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W2770812876 abstract "Writing a competitive grant application is an essential skill for any scientist who wants to embark on an independent career. This instalment of the Words of Advice series provides a comprehensive guide to preparing a successful grant or personal fellowship application. Writing a grant or fellowship proposal is an integral part of the scientific process, and mastering this skill is crucial for any scientist seeking to carve out their own research programme. As funding is tight and competition strong, obtaining research funding is becoming more arduous, with the odds of success for many schemes getting lower with each passing year. But luckily, writing a standout research proposal is not an entirely new skill that needs to be learned; it is a skill that most scientists already possess if they have written a research paper and know how to ‘sell’ the importance of their work and how to place it in a wider context. There are important differences between writing a paper and writing a grant, however, and here, we will try to cover the majority of these. The basics of writing research proposals are embedded within the daily activities of any scientist. Identifying an interesting biological question and proposing different lines of enquiry to support or refute their hypotheses are what scientists do. Effectively framing a scientific discovery and logically laying out the supporting data to achieve an impactful narrative are as essential to getting a paper published as they are to getting a research proposal funded. Explaining complex scientific concepts in an engaging manner is fundamental to capturing and maintaining the attention of an audience, whether giving a scientific talk or pitching a research proposal to a grant review panel. In this instalment of the Words of Advice series, we provide you with a guide to crafting a competitive grant application – be it a for a personal fellowship, to pursue graduate education or postdoctoral training, or for a research project grant that will allow you to embark on your independent career. And as with any skill, grant writing can be mastered and continuously improved through practice and feedback from advisors, colleagues and lab mates. Seek advice from your seasoned mentors who have written successful proposals, who have a proven track record in choosing ‘fundable’ research questions and who have experience in navigating the grant and fellowship application process. Although initially daunting, do keep in mind that writing a strong research proposal simply requires a redirection of skills that you already have. Before you start writing your proposal, check the funders’ websites for funding opportunity announcements and give yourself ample time before the deadline to prepare an application. Ideally, start the process at least a couple of months before the grant deadline. Most funders have multiple grant/fellowship schemes. Check which funding schemes you are eligible to apply for. Each application has a specific set of requirements and criteria by which it will be evaluated, depending on the funding agency. Take your time to read all the relevant information and draw up a list of documents you will need to support your application. This will help you plan your application effectively. If you are applying for a personal fellowship, you will almost certainly need letters of recommendation and a personal statement. Organise letters of recommendation/support well in advance of the deadline. It really does not pay to expect others to drop everything in order to write you a strong and supportive recommendation letter if you ask for this at the last minute. They may simply not have the time, or inclination, to do this for you at very short notice, whether this is important to you or not. Poor planning may instead be rewarded with a generic and tepid letter of ‘support’ that would likely have been much stronger had you asked for it well before the deadline. If you impose your deadlines on others, don't be surprised if they are not quite as supportive as you would like. Letters of recommendation that say you are a star in the making are worth their weight in gold, so do all that you can to be deserving of such high praise. Especially at the early career stage when your list of publications is likely to be quite modest, the support of a respected and influential mentor can be decisive in swinging a finding decision your way. But this support will not come automatically. While we are on the subject of mentorship, please try not to take your mentors for granted by only contacting them when you need something. Remember, having a great mentor, who is there for you when you need advice, a shoulder to lean on or stellar letters of recommendation, also means being a great mentee. If you contact your mentors/former advisors only when you want letters of support or something else, you might find that those letters of support become more and more ‘vanilla’ over time. Ideally, your letters of support will say what a wonderful and creative scientist you are, and how richly deserving you are of support for your work. To receive this type of letter, you need to build and maintain strong professional relationships with your mentors. If you feel that your mentors will not be able to say highly supportive things about you, try to fix the problem rather than hoping that the problem will fix itself. If you are embarking on an independent career and applying for a research grant, you will also need to demonstrate that you have institutional support to conduct your research. A letter from the head of your department and any start-up funds you have received are good indicators of institutional commitment. Letters from your PhD and postdoctoral advisors will also hopefully support your readiness to manage a research group. Some funding schemes are designed to encourage collaborations and thus require multiple investigators on an application. These can be excellent funding opportunities for early career scientists. If your project is suitable for such grants, don't be afraid to look for collaborators beyond your immediate circle of peers – perhaps during a poster session or at the bar at your next meeting. Overlapping expertise in a collaboration is good, but collaborators who can contribute new techniques, different model organisms or even a different discipline will strengthen your application. The proposal should justify the need for the collaboration and state the contribution of each collaborator clearly. Before you start writing, check the formatting requirements (e.g. font types and sizes, type of images allowed, citation format) and length restrictions for the proposal, very carefully. These requirements are in place to make the reviewing experience consistent and bearable for grant reviewers (who may review just one or two proposals per funding round) and grant panel members (who may be asked to read and score 20 proposals per funding round). Don't expect reviewers to read several extra pages just from you because you clearly deserve special treatment. They won't. Instead, you will simply irritate them (not a great idea) and you may ruin your chances from the outset. Nobody has the time to read twenty long rambling grant applications without losing the will to live. Remember, reviewers and grant panel members are busy people, with their own grants and papers to write, so they will not be impressed with a sloppily prepared grant application, that ignores the length requirements, and is an impenetrable maze. Clarity and brevity are highly appreciated by referee and grant panels alike. We have rarely, if ever, heard a grant panel member complain that the 20 grants they had to review yesterday were too easy to understand and that they dearly wished they had 5 more pages to read per grant. Remember, the simple facts are that grant panel members often have to read 20 or so grants per funding round. If we allocate just 20 min to read each grant, that still clocks in at 400 min of continuous reading, or almost seven solid hours of total concentration (which is really not possible). If your grant application is badly written, verbose, muddled, poorly laid out or excessively complex, it may take a referee an hour or more to wade through it to get a sense of what you are proposing. That's three times longer than the time they realistically have for each application and they will not be very happy with you because of this. So, before you start writing your proposal, remember that reviewers are human and that you want them to be able to easily grasp what you plan to do and why. Try to aim for your grant or fellowship application to be understandable, by a nonexpert, within 20–30 min or so (ideally less). In practice, this is quite hard to do (but gets easier over time) and will require you to edit and polish your application multiple times to get it right. Hard writing makes easy reading. So, be prepared to put the effort into preparing a finely crafted grant proposal to give yourself the maximum chances of success. Your livelihood depends on it. Before entering the total immersion phase of writing the grant proposal itself, a phase that necessarily requires you to be largely preoccupied with the science, double check that you know what documents you are going to need when the submission deadline looms large on the horizon. Now is the time to discover that you will need a quote from an equipment supplier (or even 3 quotes) for that fancy flow cytometer that you plan to request. Don't let formatting errors or missing documents jeopardise your submission or even result in your application being rejected (Box 1). This does happen, so take all of the submission requirements seriously. Once you have a clear idea of what you need for the grant/fellowship application, you can focus on writing a proposal that will make your application stand out from the rest of the pile. When preparing a grant application for a research project, your main tasks are to convince the reviewing panel that your project addresses an important and timely research question and that you are the most qualified candidate to conduct the research (or guide it). Remember, it is not enough that you find the question interesting, you have to convince the grant review panel and funding agency why they need to fund this particular research question and why now. It is sobering to know that for many funding calls, a success rate of 10% (or even less) is the norm, so expect to spend quite a lot of time choosing your research question. There really is little point in writing a proposal before you have identified the ‘big idea’. People who make the top 10% tend to be those with fresh and creative proposals that are well thought out. Indeed, choosing your research question is one of the hardest aspects of grant writing, as it requires you to identify an important and non-obvious question that is likely to engage you (and possibly several others in your lab) for the next few years, and most likely beyond. Your research question should not be the next obvious step in your current research, or an open-ended fishing expedition that entails you carrying out several poorly-defined screens. Your question needs to be creative, experimentally testable, not too speculative (i.e. is a reasonably logical extension of current knowledge and not a huge leap into the wide unknown), but not too obvious, and should generate important new insight on an area of general interest. Sounds easy, right? Give yourself plenty of time to come up with a great research question, well before you really get to grips with the detailed writing of the research proposal. This might take several weeks of sustained thinking and reading, wrestling with various ideas, having several false starts, jotting down lots of half-formed ideas, balling up pieces of paper and throwing them in the trash, before you finally experience your creative breakthrough. Don't expect it to be easy. It won't be. But the process itself will bring you very close to your science and will be fruitful and rewarding. In the end, you will be glad you did it. It is unfair, perhaps, that areas that are considered ‘unfashionable’ or already well trodden tend to be given a lower priority for funding, but that is a fact of life that you must deal with when seeking funding to pursue your research. Unfortunately, some grant applicants feel that ‘because it's there’ is a good enough justification for why they wish to address a particular question. This might be a good enough reason to climb a mountain, but it just doesn't cut the mustard when asking for large amounts of public money to carry out a research study. In a perfect world, there would be enough money to fund all scientifically sound research proposals, but in the meantime, scientists have a duty to think of why hard-pressed taxpayers would wish to see their work funded. So, try to ensure that your proposal is grounded by a sense that the applicant understands that the funding agency has to prioritise funding requests based on those that are likely to deliver greater and more immediate dividends for the public interest. That is not to say that your proposal should be completely utilitarian and be aiming to cure a disease within 5 years. Far from it. But you will need to bring a sense to your proposal that you are aware of your responsibility to give a return on this investment at some stage in the not too distant future. In a personal fellowship application, the emphasis is more heavily weighted towards funding the candidate rather than the specific project, although the specific project proposal is still very important. Members of research grant panels will have largely overlapping expertise in a specific field, whereas members reviewing personal fellowships tend to have diverse expertise. The type and level of expertise of your reviewing panel will inform the content of your proposal and how it is written, as well as your application as a whole. Tailor your application to match the expectations of the reviewing panel and the funding agency. Don't assume that your reviewers are experts in your particular field. They might not at all appreciate why your research is important and why you're proposing your aims. This may be quite obvious to you, but you have the benefit (and bias) of having worked in the area for years. Recall, as we noted earlier, that your reviewers will have a stack of proposals to review and very limited time to evaluate each one. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to clearly and persuasively state the importance and feasibility of your proposal so that your reviewers have no doubt that your proposed research is important and why you should be the one to perform it. In the next sections, we will focus on the most important part of your fellowship or grant application: the proposal. In a personal fellowship application, you need to demonstrate creativity, critical thinking and the ability to propose a research plan. You also need to show that you have the technical skills to conduct the proposed research and that your project fits within the general interests and expertise of the hosting lab, as well as the aims and interests of the funding agency. The information you provide in your cover letter and the research proposal should be cohesive and complementary. In the cover letter, state your intentions, previous experiences, motivations and future expectations. Organise your proposal in a way that allows your reviewing panel to find specific information quickly (see next section). And keep in mind the expertise of the reviewing panel; this will dictate how you should write your research proposal and how much technical details should go into the methodologies. It has been said that the key elements of how to give a good talk are as follows: tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. This advice also holds true for strong grant applications. As you work through the proposal, try to make the research question and the key aims of the research as clear as possible. Don't be afraid to re-state your key question several times throughout the proposal. Repetition is good for emphasis and helps reviewers get a sense of your proposal quickly and on a single read through. Do not clutter your proposal with extraneous and superfluous detail and do not be tempted to squeeze as many words as possible into the available space by various forms of subterfuge such as employing tiny fonts, reducing margins, dispensing with diagrams and employing single line spacing throughout. A diagram can capture in a very small space what it could take several paragraphs to explain. You do not have to fill every available line in the application template. Avoid your proposal looking like a sea of words and compressed tiny fonts with no diagrams or supporting data, or be prepared to really test the patience of your reviewers. A strong research proposal has three key elements: (a) a main scientific question, (b) a plan of how it will be investigated (research plan or methodology) and (c) what will the outcome(s) contribute to the field (intellectual merit) and beyond (broader impacts) (Fig. 1). Reviewing panels read hundreds of proposals. Make it easy for your reviewers to find these key elements, and other relevant information, quickly by organising your proposal with subheadings (e.g. background, general goal, specific aims, significance and novelty, research plan, broader impacts (Fig. 1)). You could also bold key concepts and phrases to make them stand out. We will now discuss in more detail the key elements that should feature in your research proposal (see also Box 2). As discussed earlier, a winning research proposal requires balancing a creative and innovative scientific question with a feasible research plan. Start writing your research proposal only when you have a clear idea of the scientific question you want to work on and how you will investigate. The question of ‘what is interesting’ in science is somewhat subjective; but, it is easier to convince a reviewing panel to fund your project when you are interested in your research and have planned it thoroughly. Be creative. Finding an intelligent solution to a scientific question is sometimes as simple as looking at the problem from the right angle. Begin your proposal by providing enough background information that allows non-experts to understand how your proposed research fits within the field and how it would contribute to its advancement. But do not distract from the main question. Space is usually very limited, so make sure that the information you provide in the background will support another section of the proposal. Once you have set the stage with the background, state your scientific question (i.e. general aim) very clearly and also state how you will test this question using three or more approaches. It is quite common for grant applicants to break their key question down into three sub-aims that test different parts of their question, or in complementary ways. Avoid drafting a proposal that aims to answer a very specific question (e.g. ‘Is process X controlled by signalling pathway Y?’); as the more specific you make your general aim, the less innovative the proposal seems. Instead, keep the main question broad (e.g. ‘Is process X regulated by process Y?’) and list 3–5 specific aims that arise from the more global one. These aims must be linked but should not hinge on each other. In case aim 1 does not work out, you should still be able to investigate aims 2 and 3. Your aims should be hypothesis-driven and not technical; present them in an unbiased and logical manner. End this section by highlighting the scientific merit of your proposed research. It is crucial to communicate to the reviewers – who might not be experts within your field – why your work is innovative and how it will advance the field. This section is where you explain to the reviewing panel how you plan to investigate your scientific question. You need to convince your reviewers that you not only have an interesting scientific question to investigate, but also the right plan to do it. The reviewing panel will rigorously evaluate the proposed lines of enquiry and whether they are suitable to address the aims of the project; whether alternative scenarios have been proposed; and what strategies are presented to mitigate potential problems. The panel will also judge the overall level of innovation presented in this section. Organise the research plan in a way that mirrors the specific aims; i.e., outline how you will investigate each aim separately. Details are important for the overall impact of your plan. Provide enough details on the methodology that you will use, and include complementary strategies that you can/will employ to investigate each aim. Use figures to explain complex experimental setups and methods, and you may also want to include a timeline for the proposed plan. You also need to articulate potential limitations, and, if possible, present the solutions – e.g. if technique X doesn't work. By showing that you can mitigate problems and suggest alternative experimental approaches, you demonstrate to the reviewers that you have the intellectual input and technical skills to move the project forward. You should also include any preliminary data – a figure or two that shows that you're on the right track to making a significant discovery can only help your chances of success. You could include these data at the beginning of the research plan to lay the foundation for continuing in this research line. Highlight the technologies available in your lab and the core facilities in your institution. Some methodologies are expensive; justify the need for such technologies and how they would benefit the proposed research. An important, and often overlooked point, is the feasibility of the proposed research in the time frame allowed by the grant. Plan reasonably; do not propose more work than can be achieved for the duration of the grant. The intellectual merit of a project is relatively simple to define and to highlight for the reviewers. It is essentially what makes the project scientifically significant to the research community and, if the aims are achieved, how would it advance the field. In addition to the intellectual merit, most funders now also require applicants to detail the broader impacts of their proposed projects. The broader impacts are harder to define because definitions vary between funders and most funders, except for the National Science Foundation (NSF), do not explicitly list the review criteria in their guidelines. So how do you write a broader impacts segment? In general, the broader impact is the potential of the proposed research to advance knowledge beyond the immediate field or even beyond the research per se. Each funding agency will evaluate the broader impacts of a project according to the agency's own mission and aims. You could find these in the funder's mission statement or by contacting the grant officer. Once you understand what the funding agency wants to achieve, writing the broader impacts segment becomes easy. Not every project in the basic life sciences has direct implications for human health; but every solid research project can be impactful beyond its immediate field of research. But do not overreach. Broader impacts should stem naturally from the proposed project. For example, a project aimed at understanding global regulatory networks in simple model organisms is not only relevant to basic biology but can also infer knowledge of cellular behaviour in complex organisms. Some projects require contributions from multiple disciplines. It is good to highlight such cross-discipline collaborations or any potential industrial collaboration. You could highlight the educational opportunities offered for undergraduate or graduate students, and any improvements to the infrastructure for research (instruments, facilities, etc) if your project is funded. You could also commit to disseminating the results to a general audience via press releases, blogs or interviews. At the end of your proposal, include a summary that wraps up your aims, and outlines the likely outcomes – what will we learn if your proposal is funded and the objectives are met – and their scientific significance, and dangles a few future directions for your next grant application. It is also worth mentioning if your proposal is a follow-up to any previously funded project. This will help reviewers recognise your qualifications as a scientist as well as the significance of your proposed project. A well-written, well-balanced and mature proposal will surely impress your reviewers. As noted earlier, there is quite a low success rate for many grant applications and fellowship schemes, so be ready for rejection and try not to take it to heart. Falling short after endless hours of writing, editing and re-writing a grant proposal is hard, very hard, especially if no feedback or reasons for rejecting your application are given. There is no denying it, getting a grant rejection letter is very demotivating and may lead you to question whether this is the career for you. But take comfort in the fact that we have all been there, and some of us have been there far more times than we can possibly remember. Try to see rejection (whether of papers or grants) as an occupational hazard and, once you've recovered from the initial disappointment, try to view an unsuccessful proposal as a learning opportunity (Box 3). Get feedback whenever possible and take these comments on board. It also helps to seek advice from seasoned peers who have written a number of grant proposals – and have experienced rejection as well. Don't forget to look objectively at your grant application, too, to identify the weak spots and find ways to address them in future applications. In most cases, the solution is not just to ‘try again’ but to ‘try differently’. And finally, good luck with those grant proposals!" @default.
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