Funding Your Science—Inside Grant Funding

Inside Grant Funding

Program officers and study section reviewers share their tips for securing research dollars.

By Alla Katsnelson

For many researchers, obtaining grants from a federal research agency such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF) is a key step in establishing and sustaining their career. But whether you’re trying to pin down which type of NIH grant from the agency’s alphabet soup of funding streams to apply for, searching out the study group that best lines up with your research, or figuring out what exactly constitutes a specific aim, the process can be difficult to navigate.

“We really try to make the peer review process transparent, but there are so many aspects involved and so many nuances that it’s difficult to communicate all the details,” says Kristin Kramer, PhD, director of communications and outreach at NIH’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR), which oversees grant reviewing at the agency.

Knowing more about how the process works won’t guarantee you the grant, but it will arm you with tools for strengthening your application. Here are some key points to keep in mind.

Understand Agency Differences

NIH and NSF, the agencies that most physiologists apply to for funding, differ slightly in the research they fund. NIH funds everything from basic to clinical projects that have a biomedical relevance. NSF’s interests hit a different sweet spot. “We are interested in really mechanistic questions in physiology,” says Kathryn Dickson, PhD, program director at NSF’s Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics program, which funds many of that agency’s physiology-related grants. “One thing we tell PIs (principal investigators) is if your research question is biomedically motivated, then it is really appropriate for NIH, not NSF.”

The two agencies might fund different aspects of a single project. “In part it’s how researchers frame it,” Dickson says. “A lot of medically related physiology can be framed as a basic biology question.” For example, a project that uses an animal model to investigate a muscle disorder would be up NIH’s alley, but one that probes how that work points to a needed revision in researchers’ understanding of muscle physiology as a whole would be more aligned with NSF.

Know the Process

Most NIH grant applications begin their journey through the review process at CSR, which last year reviewed 62,000 grant applications—76 percent of all the applications NIH received. Each grant is assigned to a study section based on the topic, and three reviewers in the study section assess it and assign a preliminary score. Based on that score, about half the applications in each study section are selected for a discussion by the full set of the section’s reviewers, which takes place over a couple days in a proverbial windowless room. After the application has been discussed and receives a score, and often a percentile ranking, the program officer at the relevant institute advises that institute—based on the institute’s payline (the percentage cut-off for funding) and other criteria—on which projects should be funded.

Individual institutes within NIH also have their own divisions for grant review, which evaluate grants that are specific to the institute—for example, those submitted through a request for applications (RFA) on a narrow topic. Institutes also have the discretion to review some types of grants internally. For example, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development reviews a category of small grants, RO3s, as well as mentored grants for senior postdocs, called K99s, in-house, explains Stuart Moss, PhD, a program director at that institute who oversees male reproductive health.

Rebecca Roof, PhD, a program director in the Division of Translational Research at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), explains that NINDS reviews applications for specialized programs, such as the translational program she manages, in this way. Just as CSR does, the institute assembles panels of peer reviewers to assess the applications. “Then, we will look closely at the peer review comments and make recommendations based on scientific and programmatic merit,” she says.

NSF has a generally similar process—review by both external experts and a panel, followed by an internal decision—except that applications go through different agency programs rather than through different study sections. Dickson notes, though, that NSF doesn’t use paylines, which gives program officers more influence in recommending whether a grant should be funded.

Get in Touch

“When I was in academia, I was typically reluctant to call my program director—they were some mysterious person that sits at NIH,” Moss says. Now, as a program officer, he strongly encourages such communication—early and often.

CSR’s Kramer agrees: “If PIs reach out to program staff in advance, they can get some guidance to shape their proposal and to make sure it fits within the areas of interest for institutes that might fund them,” she says.

Moss often asks researchers who contact him to send a rough draft of their specific aims so he can offer suggestions on what—or what not—to emphasize and advise them on the most appropriate funding mechanism for their project.

“We are here to help. We realize it’s complicated and confusing and there are a lot of mechanisms and funding opportunities,” Roof says. “The last thing you want to do is put all that time and effort into an application to find out that it doesn’t even fit the institute’s FOAs (funding opportunity announcements).”

One way to find an NIH program officer by topic is to paste an abstract or other descriptive text from your work into the “matchmaker” tab at NIH RePORTER, an online database of the agency’s published grants. Or, ask NIH-funded colleagues who do similar work for a name. If the first program officer you get to isn’t quite right, that officer will usually pass you on to someone better aligned.

The same advice holds true for NSF: Search the agency’s website for the program officer in the division that sounds most appropriate and get in touch. Researchers often think they fit the description for one division, but talking through their project reveals a better path, Dickson says. “Matching the project to the program is a big first step.”

Help Your Application Speak for Itself

An NIH study section might consist of about 30 reviewers, each of whom individually assesses up to a dozen applications. Only about half—those with the highest initial scores—get an airing at the meeting, and those that do will be discussed for perhaps 15 minutes, says Laura McCabe, PhD, a physiologist studying bone health at Michigan State University who serves as a reviewer for NIH. Clear descriptions of your approach, your reasoning and how you are addressing biological variables help reviewers highlight the grant’s strengths and argue for your project, she says. She also suggests, where appropriate, including a graphical model that depicts your hypothesis and how you plan to test it. “It’s another way to lay your ideas out,” she says.

“Reviewers will have expertise in your area, but they don’t think about that particular topic 24/7,” Moss says. “They want to be taken by the hand and led down the path on which the PI wants to go.” In that respect, the Specific Aims page, where researchers lay out the reasoning behind their project, “is absolutely critical,” Moss says. “If you’ve lost the reviewers in the Specific Aims page, you’ve lost them for the next 12 pages.”

Achieving the clarity and the right level of detail that doesn’t get into the weeds isn’t easy. McCabe recommends making sure to build in time to ask colleagues who have successfully navigated the process to provide feedback on your application. And, of course, think about format as well as content, McCabe says. Break up the page with figures and white space so that reviewers don’t have to wade through a solid page of tiny text.

One common problem in grant applications is what reviewers call a “house of cards,” Kramer says. Of course, your project’s aims should follow logically from one to the next, but one generally shouldn’t be entirely dependent on the results of another because if one aim fails, the entire grant falls apart. Along the same lines, Kramer adds, “some truly thoughtful consideration of alternative outcomes and potential pitfalls” strengthens the application.

In their training, Kramer says, NIH reviewers are sometimes encouraged to think about the five review criteria (significance, investigator, innovation, approach, environment) by considering two questions: Should a researcher do a particular project? Can they do it? The first question addresses the significance and innovation of the research and what it would bring to the field or beyond, and the second addresses whether the approach is rigorous and if the researcher has the expertise and resources for the project to be a success. The application should answer both questions, she says.

Think Like a Reviewer

NIH posts extensive materials, such as videos and guideline documents, that are used for training reviewers. Exploring exactly how reviewers are asked to assess projects can help you focus your own applications, Kramer says.

NIH also invites early-career investigators to apply to the Early Career Reviewer Program, which allows them to serve as reviewers and get a taste of the process from the inside. “The feedback we’ve gotten is that people find it invaluable in crafting their own grant,” Kramer says.

This article was originally published in the March 2020 issue of The Physiologist Magazine.