Hi everyone. You've made it to our final lecture. Great job. In this lecture, we'll talk about what it means to get funded, the main point of everything we've been doing in this course. We'll talk about searching and applying for funding opportunities, what to expect throughout the process, and the best way to improve your chances of getting funded. We're going to break it up into two main phases, preparing the infrastructure of your project and writing the grant. For preparing the project infrastructure, you can see that 10 tasks take place. First, you need to define the research area. Then you need to identify realistic funding targets. Then you need to choose a type of grant, research the funding announcement, and match your topic to a specific funding announcement. Next, you look at previously funded research, identify collaborators, writes specific aims, talk to your program officer, and choose a study section. Now we will go through each of these steps in more detail. The first step is defining the research idea and establishing a clear set of goals. What questions would you like to answer? What tools are you going to use? What theories or perspectives will guide you? These are important questions to consider to define your research area. You want to identify a funding target. Funding targets can be public, such as the NIH, or private. You can subscribe to the NIH Table of Contents. They'll send you a weekly noticed with everything that's new on the RFA and PA requests for applications and program announcements fund. It's a good way to always be thinking about funding. Then you have to choose the type of grant. When you're choosing the type of grant, consider the possible amount of funding offered relative to the funding required for your project. Also, does the grant opportunity target a career stage that is relevant and appropriate for you and your research team. How competitive is the application pool? Also, always consider opportunity cost. Is pursuing the type of grant you are considering going to be worth your time and energy and resources? Because while you are writing a grant, this is going to take up valuable time in which you will not be able to do other things, such as writing papers or conducting research. Research the funding announcement. Note if the call for proposals is targeting specific groups. This can include under-represented groups, those with disabilities, and more. So if you're a representative of any of those groups, you might want to consider applying for those grants, as they're widely available and provide a strong component of NIH funding portfolio. Also, note the NIH funds across the spectrum from undergraduate, all the way up to late career. They have opportunities for people at every stage. So consider applying for one of the grants that are appropriate for your current stage. Here summarizes the R01, R03, R21, R15, their parent announcements, and how much money you can get for each. Match your topic to a specific funding announcement. A good way to search Google for this information is to type in all active RFA and PA, as you will be able to find all this information about what's out there. This is a good thing to do a few times a year along with reviewing the NIH Table of Contents. Click on grants of interest and copy the program announcement number. Then you can explore a previous research that was funded by the same funding announcement to get an idea of what types of projects they're looking for. You can also see if the idea has been funded before by that announcement, then it will probably not be funded again. This is called the NIH RePORTER. It's very useful, as you can explore previously funded research, read about funding more, and decide if your grant is a good match for your topic. If it's not a great fit, repeat the previous steps. So spend time going through the NIH RePORTER to look at what has previously gotten funded. As we said before, you should also confirm that no one else has been funded on the exact same research idea, as this would diminish your chances of being funded. Then you want to identify collaborators. This is a good idea to find researchers with publications in the same field, skill sets that complement your own, and high levels of productivity and impact. It's also extremely important to pick someone you can get along with. This project save time and our hard work, and you need to be around others you can have a positive relationship with. You can use NIH RePORTER to identify researchers with the history of receiving funding to potentially collaborate with. As we noted earlier, look for someone in which you can have a positive working relationship with. You can always find these types of collaborators through word-of-mouth. This is surprisingly a good way to find collaborators, as people will tell you if other people are not good to work with, and it's worth listening to them. Write specific aims that match your research goals. Write your aims as testable hypotheses, or provide separate testable hypotheses. One of the reasons for this is when you've spent all this time and effort learning how to do power analysis, we can only do power analysis for testable hypotheses. So write them as testable hypotheses, so that you can do the power analysis. Talk to your program officer next. They are listed on the bottom of every RFA and PA. There are general ones for each institute. Call them and talk to them, as they can tell you what is relevant at the time and what's not relevant. They can give you information about what is coming up. Here's where you can find the program officer or contact information. Technically, when you look at your aims, they are only allowed to say if the aims are responsive to the goals of the announcement or not. They're not allowed to say, "Yeah, I really like that. I think that's a great idea." But in the course of chatting with many program officers at NIH over the years, we have found you can find more information. It's also very helpful when you can get help candidly. No, this will not work out, which is great because it means you won't waste your time on this effort writing something which has no way of getting funded, even if it made it through the study section. It's suppressing to hear, but you'd rather get rejected then before you write the grant instead of it after you write the grant. Choose a study section. NIH publishes a list of study sections for you to access. You can see which study sections reviewed grants that were successfully funded. So you can figure out who is on and whether they are a good fit for your type or research. The NIH Center for Scientific Review provides links to all the study sections in special emphasis panels. Special emphasis panels are similar to study sections, but they only can be in once or twice. That's it for wrapping up the project infrastructure. Now, let's move on to actually writing the grant. First, write the aims. It sounds simple, but you have to go through many iterations of aims. This is because good aims make a good grant. It needs to be immediately grabbing your attention and get you excited about the science. You only have 12 pages to make the sale, and the sale needs to be made in the first paragraph. Essentially, you need to describe the problem, talk about why it's serious, describe that you can fix it by answering a question, and present a question. Then you can see the next steps in writing the grant, which we'll go through step-by-step. Write the analysis plan and make sure it is aligned with the power analysis. Refer back to the steps we talked about for aligned power analysis. Conduct an aligned power and sample size analysis. For this, refer back to the steps for handling multiple aims. The minute you have that, you can draft the budget because you know your sample size will be. Every department here has grants management administrator. You want to consult them early and often to help you along with the process. Based on your projects details, your grants management administrator may advise you to revise your budget or sample size based on feasibility. Make sure to include a justification for your budget. This is important, as it will proactively answer questions reviewers will undoubtedly have regarding your allocation of costs. As we mentioned, the grants management administrator or your institution will be a valuable resource to discuss all things regarding the grant, especially for details related to the specific institution. We advise you to contact the grant management administrator early, so that you do not waste time drafting something that is already prepared for you to use. Write, revise, and repeat. Internal reviewers can definitely help. It is a good idea to have trusted peers that will hold you accountable and read your grants. You want somebody who is comfortable giving you negative comments, so that you can fix things before you send it out. Then it is finally, time to submit your grant. It's important to set reasonable expectations. By this, we really mean set low expectations, as NIH accepts very low percentage of grant submitted. So it is better to expect less and then be happily surprised when your grant is accepted. So why bother with a good power analysis in the face of almost certain failure? We'd encourage you to go out there, write your grants and fail. Write them again and fail again. Keep writing them. Eventually, by sheer numbers, you're going to get one through. In the meantime, every grant attempt is a promise to do good science. As researchers, we have ethical obligation to participants, other scientists, and to society, as your power and sample size analysis is an ethical obligation. These are people who have mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. As researchers, we need to be careful. Their lives are in your hands. So that is why we bother with good power analysis, even though our grants will fail most of the time. In summary, it is important to prepare your project infrastructure in advantageous ways and then follow the steps, as we discussed in actually writing the proposal. If you are careful about things, prepare the infrastructure for the project in beneficial ways, conduct high-quality power analysis, and do a good job writing your grant. You will be doing part as the scientist in sending out high-quality ethical research opportunities into the world. Thank you for taking the time in this course and congratulations for making it to the end. Good luck and happy power analysis in grant writing.
