1. My lab currently
has no other funding and I’m going up for tenure soon. NIH study sections are not supposed to
consider these things, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was the
grant to hit the payline.
2. I submitted what I
would consider credible applications to this study section at least 2 out of 3
grant cycles for the last 3 years.
They’ve seen my name many times at this point, and I’m sure that
helped. These repeated submissions also
involved a bit of “spaghetti throwing” to see what sticks to the walls, i.e.,
experimenting with what combination of aims the reviewers liked.
3. I stopped
publishing my lab’s research. I discussed this in my last post, but I think it
bears repeating because it seems to have been successful. I still had collaborative manuscripts coming
out, so I have lines on my CV for this year.
But, what I had experienced too many times was that I would submit a
grant and the reviewers would say certain aims were incremental because we had
already published on the topic. In one
instance, I had a paper accepted surprisingly quickly, so it was out before the
study section met, and basically scooped one of my own subaims. I was not going to let this happen again, so
I put a pause on our submissions. This
idea of needing a strategy for timing of publications is not something I had
thought about previously.
4. Having served on
five study sections now for NIH and other national or international
organizations, I’ve seen a total variety of successful grants written in
completely different ways. What I will
say is that there are a few things that seem to be necessary if you’re a new PI
and/or not famous: a perceived need for
funding by the study section even though these things are never discussed
outright (e.g., tenure deadline, no other funding, salary requirements for your
institution), a steady track record of productivity (fancy journal publications
help immensely whether that’s fair or not), credible applications (clear and
concise with not a single extraneous experiment; if an experiment won’t give a
clear result, don’t include it), appropriate collaborators with strong letters
of support for any new techniques, and something about your application that is
really exciting or novel.