 So if you're just getting started applying for NIH grants, this might be how the NIH looks to you. You work hard to put your best ideas into a grant application. You send it off and something happens, and then maybe a grant comes out the other side. So my name is Lisa Chadwick. I'm a program director at the National Human Genome Research Institute, and I coordinate our programs for early-stage investigators. Today, I'm going to try to take you inside that black box. In this video, I'm going to answer some questions you might have, like, how is the NIH organized, and why does that matter to me? How do I decide what to apply for? Who do I talk to about this? What happens to my application after I submit it? How does a review meeting work? And what do I do next? Understanding how this process works can help you be a better grant writer and hopefully increase your chances at getting a grant out of that black box. So first, let's talk about how the NIH is organized. The NIH is made up of 27 different institutes and centers. We sometimes call those ICs. They all have some kind of scientific focus or health-related focus, like aging, cancer, neurological disorders, etc. The National Human Genome Research Institute or NHGRI is one of those institutes. Now, why is that important for you as a grant writer? Well, you're likely to spend a lot of your grant writing life submitting applications to a fairly small subset of those institutes or centers. You'll want to know which ones fund the kind of work that you do. One reason that this is important is because not all ICs participate in every funding opportunity. This is especially true for some of the smaller grants like R21s or RO3s. You really want to make sure that the institute that funds work like yours participates in the funding opportunity you're applying to. Because if you don't, you run the risk of your application being rejected before it even gets reviewed. Finally, even though all of these ICs are under the umbrella of the NIH, they all operate largely independently. And they may have different ways of doing things. It's really helpful to understand how the institutes that are most relevant to your work operate. For example, some institutes may have a defined pay line that they publish and others don't. And some, they may also interpret some of our policies a little bit differently or implement them a little bit differently. So it's a good idea to know which institute funds research like yours. So what kind of research does NHGRI fund? Well, we take applications that do things like developing tools, technologies or approaches to study the genome or how it functions. Applications that use genomics to advance the science of medicine or improve the effectiveness of healthcare. We take applications that study the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics and genomics research. We're generally looking for things that are larger in scale. So they're not focusing just on one gene or a small subset of genes. We are also looking for things that are broadly applicable. So they can be used in many different kinds of contexts. They're not only going to be useful to tell you about one particular cell type or one particular disease. And then we also look for things that are not just mechanistic studies. So you're not just using genomics techniques to understand how a disease or a biological process works. It's really important for you to talk to a program officer to make sure that your research is a good fit for the Institute before you submit your application. There are a lot of different kind of stuff at the NIH that you might interact with, but program officers are who you'll probably interact with the most. We can be really helpful to you when you're putting your application together. So we can help you figure out whether your research is a good fit for our Institute or for the funding opportunity that you're considering. We can also help you figure out where your application is likely to be reviewed and what kinds of things they're going to be looking for. We can also review your aims and give you feedback on them. So how do you figure out what program officer you should be talking to? There are a couple of ways that you can do that. So first, if you're applying for a specific funding opportunity announcement, it will tell you in that announcement who it is. This is a screenshot of one of NHGRI's funding opportunities. This one is specifically for early career researchers in genomics. There's a lot of information in a funding announcement, but right at the top you'll see a couple of important things. So you'll see the grant mechanism that's used. This one uses an R01 mechanism. And you'll see the due date. So this one has had one due date a year for three years. The next one is on February 27th of 2024. Then if you scroll a little bit further down, you'll find the table of contents. So each of these sections is hyperlinked. And if you click on agency contacts, it will bring you to this section. The person that's listed as the scientific and research contact is the program officer that you should reach out to. If you're not applying to a specific funding announcement, you can also find the right program officer by looking at our website at genome.gov. You'll be able to look for the person who covers the kind of science that's in your application. So if you go to our website at the top, you would click on the icon that says research funding. That will open up a dropdown menu. And then you'll click on contacts by research area. That brings you to a different menu that's broken down into different broad scientific areas and some subtopics. And then when you click on one of those subtopics, it will expand and show you some of the program officers that cover the grants in that scientific area. So now that you know who to talk to, how do you contact them? The first big tip I would give you is not to cold call them. I'm just not going to be very helpful to you if I don't know ahead of time what we're talking about. It's really best for you to reach out by email. And if you don't hear back from us, don't hesitate to email us again. Just like you, we get a lot of email and it's really easy for things to get lost in our inbox. If you have a draft of your specific aims, even if it's a very preliminary draft, it's really helpful to include it in that initial email. And then ask us if you can set up a time for a call or a zoom to talk about your aims. I just want to make sure that you all know that working with applicants is really one of the most important parts of our job. So you should never hesitate to contact us to talk about your application. The next thing I wanted to touch on are the different ways that you can apply for a grant. So we call these notices of funding opportunity. Understanding these can tell you a lot about how the application will be reviewed and funded. So first you might talk, hear people talk about applying through the parent announcement. That's what we also call investigator initiated applications. This is like when you wake up in the morning you have a great idea you want to submit a grant application. This is how you would do that and the topic is really up to you and whatever you have on your mind. And parent announcements have three due dates per year. We call those the standard dates, the specific dates depend on the kind of application you're submitting but they'll be linked in the announcement. Those kinds of applications get reviewed in what we call standing study sections. Those are recurring review panels with a specific scientific focus and a fairly consistent set of reviewers. We also see funding opportunities that are what we call par's or nosies nosy stands for a notice of special interest. This is how an Institute tells you about specific scientific areas that we want to get more applications in but we don't necessarily have a specific amount of money set aside for. They can have anywhere from one to three due dates a year, and the dates will be listed in the funding announcement. We generally get reviewed in those standing study sections, although a par will include some additional special review criteria that the reviewers will also be looking for. And then finally there are announcements that are called RFAs. This is an Institute telling you that they're so interested in this topic that they've set aside a certain amount of money to fund applications in that area. These are going to be a lot more specific in terms of what they're asking for. There's usually only one due date for these are maybe one per year for a few years. These will get reviewed in what we call special emphasis panels. So those are panels that are specially convened to review the applications that came into that announcement. Another thing that you'll want to know when you're applying is whether you qualify as a new or early stage investigator. So these are two statuses that are kind of related. A new investigator is what we call someone who has never been the PI of a significant independent NIH research grant like an R01. It doesn't matter where you are in your career, you may have even had funding from another source like the NSF, but you've just never had an NIH grant before. You can still be a new investigator in that case. Now early stage investigators are a subset of these. Not only have you never been the PI of a major R01 type NIH grant, but you're also within 10 years of having finished your last degree or your residency. So it's really important to find using the information that you put into your ERA comments profile. So it's really important to make sure that you have that up to date and that you check to make sure that the status is reflected correctly. Now, why is this so important? Well, when you submit an R01 application, the reviewers will know whether you're a new or early stage investigator. The applications are usually clustered in the review meeting, so reviewers are not going directly from reviewing like the leader in your field's application and then to yours where you're just starting in your career. Also, the reviewers understand that you will have fewer preliminary data and publications, and they'll be evaluating that within the context of your career stage. One really important thing is that if you have multiple PIs on the application, in order for it to be flagged this way, they all have to have that ESI status. So when you're an ESI, it's really important to be strategic about how you involve other people in your grant application and whether you choose to include co-PIs or not. Another reason that this status is so important is that you may be eligible for funding opportunities that are only open to early stage investigators. At the time I'm making this video, there's one like that at NHGRI. The announcement number is RFA-22-001, and there's a due date for that on February 27, 2024. If you have questions about early stage investigator status, the NIH has a helpful FAQ page. I have the link here on this slide, and you can also find that by searching for it. Okay, so now you've talked to a program officer, you figured out what announcement you were applying for, and you submitted your application. Now what happens? So now it'll go to the division of receipt and referral, which is within the Center for Scientific Review at the NIH. There it'll get assigned to one of the NIH institutes, and that's based on the sciences and the application. And it'll also get assigned to a study section. That could be a special emphasis panel like we talked about, or it could be a standing study section, depending on the kind of announcement that you apply to. I would also always like to tell people about this great tool, which is called the assisted referral tool. This can help you figure out what study section your application is likely to go to. So you would paste the text of your specific aims page in, and the tool will tell you what study sections are most relevant to it. It also will have a link to the roster for that study section. So you can see the kind of people that will be reviewing your application. So in addition to knowing where your application is going to be reviewed, I think it's helpful to understand how a review works, because it can really help you write a better grant application. So your application will be assigned to usually about three reviewers ahead of the meeting, they'll read your application and the others that they were assigned. The initial overall impact score and they'll submit it. And then before the meeting, the scientific review officer will take all the scores for each application and average them. In most reviews, only the top half of scores will actually be discussed at the meeting, although sometimes reviewers might pull some of the applications out of that non discussed or triage pile that they want to talk about. In itself, what will happen is that the three assigned reviewers will state their preliminary scores, and then they'll tell the rest of the panel about the application and why they gave it the score that they did. Then everyone gets a chance to ask them questions and talk about it. And then at the end of the discussion the three assigned reviewers will again state their overall impact score that may have even changed over the course of the discussion. Everyone on the panel will give it a score based on what they heard during the discussion. They're typically going to vote within the range of scores that were established by the assigned reviewers but not always. Then they'll discuss any administrative issues like resource sharing or budget, and then they'll move on to the next application, and that takes about 15 minutes. So all that work that you've done 15 minutes of discussion. So I think it's helpful to think about who your reviewers are when you're writing your application. They're really your audience and you're writing for them. So who are reviewers. Well they are scientists, but it's important to remember that they're not the exact same kind of scientists as you. So they probably have a broad understanding of the topic but they are not a specialist in exactly the same field as you are. It's really important to make sure that even a non specialist can understand what you're planning to do and why. Reviewers are also really trying hard to give your application a fair review, but they are also going to be critical. That's their job after all. Another thing that's important to remember is that they have a job, maybe a family, they have other responsibilities, and they're probably sitting down to read your application at the end of a long day that they've been busy doing all that other stuff. They're probably tired. So think about what you would like to read at the end of a long day. No one really wants to sit down to a wall of extremely technical texts at 10pm at night so it's really helpful to keep that in mind when you're writing. Make sure that you're making your application as easy as possible for them to read. So you want to make sure you lay things out in a logical way. You're clear and concise with your writing. Make sure you're not using a lot of overly technical jargon that people won't understand. Don't be afraid to organize the page in a way that is pleasing. You don't need to fill every single space with words. Also, make sure you proofread. That's really important. And then finally, you want to know what they're going to be looking for and make sure you serve it right up to them. That's really spelled out in the review criteria in the funding opportunity. So it's important to be familiar with that and make sure that that's all clearly contained in your application. So now that your application has been reviewed, what happens? I think we all know that the first thing that happens is that you will refresh eRA Commons hundreds of times waiting to see if your score has been posted. It doesn't make it appear faster, but it makes you feel better and that's okay. In a couple of days, you will get your score and you might also get a percentile. That tells you where that score falls relative to the other applications that that study section has reviewed. You won't always get a percentile though. It really depends on the kind of study section that you were in. A few weeks after that, you'll get your summary statement. The summary statement will contain the written critiques from the three assigned reviewers. And if it was discussed at the meeting, there will also be a short summary of that discussion. And then you try to figure out what to do next. This is another great time to talk to your program officer. The program officer that's been assigned to your application will be listed on your summary statement with their contact information, and they can help you strategize about your next steps. So they can probably give you some insight into the likelihood of funding, and they can talk to you about whether it's a good idea for you to revise and resubmit your application. They can also be really helpful in helping you understand what the real score driving points were and where you should focus your effort. A lot of times you'll read the summary statement and you'll find something in there that really makes you mad, but that's not always the thing that really drove the score. And I can help you find that. I didn't spend months writing this application. I'm not personally invested in it, and I can help give you that sort of advice. So hopefully this video has given you some new insight and how to better navigate the NIH process. I do also want to mention that NHGRI's website has a landing page for early career researchers. Here you'll find a lot of helpful information, including events that may be of interest and funding opportunities that are available to people at your career stage.