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Saturday, March 25, 2017

Writing Grants for Federal Research Funding – Some Tips!

          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.

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