Bouvier Grant Group

1. Introduction, Candidate Section

Should you apply for a K, and if so, which one? To which institute? Is the project idea sound? Is your mentoring team a good one? We begin with an overview of the Career Development Awards, the available FOAs, how to choose support by career stage and eligibility, and how to structure your thinking about training topics, mentors, and your project. I will discuss the writing of the Candidate Section, providing an array of recently funded samples from across the spectrum of K submissions.

2. Preparation

My most successful clients spend a lot of time preparing to write a grant submission. I will discuss strategies for optimizing success on your NIH submission, including familiarizing yourself with NIH’s funding priorities; finding your niche in the funding portfolio via the Reporter website; discussing your mentoring team, project, and options with program officers; and shopping your draft Aims to find the best possible IC and FOA fit.

3. Specific Aims

The one-page Aims document is arguably the most important narrative section of an NIH submission. It is the first section I write, and the one that undergoes the most revisions. It must quickly convey what you are doing, why you are doing it, and the impact your results will have on clinical care. If you learn to write a well-honed Aims document, it will open the door to success in writing other sections, and in writing persuasively about your work in general. Attendees will be given examples of funded Aims documents as well as a version into which I have inserted mistakes I typically see from grantees, in order for you to practice editing.

4. Significance and Innovation

The Significance and Innovation sections are all about persuading your reviewers about the merits of your project. You must concisely describe the disease burden, Rigor of Prior Research, knowledge gap, and how your project will fill the knowledge gap and reduce the disease burden. You must also clearly articulate your competitive advantages over previous and current approaches. I describe a writing strategy to help reviewers quickly grasp the key points of these important sections, which are part of your scored Research Plan. I provide funded examples and exercises to help you edit and write more competitively. Grantees often struggle to write these “sales-y” sections; I will help ensure that reviewers both in and outside your field come away persuaded of the significance, innovation, and impact of the work you propose.

5. Approach

This section is based on the classic IMRAD writing style (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion), which most researchers have used since their high school lab reports and continue to use in their publications. That said, it is not easy to write this section well, and K grantees must be careful that a poor score on the Research Plan does not drag down their Mentoring Plan score as well, given that a poorly designed project is often blamed on a lack of mentoring. I will discuss strategies for structuring this important section and describe the reviewer comments I typically see.

6. Letters, Mistakes Commonly Made

I will discuss how to draft the Letters from mentors, co-mentors, collaborators, contributors, and consultants — which unbeknownst to most K grantees are written in large part by the grantee. We review reference letters and how all these letters differ from one another. We also examine the contents of a winning institutional letter. Finally, I present mistakes I typically see made on K submissions based on my assessment of recent Summary Statements from my K grantees.