Authored by Nirmish Singla, MD, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, USA

In this engaging breakout session, Dr. Levine discussed some tips and tricks for putting together a successful grant application, with particular focus on early career development. As general advice, success depends on resilience and the willingness to write lots of grants. Any opportunity to do or help with a grant review may be the most useful thing for writing successful grants, along with gaining insight into how seasoned grant reviewers review grants.

To start off, a grant must be visually pleasing. The font and format should be easy to read/follow without too many typesetting distractions. Bullets can be helpful to highlight items of importance that you want the reviewer to remember. Figures ought to be interspersed and ideally located where they are referenced. An approach schematic can also be helpful for complicated experiments by reducing the number of words and even potentially showing how all the aims are intertwined.

Know your audience and recall the five NIH review criteria (Significance, Innovation, Approach, Investigator, Environment). Having distinct subheaders with each of these will ensure that each is addressed. Don’t talk down to reviewers, and don’t assume they know everything. At the same time, don’t waste precious space by divulging too much unnecessary information (such as epidemiology of the disease, if irrelevant or understood by your audience). Reviewers want you to command knowledge and mastery of the field and available data.

The Aims page is the most important part of the grant and should fit on one page. Before writing the body of the grant, have many people from various backgrounds read the Aims page. Keep reviewing and revising the Aims page as you are writing the rest of the grant. The aims should be sufficiently independent of one another such that the outcome of one does not influence the feasibility/success of another. Every aim should have a standardized template, including rationale (~2 sentences), hypothesis (~1 sentence), approach (including statistics), expected outcomes, and pitfalls/limitations. Preliminary data can be independently sorted into each aim or, if overwhelmingly in support of one aim versus the others, presented prior to the aims. For junior investigators who may have less preliminary data, be sure to incorporate background information from others who have worked in this field and demonstrate proof of principle. The reviewers are interested in a feasibility check and experimental proficiency.

Another critical component of early career grants is the career development plan, institutional plan, mentor letter, and, when used correctly, collaborators. For the development plan and institutional letters, don’t try to be creative. Instead, see what types of letters/templates have worked for others and adapt. Don’t forget to incorporate coursework on the plan. Mentors should also echo a detailed career development plan and support while also providing evidence of prior trainee successes. Collaborators are important to include if they can provide expertise, samples, or assays that your lab doesn’t do or have, but they should not simply be used for the purpose of “name-dropping.” Finally, don’t forget to involve a statistician from the beginning. Be sure to include power calculations, and remember to specify that both genders will be used in mice studies, unless there is a reason not to.

One question I brought up regarded the timing of K-grant applications. In particular, while obtaining a K-grant can be beneficial in seeking out a faculty position and protecting time for research, how can a fellow/trainee draft a complete K-grant that includes evidence of mentor commitment and institutional support without knowing at which institution he/she will be working? While waiting until a faculty position is secured is one option, it is completely reasonable for a fellow to submit a K-grant application with institutional/mentor support from the institution at which he/she is training, even if it is not the final workplace. The review committee understands these issues and, in such instances, expects the documentation to reflect that the training institution supports your research ideas/plan and adds credibility to your track record (e.g., “We would love to retain him/her…He/she would flourish in any academic setting wherever he/she chooses to go…”). In this case, it is permissible to be hired as faculty at another institution and utilize the K-grant funding that was originally written in the context of the training institutional environment.