you may have, as always. All right. Hi, everyone. So I just have a couple of caveats before I begin. And the first is that my lab is young, so I clearly don't have as many years of grant writing as the other panelists. And the other caveat is I don't have an R01. So the way that I approached this today was to give advice from the perspective of a person writing the grant and just the things that I think that the steps that I believe that I took that helped me successfully get funding for my lab and just the pieces of advice that I found most useful for myself, which I think a lot of it lines up with what has been said previously. So I'll try not to be repetitive, but it's interesting how so many of the advice, a lot of the advice is the same. So I think that's important. So I'm talking broadly, but this is specifically how I went about applying for the DP2, which is the NIH New Innovator Award. So I reached out to previous awardees, and I reached out to a faculty member that I knew from my former institution who used to run the review panel. And obviously, she would have been a conflict of interest for the panel. And I talked to these people about the award and just got advice. And it's one of those things where it's not clear how that would be useful. But for me, what was useful about it was that it helped me, just that aspect of brainstorming helped me to really form my idea. So this is what either Sean or Ines said, which is talk, share your ideas right before your proposal. It's like get feedback on the ideas. And I think that shift in my idea was critical. And so I think the one thing that I do want to emphasize is that everyone here is really smart. That's why we're here. But we all have these blind spots, and we all can be made better. And so talking to people about our ideas is what makes it better. We're not going to be able to make it better on our own. We need other people to help with that. And so as far as timelines, I was looking at my timeline. It was really interesting. I started writing in March. Grant was due in August. And I actually started sending out drafts a month before, which is consistent with other advice that we've received today, right? So it's get the draft done a month early if you can and send it out. And I will say that my draft changed a lot between beginning and end. So again, I think the advice is all pretty consistent. Get a lot of people to read it. I'll talk a little bit more about who read mine on the next slide. But reading, again, just led to lots of changes in writing style and organization. And I wrote thick skin because even till today, whenever anyone sends me feedback on my grants, I have a sensation in my stomach that just like, I do not like to receive this feedback, right? Because I just don't enjoy it. But it's an important part. And I think everyone's different. Some of you might like it, I don't know. It's an important part of the process. And so you have to figure out how to get your skin thicker, right? If you're, cause you have to, that feedback is the way that you're going to, it's going to get better. And I know it's hard to see that figure, but I was kind of putting like, this is my first draft and this is my final draft, right? And you can see things like color, right? And these are things that have come up and it's like figures have changed because people told me, I don't understand what your figure is supposed to be telling me, right? And so I fixed that. And so it's all these different aspects. It's the way that it opened, the way that I laid out my points, my plan, everything, right, there was a lot of updates. And then for things that are specific to DP2, there's just a lot of specific considerations like a collaborators and your grant, your idea has to be high risk, high reward. You have to talk about your qualifications cause there's not, no one's allowed to write you a letter about this grant. So those are just very specific points that I can talk more about later if anyone has further interest. But thinking about how I developed my idea, I started out by thinking, what do I know how to do? Because there has to be some credibility, right? This is the thing that I'm an expert at. Then I thought about what's interesting now, like what would a reviewer say and say, okay, well, there's a lot of buzz about this, so it's cool that they're working on this. And then I thought about what's a basic question that I want to achieve because it had to be something that I was actually interested in doing. Then I thought about what is an ambitious goal that I have, which for me, it's to achieve drug design, right? That's kind of my long-term goal for my research. And so this is how I started. But then I passed these ideas to people who had won the award before, and they told me this is, they said, you need to go further. Like this is, like you need more kind of, more risk, more reward. And so just again, with brainstorming with these people who had gotten the award before, it went from, my idea went from, oh, I'm going to design this application. It's machine learning-based to design drugs to, I'm going to design a drug to treat this very specific disease, right? And I'm going to test it in mouse models. I've never worked with mouse models, so this is not an expertise that I have. But then, so which is why it's very risky, right? But I'm at an institution where there are people all around me who can do this. So there's this kind of balance of like, what can I do, but what, the things that I don't know how to do, that would be risky, but that would, I'd be able to emphasize that in the grant, that this is why this is risky. Because if I knew how to do everything, it would not be risky, it would just be a grant. And who are the people that read my proposal? I had a few, so there's something like 10 people that I sent it to, and this includes former recipients of the award, people that were machine learning experts, because I am not a machine learning expert, but I was proposing to do it. I have a friend who is also a junior PI like I am, but she's read my grants over the years since we were postdocs, and she's kind of my editor, but also able to get me out of field, like this doesn't make sense to someone who's out of your field reading it. Senior people who had a lot of experience with grants. A mentor, institutional mentor in my field, completely out of my field, I mean, but just someone in my department. And then former lab mate who was really the only person who was an expert on the topic that I was proposing. And so these people I basically assembled by people that I've met at any point that I've said, if you have anything to read, what you want me to read, let me know, and I write those people's names down because I email everyone, and I send everyone who's ever offered, I take a note of, and I go back and I do this with them. And I would encourage everyone here to come up with a list of people that will read your grants because you need this list. And so this is a very long slide, I don't expect everyone to read it, but what I wanted to highlight here was that this is just so much, all the different things that changed, or how this feedback improved the proposal. And so you can kind of go through and see, you can see like jargon, I had a lot of jargon, like someone I wrote in my grant, this is mouse work, someone was like, what does a biophysical mechanism mean? Right, like I would write these words that I'm used to using, but other people don't understand. People talked about the physical appearance, they wanted things to look different, or the way I was placing things, they're like, this is distracting, right, the opening of the proposal changed. Someone told me about this hourglass metaphor, and he said, start big, and then you should go show your narrow details, right, and then come back in the end big, which is what someone said earlier, I think Sean said that. And then so just someone, some people said, some people, the person that was in my field would say, I don't know if this is true, you should either put a reference or check it, right, so even for accuracy of details. And I think that Inez made a great point, ultimately you are the expert, so you know if a correction should be made or not, right, but people pointing these out are just ideas, indications that reviewers might have these same issues. And my, I've only done study section a couple times, but anything that makes your grant easier to read is always better for you. And so that was the end of that, and then I had a few thoughts about NSF, because I do have NSF funding also, and I guess my big thing is that you would know if your research is eligible for NSF funding, but then again you might not, so it's always reach out to a program officer and check, and that this is what I did, and this is what everyone else I know does, so this is just the thing that is done. Be aware of the differences, if you're going to other institutes, not only NSF, but if you're going anywhere else, so private institutes, be aware of the differences, and just kind of do your research, which everyone here is an expert at doing research. One thing that NSF places a lot of value on that none of the other institutions, institutes do, or organizations do is an outreach or education plan, or maybe not as much emphasis, I should say, and that's, this is a big thing with NSF, so if you're going to apply for NSF funding, you have to be able to propose some kind of outreach or education-focused proposal, and that just is with every NSF grant, which could, depending on where you go, where the grant goes, could sink or sink your application, so it's just things to be aware of, and my final word of advice is just always get examples. I think for my applications, I look at at least five examples for everything, and some up to 10, and examples just help you know what the range is, how everyone does it differently, and then you can kind of have the freedom to craft it the way you want to craft it, but if you don't have examples, you don't know what you're. Thank you. So, I think, let me just, it said somewhere that I had no disclosures, but I do have. I apologize, it's not in these slides. I am a consultant for, I believe, like three or four pharmaceutical companies involved in manufacturing drugs for treatment of hypothyroidism, so that has nothing to do with the presentation today, but I want to make a disclosure. So, the advice that you guys received today from these previous speakers was excellent. I thought this is like going to a restaurant and you're going to have the same dish made, prepared by different cooks. We think differently. Reviewers not always agree with each other. There are distinctions. For example, I try to minimize repetition. I appreciate the fact that you want to bring home certain points, but one thing that annoys me a little bit, you know, at the end of the day, we have to read a lot of grants, and if the person starts repeating and repeating something that I already read, they say, well, this is a waste of my time, because I already know this, because I read it in the three pages before this page. So, if you want to bring home a certain point, I think you should maybe say it differently, use a different format, don't make it so obvious. I saw applications that sentences were copied and pasted from here to there, and that's really annoying. The other thing I was thinking, if you're writing about something controversial, it's always a good idea to look at the roster of the study section to see who's there, and if there's a chance, there's some likelihood that a certain person is going to review your grant based on the affinity of the work that they do, you should quote their work, or at least acknowledge that other individuals in the area exist, because that's respectful. I think we should be respectful and humble when we write grants. The reviewers are human beings, and some of us get annoyed very easily just for things that are completely unnecessary, and I think that we want to be very academic when we write, and inclusive, and acknowledge that different opinions exist in a controversial field. So I was asked to talk about translational grant applications, with at the end of the day, what is translational application? I asked AI, so the two first points were generated by artificial intelligence. That's what translational medicine means, or translational grant applications. There's a component of basic research, and a component of improving people's health. In a way, you always want to portray your research as what is the ultimate goal of your research. You don't have to have that. You're not going to be deemed by not having a health-related research. You can do just basic research, but it's always nice to show a story, right? I'm doing this because I think eventually this could lead to that, and that is going to resolve a health problem. That would be the essence of translational research. Now, when you explain all these things, you have to be very simple. Very, maybe simple is not the right word, but very, you have to write in a way that people will understand, because not everyone in the study section will be completely knowing 100% of your field, right? You might have someone, but you might not have someone like that. So when I'm doing this, I'm always thinking, while I'm telling this story, what if I were telling this story to my patient? Would the patient understand what I'm writing? I think that that's, I know that I want to be very respectful to the study section members. It doesn't mean they're very successful and intelligent people, but when you tell a story in a few words, it has to be in a simple way, very straightforward way, and when you're telling to a patient what the patient has and why you're doing this, that's exactly the same story you're using with a grant. So I think that that's an important thing. So the other points are basically similar to this. Talking about rare diseases is okay. You don't have to work on diabetes or hypothyroidism that affect tens of millions of individuals in this country. I mean, you can talk about very rare disease. At the end of the day, what matters is the science, the quality of the science, and if there is a possibility that this is going to impact somebody's health, that's a good thing to do. The other things are, you know, sort of obvious. You want to be updated, up-to-date with your knowledge. You want to identify gaps that exist. Okay, why are you doing this? I'm doing this because right now we don't know how to do this. That's a problem, and with my application, I'm going to try to resolve this problem. So you really need to be logical. Try to imagine in your mind, I'm telling this story to a friend or to a colleague. Will that person understand and think that this is relevant? I think these are my points on this slide. Now, translational research is sort of a little bit challenging because it involves different degrees of basic science and eventually some clinical application. So if you're a basic scientist and you don't feel very comfortable talking about clinical applications of something or describing a disease, you need to build a team. You need to have someone in your team that will feel comfortable with that. And the same thing, you don't want to have a physician proposing a strong basic science component that that person starts with, I'm going to do RNA-seq, chip-seq, and I'm going to do all this. And a reviewer realizes immediately that that person is proposing things that are far beyond their reach. So you want to have a team of people, and you would explain the basics. There's good integration and good knowledge. And if you have a gap, it's perfectly fine to have a gap in knowledge. You don't have to know everything, but you need to have someone in your team that knows that. And I think when you create the budget justification, that's the perfect place to explain why you have that person in your grant. So that's the gap that that person is going to provide when I'm preparing the grant. So I think that that's critical. That's a common pitfall that I see in applications when someone is way out of their league and without having a strong team component. Now, your application will have preliminary data, and sometimes you come up with great ideas but what are the chances that this will one day translate into reality for a patient, for health, for human beings? Ideally, you want to have your preliminary data to support that, right? So this is translatable because look at my data, look at figure four. So I think that's the kind of piece of key element that's important to have in preliminary data to show that this eventually will lead. And the more supportive data you have, the more convincing you're going to be. Now, it is important to show that you understand that when you're dealing with cell models or animal models and aiming something for humans, there's all consistency, right? So I have seen applications in which they say, oh, I'm going to study cortisol in rats because this is important for humans. Rats don't have cortisol. So the main glucocorticoid in rats is corticosterone. So that's a failure right there. So although we might not think about it, so when you're writing, you want to make sure that the experimental model you are proposing really translates what's happening in the human being and vice versa. I think this is really important. Make sure that, and that's why the team is important. If you're proposing animal models, you're more of a clinical guy. Make sure you have someone in your team that understands about animal models. I think this is just to talk a few words about clinical trials. We don't see a lot of clinical trials in our study section, at least. I think I only review very few clinical trials. I'm not going to give you specific numbers, Latha, don't worry about it. So, but I think the clinical trial, what I think is really important is have a statistical component. Really, really important. Because these days with primary outcomes and secondary outcomes and power analysis, this is extremely, it used to be that this was not that important. Today, you cannot have a clinical trial proposal without a very strong statistical analysis with power analysis. So, rarely a PI will have the ability to do that. So, usually what I see most of the time is a biostatistician working in the grant together and preparing a very detailed justification of the number of individuals, the variability that you're expecting on the primary outcomes, and why you, the rationale for why you're doing crossover versus parallel. This is really a science in its own. And if you're not, if you haven't been a PI on a clinical trial before, you really need to have someone in your grant that has that expertise. Because it's unlikely you're going to be successful without having someone that has been successful in the past. This is really important. It's a different world, evolved very fast, and I think it's important to have someone in your team that knows about that. I think it's important to know that you don't need to have an IRB when you submit a grant of a clinical trial. You can submit it, but when you get the money, you will have to have, if you get approved, you will need to have an IRB. So don't worry so much about the IRB before you submit the grant, write the grant, and then you can submit the IRB. And again, I think the key element is to have a good team that addresses all the components in the translational grants. Other than that, I think what my colleagues mentioned is very, very good, and I would just minimize in order not to be repetitive. Thank you. Okay, so we have about 20 minutes left. And we can open the floor up for questions if you have them. Yes? Okay, so the question is, should you have your mentor on your first grant, more or less? What are the thoughts? I think it depends a little bit on for how long you have had your independent lab. Are you still collaborating with your mentor or your former mentor? For how long? Oh, you're a postdoc right now. You know, there are two takes on this, and I think people go to sort of opposite directions. I personally made an effort to separate my operation and my lab early on from the work I was doing with my former PI, because if this is something in that field, then my former PI can do it probably better than me as a junior PI, right? So why am I proposing something that's so closely related to what I have been doing as a postdoc? But that depends on the project and how kind of separate it is from what you're doing now as a postdoc. So I think this varies a lot, and you probably will find different advice from different people. I started out in this, like, independence as far as possible. Well, you know, within limits, right? I'm in the same, roughly, I'm in the same field. I have expertise in doing that. But this is a separate lab. It asks separate questions. I'll add to that. And unfortunately, the answer is it depends, okay? Just one of the most vague things that you could say. But I think one piece of advice I give to people in my institution when they're thinking about moving from a postdoc and thinking about the next sort of grant application is to ask what the next position is, okay? So at Baylor, the next position from a postdoc, the next step up is a scholar and instructor. And it's an entry-level faculty position. Almost every institution has a similar support network for moving people up the ladder. And that change in status assigns you a faculty position, which puts you in the game to write, you know, an R01 application, right? So some of those commitments help you sort of convince reviewers that the institution is committed to you. And then the other thing I'll add is in my first grant, I did have my mentor on the award for a small percentage. But we had different expertise. So I was proposing something that was in adipose tissue. And my mentor was more well-known in liver biology. But I needed somebody to help me sort out, like, fatty liver disease, right? So I had him on there for a small percentage effort to help me sort of close those expertise gaps. So it depends. That's the best answer. Yes? So, the question is, how much time needs to burn off between your independent program and your mentors? I'll ask. I'll start with my opinion only. It depends. But, what I want to say, I think, when I think about that, those are great questions. Those are questions, as someone in my group just got his first R01, and we have, you know, he proposed a different scientific area, so that particular question that you're raising never came up between the two of us. It just kind of made sense that he was going to take off in this area and write a grant. So I think those are kind of existential problems that I wouldn't worry about too much. Because if the expertise is similar between you and your mentor, then there's no reason, there's no justification for both of you being the grant. I think now, I mean, I just came up, based on what you said, I think it makes perfect sense. Now, David was your mentor, right? So if one is focused on the liver, the other one in adipose tissue, I think that's something you need to think. It needs to be something different. Because otherwise, if it's just duplication, it wouldn't make any sense. I think that's a good point. I'll also say, I feel like when I'm on the study section, the panel, every application that we receive, people view them as independent people. It's up to you to assemble an application that has a convincing message. Whenever I talk to people about writing grant awards and stuff, or applications and stuff, I said, you just have to put together your best science and forget about all the other stuff, for the most part. Yes? Okay, so her question is regarding publications, right? If you are an early career scientist, obviously your previous publications had your mentor as a co-author, right? You don't need to have, I mean, it's great if you do, but I don't think there is a requirement for you to publish something without your mentor first time when you submit your R01. This is no need for that. So bringing new people, yeah, so it is an advantage of, yeah, I see what you mean. This is true. It's a little bit circular in a way, right, because at some point, it means that you need to kind of have published with them already by the time you apply, you have them on your grant, right, to kind of demonstrate that this collaboration is real and sort of exists, right? Yeah, I don't, there is no good advice. I mean, it's sort of, you know, if you are collaborating with these folks, it's helpful to have something already in press by the time you're putting in an application that demonstrates that you guys are, in fact, working together. It's beneficial. It's not a rule, but it's a plus to have that. Yeah, yeah, it's like some evidence that you didn't just, you know, email somebody in whatever institution, even if it is a building across the street, and they will, you know, provide a letter of support, especially if it is a, letter of support is different, right? It doesn't have to be a really on collaboration. Somebody could be just providing valuable systems or reagents or says that, you know, your postdocs can come over to my lab and do such and such experiments, and the letter specifies that. That's okay. If you're bringing somebody in as a real percent effort collaborator, it is helpful to show some evidence of that collaboration already in place, whether it's publication or unpublished data, it's just helpful, yeah. So I just want to add, with respect to review, for early stage investigators, your grants or RO1s are reviewed separately from those PIs who are more established, and so what we advise reviewers are to not consider, not have the same expectation for published data, for publications, or preliminary work. So as a new investigator, you're starting a new lab, you will not be expected to have the same amount of publications or preliminary work compared to those who have been doing this for years, right? However, that said, having some preliminary work and some supportive, you know, documentation from collaborators is always a good thing, but again, we try to distinguish that so you're not held to the same standards as, you know, established PIs, if that's helpful. Okay. Thank you. Yes. I'm suggesting if it is not discussed, right, then my advice, I mean, wait for the critique, right? See what it says, regardless. You need to see the critique before you make this decision. But once you do have the critique and, you know, there are a lot of negative stuff in there, I think it's better if you take it into consideration and just put a new application together. But this is if it was not discussed, because you still get the reviews that, you know, the reviewers submitted. It just didn't make it to the panel discussion. If it was discussed and you have a score that just didn't quite make it into the, you know, funding range, then absolutely resubmit, address the critique, put it all into your one-page review. His follow-up question is related to reviewer perceptions of resubmitted grants. So I think in short, if you make genuine efforts to address the concerns, it makes sense, then I think people will appreciate your efforts. As I said, the NIH hasn't replaced peer review with artificial intelligence yet, so many people are human and can appreciate people's efforts. If you went out and did the key experiment that people wanted, made the key animal model that they requested, then you should be fine. I think one takeaway message is when you interact with your colleagues at your home institution stuff, there's a lot of complaining about, this grant got triaged, the reviewers don't know anything, those types of messages, right? But the reality is I've come to really respect colleagues on study sections. People actually read grants, they do a dedicated job to try to understand what you're saying. No one's just in there to discard ideas. And everyone, in my opinion, is doing their best to really help the NIH identify which are the best projects to award. Is that? So one of the challenges of engaging funding is that it takes a lot of time. So that's the F word, right? Which we should try to avoid discussing. So generally, we don't discuss the F word. I can only tell you, he asked if you revise your grant, what are the chances of funding? That's a long time. You can find the creation date. It will very much depend on the institute and the institute's overall success rates. It starts early. How do you revise it? Have you got grants for all the issues? Oh, yeah. My watch went dead, so I don't know what time it is. Oh, okay. So this session ended at three, so I guess we'll close out. Thanks, everybody, for being here today, and thanks again to the panel for this important service to the society. Thank you.

grant writing

panel discussion

advice

research topic

mentor

research team

proposal

reviewer feedback

clear writing

preliminary data

translational research

grant funding