When I finally successfully defended
my Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, one of the members of my committee wanted
to meet with me separately after it was over.
When I met with him, he gave me some “advice” that has been seared into
my brain ever since. He said: “your
writing is so bad that you’ll never get any papers published and you’ll never
get any grants funded.” A truly optimistic
way to start a career in research!
Well, he was right in one sense: my
writing was terrible. But that was over
25 years ago, and since then I have managed to get many papers published and get
many grants funded. I don’t have any
teaching duties, so I and my staff are essentially fully supported by the
grants I write. My funding is mostly
from National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Veterans Affairs
(VA), but I’ve also had funding from the Department of Defense (DoD), the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA), and a variety of different private foundations. These
days it is very hard to maintain continuity in a research program. The funding rates at NIH are typically around
10-15%, meaning that only one in ten grants is funded in any one cycle. And you’re competing with a lot of really
smart and creative people trying to solve equally valuable problems. So I thought I would write some of my
thoughts about the process of grant writing and give you my personal tips on how
to write successful grants. Hopefully it
will be of some help to any of you who are trying to make a career in research.
Most
of my thoughts are specifically related to medical research grants submitted to
federal agencies where there is a scientific peer-review process, such NIH, VA,
FDA, and DoD. I personally haven't had funding
from the National Science Foundation, but I presume the process would be fairly
similar there as well. Also, my area of
research is implantable medical devices and rehabilitation, so that will
totally color my comments. For example,
if you are doing basic cell research in a neuroscience field, my comments may
not all be relevant or even correct. In
my experience, the different disciplines even within NIH have different “personalities”
with respect to the types of projects they like to fund. But, with that background in mind, here are
some suggestions.
Let’s start off by trying to put into
perspective the difficulty that researchers face in getting funding. I tell people that getting a grant funded is
like bowling a perfect score. Bowling a perfect score is very hard to do – 13
strikes in a row – yet there are lots of bowlers who bowl a perfect score. How do they do it? Well, I would say there are two things that
you need in order to bowl a perfect score: one
is you have to be a very good bowler (obviously), and the second thing is that you have to bowl a lot. Even the best professional bowlers don't bowl
a perfect score every time - it's still a rare event.
The analogy with respect to grant
writing is this: you have to be a good
researcher, and you have to submit a lot of high quality proposals. By that I mean that you have to have good
ideas, you have to do good research, you have to work as hard as you can to
improve your skills and knowledge, and you have to be good at presenting your
proposed work in written form. But in
this day and age you also have to
write a lot of high quality grants. This is,
of course, hard to do because it takes time to write even one good, high
quality grant. Efficiency is therefore
important – you have to keep evaluating what you are spending your time on. I often ask myself as I’m working on a grant:
“will spending more time on this
particular aspect of the proposal improve the grant’s chances of getting
funded?” If not, then don’t spend too
much time on it!
Given
the difficulties in getting funding, you have to accept that sometimes you will
have an excellent idea and write an excellent grant, and it just won’t get a
good enough score to be funded. The
process takes a lot of perseverance. There will be ups and downs. Because of that, I highly recommend being
part of a larger collaborative group of investigators. Collaborative research itself is an important
issue that may be a topic for future discussion, but from the standpoint of
grant support, it almost seems necessary. It's extremely difficult for a single isolated
investigator to maintain continual grant funding. By having a collaborative group, it is
possible to “ride out” some lean times.
I’m
not going to talk here about the importance of your scientific ideas. Obviously you have to have good ideas. You have to conduct research on issues of
importance. You’ll have to listen to
your colleagues and reviewers; and sometimes you’re going to have to face the
hard truth: you need to change your
focus. That can be very difficult. About fifteen years ago I spent three or four
years trying to get funding for an idea I had that involved restoring function
in cases of peripheral nerve damage.
After a number of attempts I had to face the reality that it just wasn’t
going to happen. I still think it was a good idea, but I just was not going to get it
funded, so I had to leave it behind.
You’re
going to have to hone your writing skills.
Grants are written documents and, for the most part, science is
conducted through the written word (grants, journal articles, books,
etc.). Grants themselves are never
scored explicitly on grammar and clarity, but it absolutely plays a role in
whether a grant gets funded or not. For
most of us in the hard sciences and engineering world, our college education
didn’t include a lot of specific training in good writing skills. Kind of odd, really. However, there are certainly ways to improve
your writing skills. Early in my career,
I read a couple of books on scientific writing that helped. There are classes that you can take that help
as well. But I would say that the thing
that helped me the most, by far, was reading
and reviewing other people’s grants.
I found it especially instructive to read poorly written grants and
papers and try to figure out what made them poor and how they could be
improved. It’s hard work. You should also keep asking yourself “do I
make the same mistakes in my own writing?” If you are a young investigator, take
advantage of opportunities to help review grants for others. Do internal reviews of papers and
grants. Write out your comments and try
to figure out what could be done to improve a grant to make it fundable. This kind of review and introspection will
help you immensely.
The other major thing is that you
absolutely have to understand the audience you are writing for. If possible, find out the backgrounds of the
type of people who are likely to be reviewing your grants. If you are submitting to NIH, the general
make-up of any review panel (Study Section) is publically available [here]. You should go through every name on the study
section roster and see what department they are in and, if possible, find out
what their area of study is. Is the
Study Section mostly composed of a group of basic neuroscientists? M.D.s?
Engineers? You need to know this
because every sentence of your proposal
needs to be written with that group of reviewers in mind. I really mean every sentence – from the opening lines of the Specific Aims to the
grant conclusion. If I’m writing a grant
that will be reviewed by a group of clinicians, then my whole grant is going to
be couched around the disease state and clinical application that I am
pursuing. If I’m writing to engineers,
then I need to catch their attention at the beginning with the innovation of my
approach and I will certainly need to include more technical details.
As important as knowing the make-up of
the Study Section, this next issue is even more important: you have to understand and appreciate the
general mental state of the individual who will be reviewing your grant. By that I mean that you need to understand
the personal conditions under which your grant is going to get reviewed. Reviewers are generally successful
researchers, which means they are busy people who have to write their own
grants. They participate in Study
Sections because it is good scientific community citizenship. They want to do a good job reading your
grant, but when can they fit it in to their day? Reading your grant will get pushed off until
the late evening. And it will get pushed
off until close to the due date for the review.
It’s just human nature.
Ultimately they will not have quite as much time as they had hoped to
read your grant in detail, but they will put time into it. This puts a premium on the clarity of your
writing. Use of clear figures is
mandatory. Write your grant so that it
can be read for someone who is tired and bleary-eyed and still has three more
grants to read after they finish yours!
Also,
in most cases, the topic of the grant will not
be directly in the reviewer’s area of research.
In fact, your grant may cover some areas of scientific exploration that
the reviewer is pretty fuzzy on. Not that
they don’t understand the basic science, but they surely have not been reading
the same literature you have been reading.
For example, my research is in electrical stimulation for restoration of
motor function, primarily in spinal cord injury. It would be quite possible that, for example,
I would be asked to review a grant on something like diagnostic ultrasonic
imaging. I know the basic principle of
ultrasonic imaging, and I “know of” people who use it, but that’s about
it. I certainly haven’t read a paper
about the advancements in that field in the past 25 years. The odds are high that there are things in
that grant that I really will not understand very well. However, if the grant includes a brief “tutorial”
on ultrasonic imaging and a clear introductory figure, that will help significantly
in understanding the proposal. In my
opinion, it is worth the space, even though space is at a high premium in a
grant.
Along the same lines, I always encourage
people to try to minimize the use of acronyms.
It is extremely difficult to read a grant if you have to keep going back
to the front of the grant to find out what each acronym stands for. I have a personal rule that I try to
introduce no more than three new acronyms in any grant. This means, again, that you have to know the
background of your reviewers. Will they
all know what CNS stands for? (yes) MRI?
(yes) EMG? (highly likely) FES? (maybe)
NNP? (definitely not) So, I try to
use, at most, three acronyms that the reviewers are unlikely to know. That means that I have to spell out a lot of
other terms where an acronym would take up less space. But it’s worth it. Also, if it has been a few pages since I’ve
used a particular acronym, I’ll spell it out again to remind them. You wouldn’t be allowed to do that according
to the rules of writing for a journal article, but a grant is not a journal article.
Your goal is to make it as easy to read as possible for the
reviewers.
I’ll stop here for now. There is no advice that can guarantee that
you’ll get a grant funded – it just doesn’t work that way. But if you keep working at the craft of
grant-writing, you will greatly improve your chances of getting one funded.
