Tips

You no longer need to, and good riddance.

It is difficult enough to shoe-horn the ever-burgeoning list of requirements in the Research Plan without having to find ways to mark resubmission changes. I welcomed this 2015 notice that said you no longer had to mark changes: NOT-OD-15-030 . You may still highlight changes if you think it will help. But often it just creates a formatting mess and is best not marked. Instead, write the one-page Introduction to the Revised Application with enormous care, which frankly you ought to be doing anyway. On the resubmission, it eclipses the one-page Specific Aims document as the single most important page of the application. – Posted: February 16, 2017

Missing expertise is a rookie mistake; Redundancy is seen as bloating the budget.

Only the newest grantees propose a project and do not budget for all required expertise. More typically, expertise is represented more than once on a team. Sometimes it cannot be helped— your long-time collaborator will oversee histology experiments, then a new co-I is brought on for some unrelated expertise, and he/she also happens to have expertise in histology. Why do you need two people with histology expertise, a reviewer will ask? You’d better have a good explanation, written carefully in the Approach, the budget justification, and the biosketches. (Hint: The new Co-I might replace the histology expertise, but not your successful, established relationship with your long-time collaborator.) – Posted: February 9, 2017

Try to avoid overlap in your sites, just as you do in your team.

Grantees know the phrase “multidisciplinary team.” How diversified are your sites? I recently read this reviewer quote: “The proposed sites are geographically close and more similar than different, limiting external validity and making the label “multi-center” technically correct but less informative.” A valid reason for including a site might be to boost enrollment of a particular race/ethnicity to power sub-studies, which would help satisfy the new scoring criteria “Sex and Other Biological Variables.” Make the case to reviewers for the site’s inclusion, because its inclusion costs money. – Posted: February 2, 2017

It will save space and be easier to quickly skim and grasp key points.

I don’t know about you, but when I read a stack of submissions, I like a scorecard to keep track of the major players involved, even on the relatively small submissions. It makes it easy to flip back and figure out who is doing what, what their role is on the project (PI, Co-I), and where they reside. Plus it saves space– you can drop the font size, and use phrases instead of full sentences. When writing a grant application, I put that info in a table. I usually position it somewhere near the beginning of the Approach section. It would like something like this (I can’t use real examples due to confidentiality issues, this was my kids’ idea):

– Posted: January 26, 2017