Grant Writing

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Grant Writing

• Gary Roberts
• Dept of Bacteriology
• groberts_at_bact.wisc.edu

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The human context of the grant process

• Reviewers have other lives.
• Dont make their job hard.
• Human beings think in terms of stories.
• Reviewers (and readers and listeners) are
  intelligent but ignorant. Tell them what they
  need to know to understand the proposal. Tell
  them explicitly why this is exciting science.

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Writing a good proposal1. What is the study
section looking for in a research proposal?

• Only a fraction of grants are funded you need
  panelists to say this was my favorite grant."
  This means that you convince them of its
  importance to biology and that you can do the
  science.
• For post-doc proposals, the panelists are told
  not to nit-pick flawed research plans, but to
  evaluate the overall training potential.
• Training potential is partly a function of the
  applicant have they been successful so far
  and the rest is whether "proposed experience will
  augment the candidate's conceptual and/or
  experimental skills. This latter depends on the
  quality of the lab you go to, but is largely a
  function of your doing something unlike your grad
  project.

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Writing a good proposal2. The first rule of
writing is dont irritate the reviewer.

• Be clear and organized.
• Do not try to pack in as much information as you
  can.
• Avoid excessive abbreviations and complicated
  data.
• Do provide explanatory figures.
• Do provide rationales of where you are going and
  summaries of what you have just covered.
• Do break proposal sections into sub-sections with
  explanatory titles in bold, to help the reader
  see the organization.
• Be clear and organized.
•  

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Writing a good proposal3. Remember who you are
writing for.

• At least some of the readers will not be
  knowledgeable about what you are working on.
• At least some of the readers will not understand
  the proposed methods.
• At least some of the readers will not know why it
  is important.
• Explicitly tailor the proposal to the specific
  funding agency.

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Writing a good proposal4. Role of preliminary
data

• The role of preliminary data is to show that you
  can do key experiments and/or have been
  productive in ways that arent yet published.
• For a post-doc, they will assume you have access
  to all the methods in the sponsors lab. If there
  are other key experiments beyond that expertise,
  a letter from a proposed collaborator is
  valuable.
• For a post-doc, evidence of productivity in the
  new lab is not expected if you have been in the
  new lab for a few months or less, but after that,
  reviewers will start to expect some results.

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Writing a good proposal5. Key elements of a
good proposal.

• Have a single, simple theme. All parts of the
  proposal should be consistent with that.
• Explicitly connect the various parts of the
  proposal.
• Most reviewers want a "hypothesis-driven"
  proposal, so state your hypothesis(es) clearly
  and explicitly.
• Briefly state expected results and how they would
  be interpreted, as well as recognizing likely
  pitfalls and how they will be circumvented.

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Writing a good proposal6. When should you
write a proposal?

• When you have a good story to tell. A poor
  proposal might hurt your future credibility.
• For a post-doc, you might either write before you
  have gone to the lab or after you have been
  there, but this choice affects reviewer
  expectations as well as timing of funding.

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Writing a good proposal7. How much time to
spend on writing a proposal?

• Proposal writing is the hardest thing we do as
  professional scientists, so start well in advance
  (4-6 months?).
• Well before the due date, settle on the big
  picture title, tentative specific aims, and a
  rough set of the approaches and themes under each
  aim. The details can change without largely
  affecting the big picture, and this allows you to
  decide the necessary preliminary work and to spot
  potential weaknesses in the overall proposal
  structure.

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Writing a good proposal8. Who should read your
draft proposal?

• Have one or two experts (such as the post-doc
  sponsor) read it for scientific precision.
• Have several non-experts read it. These should be
  people like those on the grant panel smart and
  critical, but largely unfamiliar with the field.
  Give them a week or so to do the reading and then
  sit down and listen to their comments.
• All readers concerns are valid even if they are
  completely wrong. In a resubmission, dont
  debate them over their concerns. If the reader
  missed or misunderstood something in your
  proposal then you may not have emphasized your
  point sufficiently. The readers comprehension
  is your responsibility as a writer!

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A grant is not a contract

• If you are funded, you are expected to do good
  science. You are not expected to do all that you
  propose or only what you propose.
• Thus, while you should propose reasonable
  experiments that you expect to do, you should not
  propose an experiment that is exceedingly
  difficult to explain in the proposal though you
  can still do the experiment.
• You probably shouldnt propose the VERY cute
  experiment that has only a small chance of
  success, but a big payoff though you can still
  do the experiment.