By Meredith W. Salisbury
They’re on your mind practically all the time. You’ve probably spent whole nights in the lab working on them while drinking more coffee than any human safely should. You know what we’re talking about: those elusive, but so essential, government grants.
Now that NIH institutes aren’t enjoying the double-digit-percentage budget increases that they have for the past several years, experts warn that competition for grant dollars may grow even more fierce. Knowing the right people and how to write the best grant will be more important than ever.
With that in mind, Genome Technology brings you its first grants guide. In the next several pages, you’ll meet 10 grants bigwigs from various government agencies, and hear what these experts have to say about improving your grant applications. And on p. 31, you’ll find a convenient, clip-out reference guide listing top dos and don’ts.
Become co-dependent
The first step, most government experts concur, is to contact the program director in charge of your proposal area. If you’re responding to a request for applications, a name should be provided; if you’re submitting an investigator-initiated grant, each institute’s website lists program directors and the main categories they’re in charge of.
“I feel like my job is really like being a social worker for scientists,” says Doug Sheeley, health sciences administrator and program director at NCRR. Like most program directors, he’s responsible for guiding scientists as they plan grants and then keeping an eye on their applications as they go through review and possibly funding channels.
Bettie Graham, associate director for the division of extramural research at NHGRI, recommends e-mailing the program director ahead of time with a few paragraphs describing the gist of your research idea. “That really helps the program director give much better guidance” when you follow it up with a phone call, she says.
Once an application is submitted, the program officer is your go-to person for questions about your score, reviewers’ comments (program staffers usually attend review sessions and may be able to shed some light on a critique), and any funding issues.
Do your homework
If you’re responding to a call for proposals, take some time to read the announcement carefully. Marvin Frazier, director of the life sciences division in the Office of Science at DOE, says it’s not uncommon that “people don’t read the calls for proposals well … They write the grant they want to write instead of trying to address the issues in the proposal.” Grants that don’t meet the guidelines may be culled out during the initial triage phase and returned unscored — which means the applicant has to wait another whole deadline period before reapplying.
Next, do some due diligence. Use NIH’s CRISP database to look up which projects have been funded by the agency you’re interested in, says John McGowan, director of extramural activities at NIAID. Also check in on who’s serving on the study section that will most likely review your grant — both of these will give you a good sense of how to target your grant for the best chance at acceptance.
Most agencies also offer an option for you to suggest particular reviewers, or at least types of expertise, that would best be able to evaluate your application. Be sure to check ahead — NIH doesn’t want you to give names, because its conflict-of-interest rules would actually disqualify those people, says Jeff Schloss, program director in technology development for NHGRI. NSF, on the other hand, readily encourages the practice. Either way, it’s your best opportunity to make sure your grant is evaluated by scientists who are more likely to appreciate its relevance. If your grant is an R01, you may also suggest which NIH institute or center it should go to, though NIH makes no promises that its Center for Scientific Review won’t send it elsewhere if it sees fit.
Network like a champion
Applying for a grant is no time to be flying solo. There are plenty of ways your colleagues can help out, from reading over your grant (highly recommended by program directors) to teaming up with you to strengthen your proposal.
Be sure to consult experts in the field of your research, especially if you’re an outsider to that field. A sequencing technology grant, for example, would get a serious credibility boost if you showed that you had discussed challenges or approaches with people who regularly perform high-volume sequencing, Schloss says.
A collaboration could also kick-start your possibilities of funding, especially for agencies like DOE where such team-based approaches are becoming more and more necessary. “We do a lot of team research,” Frazier says. “Our $6 million grants will have maybe three or four different investigators involved.” In that kind of situation, he adds, it’s imperative to show in your grant how division of labor will be managed.
Even basic technology-sharing collaborations need some evidence, says Anna McCormick, chief of the genetics and cell biology branch of the Biology of Aging program at NIA. If your grant says that you’ll be using expression vectors from a colleague’s lab, for instance, you’re more likely to get a positive review if you can provide a letter “saying that they’ll be happy to give [those] to you,” she says.
Developing these relationships takes time, notes Jane Silverthorne, program director for plant genome research at NSF: “Consortia rarely gel overnight.”
Last on the networking theme, don’t pass up a chance to serve on a review panel. It offers insight into the kind of things reviewers look for in a grant, and you get to hobnob with colleagues, potential reviewers of your own grants, and program directors.
Plan ahead
“People have so many things going on at the same time they write the grant in a rush,” says Felipe Sierra, director of the cell structure and function program in the Biology of Aging unit at NIA. He estimates that a grant can take between one and three months to write — and that anything less comes across as hastily put together to the review panel.
For grants submitted electronically, don’t forget to leave enough time to send it in. Silverthorne says she sees this all the time, where for a 5:00 deadline, 100 people rush to submit their grants at 4:55. The software can’t handle the overload, and the result is that applications tend to be uploaded in pieces, and often the whole thing doesn’t go through.
For scientists who are really into planning ahead, NIAID’s McGowan suggests looking into an institute’s future plans on its website. “We project out where we’ll be for [up to] two years,” he says. “Let’s say you know we’re going to be coming out with an AIDS treatment network for pilot grants and microbacterial infections. You now have 18 months” to plan that grant.
That also gives you a good opportunity to start gathering the preliminary data that can be so critical to the success of a grant application. NIA’s McCormick says her institute, like many others, offers a series of small pilot grants “to get you enough preliminary data to get you over that hump” so you can apply for a more sizable grant. Pilot grants at NIA, for instance, range from $50,000 to $200,000 for two years.
Dress to impress
Should it matter what your grant looks like, so long as your science is sound? Of course not. Does it? You bet.
Reviewers have to sort through so many grants that anything that makes an application hard to read — such as a tiny font — can weigh that much against you. Eric Jakobsson at NIGMS recommends making the grant an easy read by using bold text to highlight key concepts or a graphic to help reviewers see what you’re talking about.
Even seemingly picayune details like punctuation and grammar should be points of concern, says Sierra at NIA. You may think reviewers who dock scores based on this are just being cantankerous, but Sierra says sloppy punctuation or bad grammar conveys the impression that you didn’t bother enough with your application to read it over carefully. Reviewers might think, he says, “If [the applicant] didn’t take the time, why should I?”
Speaking of details, ignore page limits at your own risk. Those aren’t just suggestions, and a grant could be sent back unscored if it’s considered noncompliant with the criteria set out in the call for proposals.
Also, experts say, be sure to avoid the cut-and-paste look. Aside from reviewers’ feeling that you didn’t spend much time if you just snatched sections from old documents, you’re likely to miss addressing some of the specific requests laid out in the RFA if you simply repurpose old text.
The ‘tortured’ writer
No one’s saying that grant-writing is fun. “The writer is usually tortured over it,” says NIA’s Anna McCormick. That torture will probably always be associated with grants, but these tips might clarify some of the writing process.
First off, be as clear and concise as possible. Review teams work hard to make sure that the people evaluating your grant have the right expertise for it, but there’s no guarantee that every nuance of scientific background will be represented on the panel. Because of that, “it’s important for applicants to remember that the burden is on them to explain ideas adequately to reviewers,” says Sheeley at NCRR.
You’re also expected to justify every part of your proposed budget — it may seem obvious, but NHGRI’s Schloss says he sees applications where scientists haven’t done a thorough, convincing job on that.
Because it’s understood that page limits don’t give you the leeway to include everything relevant to your application, your most important goal should be showing reviewers how you think, Schloss adds. “Give them enough information about how you’re thinking about solving problems … that they get a good feeling that you’re being critical about strengths and weaknesses.”
Don’t forget to start off with a hypothesis, or compose the grant around a series of smaller hypotheses, McCormick says. That’ll give you a clearer framework to tackle your proposal, and help the reviewers follow your rationale.
Also, explain the various approaches you’re considering, and give your reasoning: Why will you start with approach A? What’s the priority for the others? Experts agree that it’s critical to point out potential stumbling blocks up front, and talk about fallback plans too. Be quantitative if you can, Schloss says, “about how well something has to work in order for the overall system to work.”
Schloss adds that applicants often spend too much time on nitty-gritty biographical details of participants or things like that, and then gloss over the research plan in as little as a page and a half. “At NIH that doesn’t go over well,” he says, noting that solid research plans tend to take up nearly half of the space in the grant.
There are also some text components grants gurus recommend. NHGRI’s Graham says including a timeline can help reviewers get a better grasp of how things will work and why a proposal might take longer than they would initially expect. Schloss says including a thorough literature review lets the study section know you’re aware of “the state of the art in the field.” He suggests taking the time to compare what you’re doing to the available methods and really emphasizing what’s better about your plan and how it will advance the field. At NSF, Silverthorne says applicants who don’t spend enough time on their summary “often waste [the] opportunity to hit the reviewer between the eyes” with how important their grant is. A good summary, she says, will address all the merit criteria of the grant and will discuss broader impacts of the research as well.
If only there were some simple formula for the art of what McCormick calls “grantsmanship.” Short of that, though, these experts contend that if you follow the advice they present here, your next grant stands to be in far better shape than much of the competition.
Name: Marvin Frazier
Agency: Office of Science, DOE
Title: Director of the life sciences division
Grants he manages: While he doesn’t oversee grants personally, Frazier’s staff handles RFAs, grant applications, and reviews for life sciences grants coming into DOE
How he got into grants: In 1990, Frazier left his post at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for a two-year stint at DOE. Four months later, he was hired as a full-time program manager for life sciences. By 1996 he was acting division director and has been full director of the unit since 1997.
Background: Frazier spent 22 years as a bench scientist, most of that time at PNNL
Words of wisdom: “Biology’s going beyond the cottage industry, and it can be more efficient to get teams to tackle these projects. You really reach an economy of scale in some of these issues. We try to decide which of our projects need that kind of scale and which don’t.” (Each call for proposals, he notes, will say if it’s looking for a team proposal or a single-investigator one.)
Why you want to know him: With a grants budget of close to $270 million, Frazier and his staff manage around 300 genomics grants. “At the DOE, we do a lot more high-risk research. … We actually look for high-risk, high-payoff proposals,” he says. “When we started the genome project, we started funding that in 1986, most of the scientific community thought it was way too premature and a really stupid idea.”
Name: Joe Ellis
Institute: Office of Extramural Research, NIH
Title: Acting director, Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration
How he got into grants: Ellis has been at NIH for about 25 years, and 15 of those have been spent in grants management. He was chief grants management officer at NIA from 1990 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2003 with NIGMS. Last year, he took over as acting director at OPERA.
Background: With an undergraduate degree from Loyola in Baltimore and a CPA, Ellis spent 10 years as an auditor before deciding to move into grants management
Why you want to know him: “We basically coordinate policy across NIH for grants,” he says. His office deals with program, training, and review policy for all the institutes. His crew isn’t the program staff, he says, but “we’re the folks that people deal with” when they’re trying to find out if they got funding.
Why grants policy is a challenge: “The process we use for peer review and for grants is always held up as the gold standard,” he says. “The difficult thing is balancing appropriate stewardship and management of funds with enough flexibility for grantees to conduct [novel] research. It’s a balancing act.”
Name: Bettie Graham
Institute: National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH
Title: Associate director for the division of extramural research; program director
Grants she manages: Her grant portfolio focuses on technology development for mass spectrometry applications
How she got into grants: In the late ’70s, Graham joined the NIH’s grant associate program, designed for people who wanted to become involved in science administration. Afterward, she got into policy and planning and program directing.
Background: Graham started out as a research scientist after getting her PhD in virology from Baylor University. Along the way, she took time out for two years with the Peace Corps teaching math and science in Nigeria
Words of wisdom: Work with the community you’re targeting. “A lot of what we support are people who are engineers or bioinformatics people who are developing tools and methods for use by the biomedical community. Those tools have to be developed in collaboration with the people who are going to be using them,” she says. “It may be a wonderful technology, but will the community use it? How high is the barrier to using it? It has to be easily transferable to just a general laboratory.”
Name: Jeff Schloss
Institute: National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH
Title: Program director, technology development coordination
Grants he manages: Technology development grants, specifically in sequencing
How he got into grants: Schloss had been at the University of Kentucky, but was looking around for another job when he accepted an interview at NHGRI. He started out working on the physical and genetic mapping program.
Background: After spending his undergrad years at Case Western Reserve University, Schloss got his PhD in cell biology at Carnegie Mellon and did a postdoc at Yale
Words of wisdom: “You have people who for intellectual property reasons inadequately describe where they are with the technology that they’re proposing to develop or improve on. … That doesn’t go over very well,” Schloss says. “You don’t have to disclose absolutely everything, but you have to disclose enough to convince people.”
Name: Felipe Sierra
Institute: National Institute on Aging, NIH
Title: Director of cell structure and function program in the Biology of Aging program
Grants he manages: He focuses on proteomics aspects for the Biology of Aging program, and is also participating in the trans-NIH proteomics initiative kicked off by NIH Director Zerhouni’s roadmap
How he got into grants: Sierra’s been at his post for two years, and went there after returning from three years in Chile. “When I came back to the States, I didn’t feel like fighting for funding anymore,” says the longtime NIA grantee. “I would [rather] give the funds.”
Background: His biochemistry experience comes from a PhD at the University of Florida and a postdoc at the University of Geneva. Sierra has also worked in industry and held faculty positions in the US and in Chile.
Words of wisdom: For veteran grant-writers with prestigious labs, “one common mistake is to be too ambitious. [There’s also] the mistake of assuming [reviewers] will accept them just because of who they are. ‘He didn’t explain how he will do it, but he’s brilliant so I’m sure he will do it.’ If the reviewers think you’re arrogant, you’re dead.”
Name: Eric Jakobsson
Institute: National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NIH
Title: Director of the center of bioinformatics and computational biology; chair of NIH biomedical information science and technology initiative consortium
Grants he manages: Jakobsson acts as program director for some grants in bioinformatics and computational biology. His center funds some 100 grants per year with about $41 million.
How he got into grants: While he has a permanent job as a professor at the University of Illinois, he came to NIGMS in May 2003 after being sought out twice for the position. He still spends about one day per week at his Illinois lab.
Background: Jakobsson’s PhD is in physics, with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. His research revolves around biophysics and quantitative biology.
Words of wisdom: Don’t be afraid to submit an application if no RFA exists. “People are always free to submit unsolicited proposals,” he says. “On average, they’re just about as successful as proposals that are responses to particular funding announcements.”
Name: Jane Silverthorne
Agency: National Science Foundation
Title: Program director, plant genome research program
Grants she manages: The plant genome program has a budget of about $90 million, which correlated to about 30 grants last year, Silverthorne says. That number fluctuates, and some of the budget money is spent in advance for long-term, continuing awards.
How she got into grants: Silverthorne has been at NSF for four and a half years. She started out as an ad hoc reviewer when she first came to the US from the UK in the early 1980s and later served on various review panels and finally came on as a program director.
Background: She did a postdoc at UCLA and got a faculty position at UCSC in 1987. Though she’s on leave, Silverthorne still holds her post as professor there.
Words of wisdom: “I always tell PIs not to obsess about the money and they always laugh hysterically at that,” she says. “It’s much better to do it based on the science and let us figure out how to fund it. If you need enough money to do a project … a certain way and you can justify it, we will take that very seriously.”
Why you should be a reviewer: “For every grant you get funded, probably six to eight people had to review it,” Silverthorne says. “So for every grant you put in, you should review six to eight grants.”
Name: Anna McCormick
Institute: National Institute on Aging, NIH
Title: Chief of the genetics and cell biology branch in the Biology of Aging program
Grants she manages: She focuses on the genetics of longevity, which includes applications such as DNA repair, sequencing, and studying basic mechanisms regulating aging or longevity in model organisms
How she got into grants: “I just had decided that I really wanted to go to NIH so that I could have a wider view of science than just the view I had from running my own laboratory.” She joined the agency 15 years ago.
Background: Before NIH, McCormick was an assistant professor in the biochemistry department at the University of Texas Southwestern medical school
Words of wisdom: Your program director is your advocate — take advantage of that. If your research gets published, for instance, “call them and tell them that you just had a paper come out,” she says.
Why you want to know her: The Biology of Aging program is responsible for approximately $120 million each year, McCormick says, and each program director handles $20 million to $30 million of that. Average grants go for about $250,000, plus indirect costs.
Name: Doug Sheeley
Institute: National Center for Research Resources, NIH
Title: Health sciences administrator; program director, biomedical technology division
Grants he manages: Portfolio of mass spec and proteomics research resource grants: 10 biomedical technology resource centers, plus other grants like R01s and phased innovation awards
How he got into grants: Sheeley’s been at NCRR for about three and a half years, and before that spent seven years at what was then GlaxoWellcome working in analytical chemistry and proteomics. He joined NCRR because “coming here would be an opportunity to have a broader impact on the developing field of proteomics … than just being in my lab at GlaxoWellcome.”
Background: Before joining Glaxo, Sheeley was a postdoc fellow at Burroughs Wellcome after attending graduate school at Harvard
Words of wisdom: “It’s important for applicants to remember that the burden is on them to explain ideas adequately to reviewers. … You may get a critique back and feel like the reviewers just missed the point. They may have, but you’re the applicant and you need to explain the idea adequately for them to understand it.”
Rub elbows with him: Most years, Sheeley teaches a semester-long proteomics course, taken primarily by postdocs, for the private, nonprofit Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences
Name: John McGowan
Institute: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Title: Director of extramural activities
Grants he manages: While he spends relatively little of his time working with grants, McGowan’s division does a lot with pathogen-based genomics and recently has helped fund genomics research in E. coli, malaria, anthrax, and smallpox. He also arranges for genomics projects in conjunction with NIAID’s transplantation and immune tolerance programs.
How he got into grants: McGowan was one of the first four people to join the AIDS division when it was formed in 1986. He was involved in program work, then became branch chief, and later associate director.
Background: His scientific expertise is in microbiology and virology; McGowan was an investigator performing his own research projects before he joined NIAID
Words of wisdom: “Most scientists don’t spend a lot of time learning how to use the system,” he says. But in reality, he adds, “it’s no different than any other business. If you’re in lighting or plumbing fixtures, you keep track of what other people are doing in that area. In some ways, scientists refuse to look at … the administrative part of it. … What are the areas you can successfully compete in?”
Why you want to know him: “Think of me as the person who’s legally responsible for ensuring that all grants and contracts are awarded in a good way from NIAID,” he says. That’s a $4 billion institute with some $50 million going directly to genomics and large-scale sequencing.
The Grants Go-Getter Reference Guide
Genome Technology polled the experts for the best guidance around on the most common mistakes in grants, and what makes a grant stand out. Make the most of this handy clip-out guide — you won’t find advice like this anywhere else.
Do:
Study up on the agency.
Find out who’s scheduled to be on your review panel and what proposals have been funded by the institute in the past. That will give you a sense of how to position your application and how much detail to provide, notes NHGRI’s Bettie Graham.
Talk to program staff.
Hands down, this was the across-the-board favorite piece of advice from our group of experts. “Not a lot of people know that you’re supposed to know your program director,” says Anna McCormick at NIA. “We’re your advocate.” Program staff are available to help you with questions before you submit your grant, and since they attend the review sessions, they can usually help explain a review panel’s critique.
Prioritize your approaches.
Include several avenues your research might take, but don’t present them as a laundry list, advises NHGRI’s Jeff Schloss. Prioritize them, and “be quantitative whenever you can.”
Consult experts and establish collaborations to strengthen your proposal.
You may be an engineer tackling a sequencing challenge, but there’s no reason your application shouldn’t reflect a firm grasp of the biological issues at hand. “Even if you’re really smart you don’t necessarily have good insights into the key issues in another field,” says Jeff Schloss of NHGRI. “For sequencing specifically, there are people who have tremendous knowledge about high-volume sequencing. … It’s important to incorporate that.”
Read the program announcements carefully.
It sounds obvious, but experts agree that many applications indicate a scientist didn’t really pay attention to the RFA. “It is amazing how many people will call up very close to the deadline and say, ‘You know, I haven’t read the program announcement yet, but…’,” NSF’s Jane Silverthorne says.
Plan ahead so you don’t write your grant at the last minute.
“Have it ready at least a week in advance,” advises NIA’s Felipe Sierra. “Then go for a long walk, have a nice cup of coffee, and read it again as if you had never seen it before — and then you will find the mistakes.”
Apply for grants as a team.
Especially at DOE, many grants are geared toward multiple-investigator projects. If you do this, though, be sure to elucidate exactly how the team will function, suggests Marvin Frazier. “It’s really important to show how you’re going to manage a complex program like that. [Be clear about] who’s in charge, and how are they going to manage it from month to month so that all the partners make the contributions they said they were going to make.”
Address any IP issues that might affect making the research publicly available.
“Do your homework on … anything you’re planning to use that might affect your ability to distribute what you develop,” NSF’s Silverthorne says. Since most government agencies require public access, she adds, “It’s good to get that out of the way at the beginning.”
Let the reviewers know you have the technical resources you’ll need.
“Make a really good statement of how you’re going to solve [the problem],” DOE’s Marvin Frazier says, and show “that you have those technologies in your laboratory.”
Include a timeline.
Particularly for technology development, NHGRI’s Bettie Graham points out, reviewers who aren’t involved in tool-building may not know how long everything takes. Showing “some kind of timeline for when things are going to happen … is very useful for evaluation,” she says.
Suggest expertise (and sometimes reviewers) needed on the review panel.
When you submit a grant application, you’re entitled to ask for a particular institute or division where it would be most appropriate (there’s no guarantee it’ll go there, but you can always ask). At NIH, you’re also welcome to suggest particular kinds of expertise that should be on the review panel for your grant. Don’t suggest particular reviewers, because that could be seen as a conflict of interest and actually disqualify those reviewers from seeing your grant, notes NHGRI’s Jeff Schloss. At NSF, however, Jane Silverthorne says applicants are encouraged to suggest particular reviewers.
Be a reviewer.
In addition to the good karma of keeping the peer-review system going, it’ll give you great experience in figuring out the finer points of a grant application, says NIA’s McCormick.
The Grants Go-Getter Reference Guide
Genome Technology polled the experts for the best guidance around on the most common mistakes in grants, and what makes a grant stand out. Make the most of this handy clip-out guide — you won’t find advice like this anywhere else.
Don’t:
Write your grant in a vacuum.
The simplest way to see if your grant is easy to read and makes sense, experts say, is to get a colleague to look it over for you. “An institution where people read each others’ grants will do better [overall] than a place where they don’t,” says Eric Jakobsson at NIGMS.
Use a hard-to-read font.
“The most common mistake is every- thing that may make a grant difficult to read, like tiny, dense type,” says Jakobsson. “If the reviewer is reading lots of grants … it can just make it that much more difficult” to get through.
Forget to double- and triple-check grammar and punctuation.
If reviewers think that you didn’t put your all into a grant application, their likely reaction, advises NIA’s Felipe Sierra, will be, “If he didn’t take the time, why should I?”
Give up after a negative review or a bad score.
“It’s hard for everyone when they read criticisms of their work to be objective and dispassionate about it,” says Doug Sheeley at NCRR. “The most obvious mistake is to put the idea aside and not try again. … In fact, the success rate for applications as they come through a second time is generally better than when they came through on the first round.”
Gloss over potential stumbling blocks.
Instead, says Jeff Schloss at NHGRI, point out possible pitfalls and let reviewers know how you’d deal with them. “If it doesn’t work, what’s your fallback? Why can the overall project still work even if the first approach doesn’t work?” Schloss says.
Ignore page limits.
Stick to the criteria set up in the call for proposals, and really make your application work within that space. “It’s easy to just write to the limit and then stop [or] cut and paste things from existing documents, rather than having to really spend time writing things from scratch,” Sheeley says. You’re likely to miss key points with this approach, and reviewers could be turned off if they get the impression you didn’t spend much time preparing the grant.
Forget about a grant once it’s submitted.
Often, it’ll be a matter of months between a grant deadline and when the review panel gets a chance to go over the application. Be sure to take advantage of that time lag, says Bettie Graham of NHGRI, by contacting the scientific review administrator “to see if they will allow submission of additional materials.” That way, if you publish a key paper or make a discovery critical to your grant, you still have a chance to get that information in front of the reviewers.