| 31 August, 2010 | Morgan Giddings |
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Getting a grant funded will be one of the most challenging things you face in your science career.
This is particularly acute when you’re trying for your first grant, but the challenge persists throughout your science career.
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On top of it, for starters make sure one of the researcher in your grant proposal is well connected and/or well known. To begin with this really helps. Some of the groups are mafia type in the sense, it is a closed circle and so again and again people within the group get the grants. Breaking into the inner circle is not easy especially if you are from a different country. The last one can be debated
Hi Venkar,
Of course it is important – one of the key factors is “trust and credibility”. I have lessons on that in both my book and online grant writing course.
But it is not so Mafia like as you think. The club(s) will usually welcome new people who come in earnest.
Does it happen overnight? No. It takes time to build relationships like that. You have to do things like sit on study sections, go to meetings, publish papers, give talks. But if you’re consistent and friendly, you will get recognized and become part of the network. And I say this as someone who has not been very good at “networking” in the past (yet got many of my projects funded).
On your second point, “the last one can be debated” – by all means, please debate. That’s why this is on a blog. I’d be interested to hear your viewpoint (though be forewarned, I will likely debate you on it).
Hi Venkar,
I fully agree with Morgan’s comments. It is a common mistake for young scientists to think that they will be more successful at landing grants if they are under the wing of a “Godfather”. This is simply not true. Well-established scientists can attract a lot of funding mostly because they are good at writing grants and, having funding already, can spend much of their time trying to get more.
The truth is that writing grant proposals is a skill that needs to be learned, and the advice given by Morgan should be heeded. Writing clearly and concisely in English is not an inborn capability, especially for foreign-born scientists (I am one, but I was lucky to have married a native speaker who is also a stickler for grammar). So your energy may be better spent learning to write well than finding well-connected PIs, unless you can get them to write the proposals themselves…
Sound advice. Humility is a hard lesson to learn.
Hi Matthew, yes, it is an incredibly difficult lesson! It has taken me many years, and still, sometimes, I find that good things can “go to my head” and destroy my humility. But when I let that happen, it never turns out well in the long run.
Getting research funding is becoming harder and harder, which makes Marc Hauser’s obviously well funded dishonest research so much more unpalatable!
While I agree with the points here, I must say that they are somewhat naive. Over the years my views on how to get funding have changed from “it all depends on the quality of the research” to “it all depends on who you know”. I think this is completely normal – you are more likely to trust someone that you know than someone you do not know. This is how it works in our society and our little research universe is not immune to this. In other words, I would add another point to this list and that is to get to know the people on the research committee.
It is funny that every time I write a blog post like this, I get people writing in with comments like this. “This view is naive because it didn’t cover topic X, Y or Z”.
These are Blog posts – they’re meant to be short little tidbits, not exhaustive tomes.
Of course “who you know” is important! That is one of the core things that I teach to turn people into excellent grant writers.
But it is not the “only thing”.
You are implying that I’m Naive. Yet of around 35 proposals of all sorts that I’ve written in my life, around 23 have been funded. It’s not like I’m some newbie that’s just spouting off here with no experience.
You can ignore this advice and think that the only thing you need to do is “know people”. I can assure you, that will only get you part of the way there.
As I said I agree with all of what you said above. I just think that you left out a major factor – that is the decision to fund you is taken by a human being. This means that a whole bunch of psychological and sociological factors also play an important role. As you yourself admit, this is clearly important. So why not also mention it? The fact that this is a blog seems unrelated.
Hi Jack,
You mention: ‘that is the decision to fund you is taken by a human being. This means that a whole bunch of psychological and sociological factors also play an important role.’
That is the core foundation of both my book http://fourstepstofunding.com, and my grant writing course.
I have a background in business marketing, and marketing is all about psychology. That’s the key distinction in my own work on grant writing training from what most others bring to the table.
Just because I didn’t write about it here doesn’t mean I think it’s not important.
While you’re dismissive of the point, these blog posts are not meant to cover everything. In fact, I was asked to write short articles, and I’ve pushed the length limits every time. Of course I’ll be writing more, and sometimes will cover topics like those of psychology and etc. Also, some of the posts on my free blog at http://morganonscience.com cover the exact points you raise.
Finally, I’m finishing a second book, “The Golden Ticket In Science” – and it is all about science career recognition through “marketing” (i.e., knowing how to “sell” your science).
Morgan
To get successfully grant funded, I have observed that the following strategy seems to work quite well:
1. Do the proposed research first! But don’t mention this in the application. Just state that you have very preliminary research in strong support of the proposal.
2. Come up with an angle where by some kind of hypothesis is being tested. Ideally it should be very simple. You don’t want to confuse the reviewers. Under no circumstances ever mention discovery-based research.
3. Rationalize that the proposed research will provide an insight into the diagnosis or treatment of a human disease. Obscure and rare diseases are fine.
3. Propose to do the work in a very simple model organism. Yeast, the fruit fly or the nematode worm are the best. This will usually appeal to a few people on the grant panel.
4. Whatever the problem is, a molecular biology strategy has to be the best. Make sure that some sort of genetic approach with mutants is being used. Try to highlight the use of RNAsi’s or micro-RNA’s to show that you are keeping up with the times.
5. Focus on just one or a few proteins, oops I means genes, in the project description. You don’t want it to look like your fishing. I recommend that one of the genes encodes a protein kinase as it could be argued to be a drug target.
6. For future studies, mention that you intend to knock out or in the gene of interest in a mouse model after you have completed the proposed work.
Good luck, because no matter what you write, you will need this too.
I do science in Argentina. Our research community is small as compared to other countries (specially US), we have less fund sources and this is a country much affected by “wrong” politics. I have written many grant proposals in my carrer, I’m 47 years old, many of which never got funded. Often many times I thought I was the victim of some sort of friends’ club that fund themselves. Although I do not deny that may exists, everytime I got a grant it was because I looked back on previous rejections, read them carefully and non-passionately and talked to people I respect to get a real perspective on what I believe is self evident about my ideas. In conclusion, I think is good to know people, people who is succesful, but to discuss science with them and then get your head and hands back to the keyboard and write a better proposal. Grant writing is a skill that needs to be learned and trained.