For three years, I kept submitting a grant for what I still think is the best science to come out of my lab. And for three years it didn’t get funded. It scored 20th percentile at one point, which felt close, and then on the next round it went back to not discussed. Not the direction you want after three years of work. With every resubmission, I was doing exactly the thing you’re supposed to do. Address the reviewer comments. Add the experiment they asked for. Acknowledge the angle they cared about. And with every submission, the project drifted a little further from what I actually set out to do. By year three it had become a Swiss Army knife. Every tool the reviewers had ever asked for, all folded into one proposal that was too big, too diffuse, and pointed in about six directions at once. The science underneath was still good. I never stopped believing that. But it had gotten buried.
At some point I started thinking the obvious thought: maybe this is the wrong audience. My research is at the intersection of two subfields, and I’d been sending the grant to one of them. What if it belonged with the other?
The resistance I felt to that idea was real. The audience I’d been writing for was the one I Know very well. I had the proper technical terminology down. I know what this field cares about and how they talk about it (at least I think I do?!?). Writing for the other subfield meant unfamiliar ground. It meant going back into a different body of literature and wrapping my head around it. From my previous work with Morgan Giddings ayt SciFOundry (the grant expert who helped my with my early career grant success) I knew that this is a big, messy chunk of work and I had no plan for how to actually do it. Knowing roughly what needs to happen is not the same as knowing how to start and having a process to get it done.
So I reached out to Morgan. I’d worked with her before on audience research, so I knew the approach existed although back in the day it was much more vague than the process she developed now. So I worked through her Grant Foundry Accelerator, a process you walk through working one-on-one with a coach. It took about half a year. It was not effortless and it was not simple. I spent a lot of hours doing what I fondly refer to as my “GFA homework.” But it was doable in a way that writing the previous version of this grant was not, because there was an actual process to follow for the parts that are normally the guessing game. Should I include this piece of background information or is it too much? What about this weakness? Point the reviewers attention to it in the pitfalls section or hope they won’t notice? How do I open the Specific Aims page? And what do I write under Innovation? In GFA, you work through all these considerations before you even start writing.
But the process did not start where I expected.
We didn’t start with the reviewers. We started with me.
The first phase is about your Big Idea. Not the grant but the idea! What actually excites you, and can you say it clearly and precisely. To do that I had to get specific about things I’d been thinking about loosely. What is the mental model the field is holding right now? How is what I’m doing different from that model? Why is the current model not working anymore, and how does my work move the field forward?
As I worked through the process, I thought I was answering grant questions (you work strategically through a mindmap with prompts that Morgan and her team designed based on more than a decade of experience working with researchers on their grants).
I was now thinking about the potential impact of my research at the level of my career. And because of that, while I was working toward the R01 that I submitted just yesterday, I was also able to spin out two other proposals at the same time (first time, I usually hate submitting more than one thing at a time).
More importantly, once I stopped trying to satisfy reviewers and started articulating what I actually believe:
I got excited about the science again!
And I started seeing it in bigger terms than I had before, the kind of questions you don’t answer in a single proposal but that tell you why the single proposal matters. That changed the grant more than I expected. Not the science itself. I’d like to think the science was always thoughtful, important and rigorous. What changed was the context I put it in.
The next phase turns to the audience. What does the reviewer actually care about, and how do you present your big idea so it connects with them? This is where it became clear that the audience I’d been chasing for three years may not be the right match for where my excitement is biggest. For this focus, the other is a better fit. But that also is the scary one that I know less about. So that’s where the new version is going.
So in this phase you are doing the real work, the part people often skip because they think they already know. Or because they have been taught that writing grants is about great ideas and solid science. That’s the foundation and where GFA starts. But then you need to close the gap. Your reviewers are standing where the field currently stands. Your work has moved past that. You can’t just show up, announce where your thinking has arrived, and expect them to follow. You have to build the bridge from where they are to where your thinking is, deliberately, on the page. Instead of slamming them over the head with your conclusions, you are walking them across a bridge.
The last phase is what you take away when the proposal is done: a repeatable system. By the time you’ve worked through the other phases, you’re not just finishing a better proposal. You’ve built a process. You understand how to develop a fundable idea, how to identify the right audience for it, and how to close the gap in your writing between where reviewers stand and where your thinking is. The next proposal does not start from zero. You know how to do this now. You’ve probably already done a lot of the work for subsequent proposals.
So, this version went in this week, stay tuned for the outcomes. Here is my takeaway:
The science I am excited about is now front and center. But that’s not where we start. The grant now takes seriously where the field is, instead of presenting an interesting discovery and hoping my reviewers find it just as intriguing. I built the bridge. With everything happening at NIH right now, nobody knows what will get funded, and that was never the part I could control. What I can control is whether the words on the page reflect how our research fits into the field the way I actually see it. This time, they do.
If you’ve got a grant that scored well once and then went backwards, or a project you still believe in that somehow stopped sounding like yours, it might not be the science. And it may not be unfundable science. It might be that your Big Idea got buried or bridges are missing
Stefanie
