I'm going to let Dr. Orgell in. It's pretty exciting to have that power. Hi everyone, welcome, welcome. Got one more minute to go and now we'll get started. 40 people on already. Wow, look at that. Thanks faculty, thanks for bringing everyone in. Okay, it's four. All right, I'd like to say hi to everyone. Thank you guys all for being here for the research fundamentals of writing grants and a special thank you to all of the faculty who have been so gracious about giving their time to talk about some of these very germane topics for researchers. So Derek and I would like to really extend a great thank you to all of you. We have a pretty packed program tonight but the way we're planning on doing this is for it to be similar to previous years where for the most part it's more like a conversation. So if anyone wants to unmute and ask questions feel free or if you want to ask questions in the chat box that is fine too and I will man the chat box with Derek. So this is sort of our program to get started. I won't go down the list and read through all of that but we'll introduce all the speakers as they all come up. The other thing that we wanted to make sure people in the audience see are our grant opportunities Ruth do you mind going to the next slide? So the PSF investigator research grants they're all open now for this upcoming cycle so everyone please feel free to check all that out. Okay without further ado since we have a pretty long program let's get started. And oh I should mention at the very end we're going to announce our Sarnat grant writing winners. Derek will announce the winners and so that'll be how we end the program. Yeah and one other thing before we get started I just wanted to let everybody know that this session is being recorded tonight. So this will be uploaded and you can view at your leisure later on in case you missed something important or want some guidelines and a review of the tips that are provided tonight later on as you're putting together your grants. And I just also wanted to mention that the grant cycle is open now and the deadline is December 1st so hopefully people are getting started on their grant proposals pretty soon. All right so as Justine mentioned we have a lot of different panels tonight providing tips and tricks on putting together a successful grant for the PSF and also for other grant funding mechanisms. The first panel that we put together tonight will be for basic science grant writing. Basically the the top three do's and don'ts in grant writing for basic science and the panelists that we've put together for this one are Alex Wong from USC, Allison Snyder Oreck from Wash U, and David Mathis from Colorado. Thanks so much Derek and thanks Justine for having us on this panel. Yeah so I think that really the basic science teams and the clinical science teams sort of work together and brainstorm a lot of great ideas for do's and don'ts and there's really a lot to cover but I think we were each going to highlight one. So for my do it's to make things simple for the reviewers. You don't want the reviewers to get irritated as they're going through your grant. So that means you want to keep it clear simple and easy to follow so they don't have to work hard and then really point out things that you think are important. So you know a main point you want to underline or bold the type on that point and then at the end of each aim I think it's kind of nice to actually summarize the aim you know maybe in one sentence maybe pull it out of paragraph form and put it in italics just to say this is what I just said in the last page or page and a half to make it simple. And then that also means keep it neat and keep it organized too just so they can clearly follow your flow of thought. David do you want to add your do's and then maybe we can hit the don'ts. Okay I think you know one is one that I've noticed a lot on grants is do you get the right collaborations. I mean if you've never published on a technique that is vital to the grant success you really need to find someone who has published on that technique because it really adds a lot more validity to what you say you're going to do right. If you're going to grow out some sort of cells that you've never grown but somebody else has and you can get them as a collaborator then you know the reviewers more likely to believe that you can accomplish that. Whereas if you just say well I read this paper so I can make these cells it's a little less believable. So that would be my do. Is Alex on? I'm not sure if he's on. I don't think Alex has signed on yet. Okay then you get another do. Another do is similar you know I would say collaborate you know find people who complement your work well and just elevate your proposal even more. Everyone loves a party. Yeah and the other one that I think we find a lot on the plastic surgery grants that is do really work on the alternative strategies and anticipated issues right because everyone would like to have a research project that went perfectly and everything that you said came true but that doesn't generally happen. So I you know when I look at a grant or I know when everybody else has been on the committees we like to be able to see that you know you understand that things may not work and you've got some kind of plan of how you're going to make it work or some alternative strategy and you know it doesn't have to be amazing but it just has to show some thought. You know certainly for the $10,000 grants it's a lot less but for the bigger grants you know it's you expect a little bit more. I'm going to share Alex's do. He had several good ones but I think one is you know have other people read your grant and especially people outside of your field of expertise because your reviewer may not exactly be in your field. Hopefully it's somewhat related but you know just making sure that your flow of thought makes sense to someone who isn't in the thick of it the way that you are and has the same knowledge that you do. Yeah that's a good that's a good one. I put that as a don't. I said don't assume that your grant makes sense. Because a lot of times it makes sense to you and to no one else and so that I agree like you know really getting people to read your grant the more people that read it the better it's going to be and the more readable it is. And that's why I think you know I think I remember Babak always saying like you know get your before you even write your grants you really want to get your specific aims defined and that kind of will help you build the grant. If your specific aims aren't really well defined then the grant's not going to flow. And so I think that that's another little little area that kind of goes along with that. Excellent yeah your masterpiece may not look the same to somebody else. Great and Alex Alex just logged on also. Alex we were just sharing some of your thoughts too. Oh hi everyone sorry uh wait. No problem. We were just doing the do's maybe we should move on to the the don'ts. So mine is don't get sensitive you know be coachable with the reviewer comments. You know consider their feedback. You may not make every change they suggest but really take it to heart and think about it with an open mind. Alex you have a good don't. Sure yeah I'm happy to add. I'll just shoot off two to make up for my absence in the do's part but real easy to say but don't be boring. I mean I'm guilty of it myself of writing a boring grant. So if you write a boring grant it feels safe to you but it's boring to the reader and unfortunately that's just not compelling to make someone want to give you 50,000, 100,000 or 3 million dollars. So you just can't do that. So definitely you know it probably links in with some of the do's. So send your grant to other people so that they can tell you it's boring or not and again you know don't be offended by the fact that you've written something boring. I think many of us have done that. I have for sure and you know think about the reviewers. They're reviewing you know eight grants or ten grants in detail or more and then the study section has 35. They want to be excited about what you're excited by. So you know do your best to make it obvious why what you're working on is exciting and important and you know although we all get into the nitty-gritty and parts of it can be you know boring and try and find a twist to make it not so much. My second one is don't submit with like really obvious grammatical or formatting errors. If I see that then it means that you didn't do spellcheck and really basic things to be detail-oriented and if you're not detail-oriented enough to do that for a document where you're asking for a lot of money it's you know probably going to translate into your carelessness with supervising your trainees or if you're at the bench being careless with your PCR or whatever and unfortunately just doesn't inspire confidence to the reviewer. Formatting is important you know these are you make it look organized make it easy to find things so you know don't make your formatting poor you know don't have your image impossible to see you know don't do things that you wouldn't want to read yourself. So I hope that's helpful to many people. Yeah I think I put some similar things to go along with that. Yeah I think I put some similar things to go along with what you just said Alex. I said like you know you got to tell a story in the grant the grant still has to kind of try to tell a story I mean obviously isn't like fiction but you don't want it you don't want so much technical jargon that like an expert is not going to really understand what you're doing so you got to kind of like kind of think of your audience and you know they may not be as interested as you are in every little detail you have to have details but some of that can be kind of put in a way that it's not you know torture and then my other one was don't make figures that no one can figure out because like half the time you know if you make some you first of all you're trying to save space so you make this tiny little figure that has like eight billion things in it and then no one like no one looking at it would ever know what it is it would be better just to have one figure with that saying one thing that's really important and maybe make another figure or maybe not just leave it out maybe you don't need all those little things but sometimes when people try to put preliminary data but it's just too many little things in a box I mean I don't want to sit there and try to you know get the magnifying glass out or enlarge it to try to figure out what you're saying so you know the bar it's for the reviewer the the bar is is as low to ignore things you know like you're like I'm not going to try to figure out what you wrote there I mean it's not you know that's what that's what the your people who are reading it to help you will do but the reviewer is not they're just going to be like you know too bad I don't understand that move on yeah I totally agree with those all right yeah so the next group of three panelists will be talking about grant writing tips for do's and don'ts from the clinical perspective so we've assembled Erica Sears from Michigan, Terry McCadden from WashU and Evan Matros is calling in from New York. Hi everyone well I'll oh I'll just start off by saying you know many of the do's and don'ts are will be the same whether or not you have a clinical grant or a basic science grant and so you know definitely listen to the advice that you're given by both panels and so we'll try to give some extra emphasis on on the clinical grant side but really they're applicable to both and so I'll start off with one I think to me it's one of the most important things in crafting your grant and specific aims and that is to have a do have a thorough understanding of the knowledge gap that you are trying to address in the proposed work and so you know it's really important to in doing that to really understand and know the literature cold and really tell a story and as was already mentioned about what the gap is so what is known what is not known and then therefore that that sets the stage for the work that you are proposing to do and I think to even a step further is you know how is the world going to be a better place and how is practice going to be changed or whether it's policy clinical care saving money you know what is the impact and so that all starts with the fundamental understanding of what the gap is and where your position is in terms of the work that you're proposing and so there's specific aims really tells that at a high level and then you'll expand on that in the in the body of the grant but really just having a fundamental understanding and having the reviewer and readers know clearly what the gap is that you're trying to address and the work is important. Evan do you want to go next since you're the it's okay I'll I'll be able to get through this that's how late it's going to be it's going to be a miserable night go ahead Terry. Sure all right yeah so so mine was that you you want to make sure that the reviewer knows your specific aims and so I think it's really important that you spend a huge amount of your time in preparing your grant to have very clear specific aims to have your colleagues to review your specific aims and really know like get what you're trying to say and to have corroboration that you're stating these things clearly. I don't want to steal the thunder I'm just noticing that Dr. Green and Dr. Pisa are going to be talking about specific aims a little bit later but it is so important and you want to so you do want to restate them you do want them to be clear and also if you have several aims you want to make sure that they are complementary perhaps but not dependent on one another. Certainly there's lots of experiments that don't work or don't work the think way we think they will and so you want to make sure that the second aim is still doable and still impactful still moves the needle even if aim one didn't work out or not the way you thought it would. So not dependent and clearly stated specific aims is the deal. All right Terry thank you I guess I'll do the next dues for our group and I actually think this is something that can be again both applicable to basic science and clinically oriented research but you really need a clear analytics process which is well described and a statistical plan. So you can do all this great research but you really have to prove that it matters and your analytics will allow you to really tell the story in a different way. You know a small benefit may not be statistically significant and so you really have to address that you can write the best grant in the world but really people are going to count on you to prove that it's significantly better than whatever you know your null hypothesis would be. So with that in mind often we find that grants lack of power calculation and so I would encourage everyone to figure what that might mean for your particular type of study and if necessary consult a statistician in advance. It's certainly not something that you should do at the very end as everyone as every surgeon knows statisticians don't work our hours and so I would encourage everyone to to seek their counsel very early on in the process. You know you could completely you know undo all of your findings with a poor statistical plan so I think you have to consider that. There are some exceptions to having like a very clear analytical and statistical plan so I think there are some grant mechanisms or types of grants where you might not need to focus on the analytics and the statistical plan. So for example if you're doing a pilot grant then you don't need that kind of analysis that kind of you know heavy duty level of thinking for those pilot grants. It doesn't mean always yes or always no. Know what you're doing but I think it's possible in a pilot grant that you wouldn't achieve statistical significance it might just be proof of concept. And another example might be and Andrea's on the phone. Hi Andrea. You know would be qualitative research so if you're doing interviews that are trying to capture domains for quality of life studies and it's the initial steps of that you know don't expect that type of analytical plan. It won't be necessary. So I think that would be applicable you know particularly for the clinically oriented research group. But I think a lot of what I said would go for basic science as well. So that's my contribution to the do section. I guess we can move to the don'ts. Do any of you have any important don'ts for clinical grant writing. Yeah so I will second one of the don'ts that we had as collectively as a team is don't have an adequate team. I know the basic science panel commented on that. You know it's really doubly important to leverage or to understand your own strengths and experience and expertise and to make sure you do a thorough assessment of what skills are needed to realistically complete the stated work or proposed work and to make sure that you have the appropriate expertise. You don't want the reviewers to question whether or not the plan and the research plan is going to be achievable. And yeah so and I'll just say a second one since there's just to give you a new don't. I would not write the grant and assuming that an expert is going to be the one reviewing your grant. So it really needs to be written to assuming that your reviewer may not be an expert in the technique you're proposing or even the clinical area. And so I'll just give you an example. I'm a VA researcher in health services research and I can tell you most certainly there would likely be few surgeons reviewing my grants. And so they have to be really written toward a broad audience in order for that funding agency to want to invest in my research. And so you just have to really understand who your reviewer is or who that group of reviewers may be. And likely assume that they're not going to be an expert in the work that you're proposing. Yeah my don't is to not overextend yourself in terms of what you're proposing. So you know if you're proposing a ten thousand dollar pilot study you don't need two or three significant specific aims. The expectation you know as Evan had said before is in those types of cases you're not going to you know sort of accrue enough patients potentially to get a statistically relevant plan. Nor necessarily should you be doing that you know for some of these smaller budget grants. So basically you know you want to make sure that you answer the question you do it well. But something that can be done on budget on time and is realistically achievable. I think that's really important. Like nobody expects an an R01 grant with a ten thousand dollar pilot. Thanks Terry. I think I have the last don't. And I think some of this is a little bit repetitive but I'll try and deliver it in an alternate fashion. So you think I'm telling you something different but I'm really telling you the same thing I think that Allison said. So I think the entire application matters. And the first time you do one of these grants for the PSF it's like it feels like there's a million parts to it. And what happens is inevitably in some area you fall short on the grant. And so you really the whole thing has to be completely bulletproof from top to bottom and everything what you said at the beginning needs to correlate with what you're saying in the middle and needs to tie together at the end and all the numbers and all the language and everything that you're doing needs to be completely consistent throughout the grant. But don't don't run out of steam early on you know with doing a great you know you know specific aims or you know a great introductory page and then and then fall short with your analysis plan. And that's and that's what will happen because you know each part is so important to the whole body of the grant and so really just think about it and pace yourself as you go through it so that each section is tight. Along I think with what Allison said is so to that end you know review with a colleague and get feedback early you don't want to wait till the very end. And then the last thing particularly for the for the training grants, what we often find when we review the grants at the study section is that a mentorship plan is often lacking. So the training grants require you to have a mentor and they also require you to have some sort of educational component to it. And that can mean different things depending upon what your research is, but people often will have a great grant and they'll have a great mentor and then they don't talk about how they're gonna interact with their department of surgery or their department of plastic surgery or what other educational courses they're gonna do during that time. So for the training grants, I think it's really important that you are clear and you have your whole mentorship plan and educational plan well delineated. That's what I got. All right, thank you. Are there any others? All right, those are all great. Thank you everyone for giving your top three dos and don'ts. I wish a lot of these I had known when I first got started and unfortunately I had to learn from making mistakes. So we have a wonderful opportunity for all this experience to be shared to everyone tonight and no problem with the repeated points as I always like to say, if it's really important, it's gonna be repeated from multiple panelists tonight. So pay particular attention to things that are reiterated throughout the evening. All right, so thank you everyone for serving on this panel and we can move to the next session. Yeah, again, thanks for all these general points. I think they're very applicable for all grants. And now we're gonna sort of drill down to some more specifics. Our next two speakers are Avi Jaladi from Union Memorial and Sam Poore from University of Wisconsin. And they're gonna give us some ideas on some resources to get started. Okay, I'm going to, Avi and I have met and kind of come up with a plan here. So we're gonna both show a few slides and really kind of retitled this section, how to get started part one and part two. I need to share my screen. Can you see it? No, not yet. Okay, here we go. Yes. Okay, so really Erica and Derek, thank you for inviting us. It's such an honor to be amidst such an amazing group of researchers and students and residents, et cetera. So how to get started part one, I would say that the best resource for resources is a good mentor. If you're getting started without a good mentor, you're really gonna have a lot of trouble, I think. So my sort of first resource is this, find somebody with a track record in mentorship, someone with grant writing experience and who knows the system, who's willing to potentially share space and equipment and understands the challenges of balancing clinical care and research. So for example, if you're at Michigan and you're a new faculty, I would highly recommend that you work with somebody like Jen Walgy or Erica or Paul Soderna who really understand what we're trying to do because this is a hard thing to balance. One of the best things about having a really good mentor is if you find somebody who you can share space with, that's really good because it saves you a lot of money. You can avoid buying expensive pieces of equipment and it really allows you to use startup funds for stuff other than just buying like a sequencer or some huge piece of equipment that's gonna eat away half of your money. I really, really was fortunate here at the UW to work with a mentor who literally gave me lab space, let me use all of his equipment, let me be a part of their lab meetings and really this person ended up being a major collaborator and I used all of my startup funds to hire someone. So that was really, really critical for me and I recommend that approach if you're just getting started. One thing that helped me immensely was a grant writing course and there are a lot of them out there. I recommend this one specifically, they'll give you this great book right here which is on my desk and it is excellent. It has sample R01, sample K grant, sample specific game pages. It talks about the differences between dependent and independent specific games and why to avoid one or the other. It's really, really good, it's dynamic. The person who gave this workshop was just incredible. This is now online, right? With COVID we can do this using Zoom so I highly recommend this course. There are a host of others like this one that Avi sent me as an example, an NIH grant writing bootcamp and then this granttrainingcenter.com is actually, it sounds a little bit cheesy but they offer a great DOD focused course which helps you learn the different mechanisms which is very confusing and they have sample DOD grants and such on here too. One of my collaborators, Aaron Dingle has taken this course and thought it was great. Sorry about the busy slide but I just wanna focus some on sources outside of the NIH in addition to foundation grants like the PSF grants, the DOD and the VA are an excellent source of funding. It's really, really confusing though and if you want an explanation you can email me, we can chat on the phone but basically there are all these different agencies within the DOD and in reality they share like an office with cubicles. So if you submit something to CDMRP there's all these different groups and they'll take your grant around and say, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? So to find these funding opportunities right here at the bottom, you go to the US Army Medical Research and Material Command, the Office of Medical Technology Transfer. It is a really good page and on there it will have a link to all of these different programs, blast injuries, burns, all of these areas that are very specific to plastic surgery that I think are typically not pursued and the funding lines are typically higher. So I think the chance of getting funding is really good and I've had very good luck with our stuff through the DOD. The CDMRP, Congressionally Directed Military Research Program is excellent and has a lot of money also, all applicable to what we do as well as the VA in terms of merit funding. So these three links are really good and I think will take you to a whole world of resources that we're normally not thinking about. Again, it's really an alphabet soup but don't let it overwhelm you once you have an idea of wanting to do DOD work. There's a lot of money available. I recommend that if you're just starting, you go to this meeting, the Military Health System Research Symposium is excellent. They will have program managers walking around. You can go to posters and see who's at conference, who's leading panels, et cetera, and talk about your aims, talk about your grants, give them your grants and just really sell your work and this is a great place to do that. So that kind of summarizes it for me. I'm gonna stop here and let Avi take over here and also you're welcome to ask questions if you have it. Avi. Yeah, let me figure out how to get my, no, there we go. Can you guys see that? Yep. Beautiful. Well, thanks Sam for the lead in. As handily the least experienced and least successful person on this panel, I'm gonna say some things that are probably a little bit maybe less aspirational than others because I think that there's a reality, especially in the PSF grant population that the NIH and DOD really aren't for everyone. So it is a lot of what we're gonna talk about, but it's okay if that's not where you're headed first or maybe ever and certainly both is a tall order and I just wanna make sure it's okay that everyone feels comfortable in that because you're hearing from a lot of really successful and accomplished people, but infrastructure time, clinical setup, research setup, all those things are really challenging to navigate and especially early on just getting the smaller wins in some of these specialty society grants or even specialty group grants can be really, really helpful. Of course, the PSF for plastic surgeons has a huge footprint in that, but finding the funding opportunities when you wanna start breaking out of these smaller, whether it's a pilot grant or even the NEPS grants and breaking into your six figure, fortunately, if you're, hopefully for you rather, the seven figures takes time. So don't forget to look at things like Komen Society or Breast Society grants if that's where your specialty is clinically. Don't forget to look for OREF partnerships if you're a hand person or the Young Investigator Bone and Joint Initiatives if you're into hand or even if you're not, but you have some crossover with either prosthetics or trauma. There are a lot of opportunities out there and industry has a place in funding small things, at least providing you supplies if you wanna look into some expensive tech. I think there's a lot of really good and important things you can do with that too, especially to get started. I think under discussed and a little bit of totally shameless self-promotion is that there are actually some literature on this, the perfect grant for you and how to get it. We actually looked back when I was in my research time under the Chung umbrella, looking through all the PSF grants for a bunch of years and why they got funded, why they didn't get funded. I don't imagine much of the content is groundbreaking or gonna be the first time you've heard it, but it's nice sometimes as you're getting ready or even in your break I'm reviewing to think about some of the details of have you thought about punctuation and organization? Have you thought about formatting? Have you, as some panelists said, answered the questions about your mentorship plan, answered your institutional plan, things that matter to the grant, but aren't really in your forefront of your mind when you're thinking about your research plan and your specific games, but they all need to happen if you're gonna get funded. So sometimes it's nice to see what other people have written about. I also echo what Sam said about mentorship and collaboration. I think on this call specifically, there are six different people whose grants I read in my own experience, preparing to write my own first grant. The topics had zero overlap, but it's just important to see sometimes what people have written. It's nice to see that people format things completely differently and they all get funded. So you don't need to go super crazy over some of those details as long as you're consistent and certainly organization, formatting, language style, all those things. And having people read them, again, I think you can't really understate how important that is. The grants people at your institution can also be very helpful, especially when it comes to support documents. Those are really painful to write from scratch and you may be able to get some help there either from mentors and collaborators or partners of yours or certainly from your grants office. And then the program officer, whether it's through the DOD and certainly through the NIH can be a great resource. And I'll talk a little bit about that towards the end of, when I talk about NIH stuff specifically. When you talk about things to look online, Sam presented some great stuff for the DOD. I think the NIH has an incredible online footprint of the opportunities. Grants.nih.gov is a place to go. The different NIH types are broken down well, the types of opportunities are broken down well. I think it's actually a relatively nice, clear place to get started. If you're thinking about making that transition from the PSF funding or small grant funding to bigger opportunities. They give really good thorough guidelines and guidance on when is the right time to go for the smaller versus bigger grants, how to leverage yourself as a new investigator, which has some appeal or an early stage investigator, which gets some additional appeal in the NIH. All that's really laid out. It does take a little bit of online navigating, but if you start there, you will find some really helpful information. They also have links to some funded grants, most of which have nothing to do with the research I'm interested in. A lot of them are basic science, which is well out of my wheelhouse. But again, it's interesting to just see how things get put together and how they're organized and still get funded. The NIH regional seminars are another really nice opportunity, especially now that all of them are online. There's one coming up, I think, next week. And the goal, which I'm not sure how clearly you can see, is to help demystify the application and review process. Sounds like perfect. And clarify federal regulations and policies, also very helpful, and highlight current areas of interest or concern. So again, it's hard to know, especially in the plastic surgery world, or if you're even sub-subspecialized within that, how much of this will apply. But certainly the first parts of that, demystifying the application and review process and regulations and policies, that mess is very difficult to navigate. And so if you're really thinking about this, and especially if you are somewhere where the mentorship is not as robust or the experience is not as robust, these can be really, really helpful. And finally, the NIH reporter is a great place to look for funded grants. And the options are amazing. You can either look by the institution, you can certainly look by topic, they have a text search, you can even look by the program officer. So if you're interested in a request for proposals or a call that's out there, and the program officer is listed, you can even go and see other things that that program officer has led, that have gotten funded. So it's a really incredible resource. It is a little bit clunky as most government websites are, and you have to play around with it a little bit. But especially if you're wanting to make sure that you're on the right track with something or certainly not duplicating work, this is a great place to go. And then certainly I would highly encourage anyone interested in NIH funding or other big federal funding to reach out to your program officer. They're really nice people and they can be really, really helpful. It's intimidating. Having only done it a few times myself, I'll tell you every one of those calls is intimidating, but in the end, they're there to help you and they will provide incredible guidance. So that's really, I think, some of the places you can get started. And I didn't really know exactly what the format of this was, but I thought that this slide was helpful. It's kind of how I feel about grant stuff in general, and it really embodies the mentorship and guidance that I got, which is if you don't try, you're not gonna learn it. So you just gotta get out there and try. I think this middle line is kind of how I live my entire life, for those of you who know me, but certainly when it comes to grants, you have to expect to win. You have to dot every T and cross every I and do all the stuff the right way, but it's okay if it doesn't work because you're gonna have a plan B and a plan C. And I think that those are really critical to getting started. And if you stay committed, you're gonna succeed one way or the other. You will find success, you will find mentors, you'll find collaborators, you'll find overlap. If there's something you're really interested in, getting started is the most important step to getting started. I think that's it for me. If there's any questions. Hey, Sam and Avi, thank you so much for some great tips on all of these resources to get started. And I wanted to echo what Derek said earlier. There are so many things that I wish I knew when I first got started and I really didn't know. So it's really great to have everyone share their experiences. All right. So the next section that we have planned for tonight will be on the specific aims page. Now, this is one of the most important pages in a grant application. And when I review grants and when other people review grants, we always talk about within the first couple of minutes of looking at specific aims page, you really know how successful of a grant proposal it's going to be. So we've lined up two researchers who are really experts at putting together grants. Erin Green from Boston Children's and Andrew Pusek from the Brigham who will be speaking on killing it for your specific aims. And hopefully they'll be putting you in the right direction to get you started for that. Thanks, Derek. Erin and I talked, we've been texting just now. I think I'll start off. I've got a couple of slides and then we can kind of go back and forth a little bit. So maybe I'll just go ahead and share my screen. This may take a moment. Sorry guys, this is a new laptop. So we might have a problem here. It's asking me to set up my preferences. So that's not gonna work. Erin, why don't you start off and I may join you in just a minute. I'll see if I can figure this out. All right, good. Let me see if I have better luck sharing my screen, okay. Do people see? Yes. I try to share a Word document. Is that up? Not exactly. Yeah, we're seeing the top of something that says specific aims, but the rest of the text is missing. All right, let me try this. It looks like your product activation failed. Okay. I'm sorry. Here we go. Okay. Can you guys see this? We're just still seeing the- It looks like your fonts are working now. Oh, there you go. Do you guys see this Word document? Yeah. Yeah, we can. Okay. All right. So I'll start off. So I'd like to mirror what other people have said, Derek, most recently, that in my opinion, the specific aims page is the most important part of the grant. The major variable that decides if grants are funded is the research strategy. So you're going to be graded on the person, the place, the environment, mentoring, et cetera. But the research aims is the most important component. And so you can think of the specific aims page like an abstract for one of the publications that you do, whether it's clinical or basic, and it's kind of the cliff notes for the rest of the grant. And so I guess that when I think about the specific aims page, these are the principles I think about. The first kind of half of the page, and I'll go through this a little bit more, should be, you should start out with background, and then you really have to get to the innovation and impact. And I think some other people are talking about making the reviewers excited about what you're doing. So usually the first half of the specific aims page usually the first half of the specific aims, again, pulls the reviewers in. And then the next part is the specific aims. And another theme of this part of the grant is to be simple and very clear. And other people have talked about this. I wouldn't abbreviate things. I would spell everything out and just assume that whoever's reviewing your grants has no idea what you're doing. And so just like writing a research paper, again, you want to be simple and clear. And so if you could see this, this is an example of one of our R01s, a basic science grant. And so the first half of this is talking about the background of arteriovenous malformations. It's getting to, this is a big problem, talking about the innovation, the impact, because when people are scoring your grant, they're going to ask themselves, whatever you're doing, is this a problem? Is this worth funding? What's the impact? So that's the pull. And then here, I've got the three specific aims. And I think Dave Mathis mentioned this too. You don't, you want to have white space and you don't want, psychologically, people don't want to look at a piece of paper and see, you know, micro font and no space. And so you want to have spaces between the aims. And then on that theme of being clear, you see here how I started out with a rationale, you know, what's the rationale for this aim, then the hypothesis, what we're thinking is going to happen, and then the approach, how you're going to do it. So there's a systematic presentation that makes it easy for the reviewers who may have no idea about what you're doing, or in this case, arteriovenous malformations, but it gives you a chance for them to understand what you're doing. And then I guess another theme that was mentioned before a couple of times is that you don't want your specific aims to be dependent on each other, because if they are, that will be a fundamental flaw, potentially, and your score will be much lower. And so can people see the different aims here? Okay, so this is an example of a, you know, funded grant. And again, the first half is pulling them in. And then, you know, the second half is this different specific aims being very clear. And so I'll stop there and see how Andrea's doing. Andrea was trying to send her slides to Mary Ruth, but I think I'm going to try one more time here. And if not, I will just, I'm going to just make some comments offline, but just a second here. I'm going to try changing now. So I'm going to, I think you might have to turn off your screen, Aaron. Okay. Okay, slide is virtual background. I don't want that. You guys are probably not seeing my screen right are you not yet. Yeah. I didn't get slides yet either though so if you wanted to. Did you send them to me by email. I was just about to send them to you. Hold on just one second. You know I will let me just quickly send this to you if everybody can hold for just a moment. You know what let's just do this all you know what I'm going to just talk just because it's not this is not rocket science really I just I think it's probably easier if I just kind of I don't want to waste people's time on this so my thoughts on it on this in terms of the specific games is first just that specific games are. It's really a formula. So I think there's the page itself, and then there's specific games in terms of your actual specific games. So, I'm going to Aaron I think did a nice job of talking about the overall and you've heard from others about the specific games themselves but I'll just break it down a little bit in terms of the, the page and putting the page of the specific games together. So what just, it is a formula and people are expecting the formula. So it's essentially, I'll simplify it and it probably for those in basic science, there's probably subtleties to this that I don't appreciate or that that others could could speak to but certainly in health services research, it's kind of four paragraphs. So if we think about the four paragraphs of that. The first one is talking about your, it's your introduction, it's your, your introductory paragraph. The, the thing the key to the introductory paragraph is it's, it's really talking about what's the the knowledge gap, so it's so important to start off and I was going to show you guys a copy of sort of, I used my M rock grant. And I did together. I think that when I was pulling it up together I was, you know, you think something was really great when you first did it, I looked at back I'm like there are things we could have done better in the specific games page so for those of you who are starting to get getting started with your grants. You don't don't be too hard on yourself you got to just get it out there as well and sometimes you get funded to even if it's not your, your finest work but. So, the introductory paragraph it's about sort of the current knowledge scope of the problem so you know like every grant kind of starts with sort of, you know, well I'll use the breast cancer example sort of you know breast cancer effects like number of peaceful this is the, this is the problem, and this is the knowledge gap or something the lack of something that we that we're trying to address so that's and then it's a statement about sort of the critical or urgent need or the consequences of not meeting that need so the whole that first paragraph, which should be probably a page or so, get it, it's kind of a recipe is to convince the reviewer that this is an important problem, and the scope of this issue that it's sort of this is something so they're like wow that's a big problem and we need to solve this problem, and they want to hear more about your, your potential solution to solving that problem. The second paragraph, which I think is in many ways kind of. I find this one hard to write, because it means it's distilling down the whole thing of your. This is kind of the who what why paragraph, which by the way Sam, the other the grant course that you mentioned that book, I have that book I actually dusted it off. That course when I first started MSK, and they, they label this as the who what why paragraph of that second paragraph so a plug to Sam for that that grants course is really great and I just actually had all our faculty go and do that one as well. But back to this so that the who what why that second paragraph. That's about that's where you're delineating sort of the whole thing in terms of the objective of your study, the central hypothesis the rationale. It's a lot to get into to one paragraph but it's so important that it flow. And instead of so it is the who and the what I think what's trickiest is to weave in the why into that paragraph, it's, but it has to chain from the first paragraph so here's the, here's the problem, and then here's your solution, why is this the solution. And what's your hypothesizing. So that's kind of that's that second paragraph. Then the third is the actual specific aims and. And this, you know, we could talk, we could do a whole two days on this. I think others have said this it's this and the specific games are so critical to making the whole grant work. The worst thing to do would be to write a whole grant and then kind of go oh I think I should change my specific games. You know, because you're rewriting so much stuff. So, spend a lot of time writing, you know, thinking getting feedback about your specific games that's that is time well spent. And, and similarly actually the whole specific games page. I would, I have people essentially right and when I'm when I'm mentoring someone I'll say, write me a specific games page, don't make it perfect it doesn't have to be don't don't don't spend so much time sort of getting that has to be perfect ultimately but in the first iteration just give me like the broad give me these four pieces and give me, and then, and then even with that I really am just focusing on going over the specific games over and over again, so that we really get the specific games just right. And I think that the others have made this comment but the. So, they, they need to be achievable, I would say that's one thing. So in terms of people often in a, in a small grant, a fatal flaws you've heard would be like too many specific games or specific games that are just like there's just no way you can do that, or as in like if I can't do this if you do a specific game one doesn't work out specific game two isn't you know you're dead in the water for that so you so they have to be achievable mutually mutually independent. And then but linked together that essentially they link back to your overall sort of overall objective and your central hypothesis. So, an example might be if we're doing so love the work we do will have a qualitative and a quantitative aim that are both, you can do both of them, and they both support the, the, the overall objective of the grant. So I would just a little side thing which is maybe a bit of a pet peeve with specific games it just be a little conscious of sort of bolding and highlighting and doing a mix and italicizing people get really fancy with that and it's like you have your own sort of you know what, it's like a language that you're not really communicating to the reader it should be just be careful not to sort of think in your mind okay italics means this and bold means that and bold and italics and underlying is this. It should be just clean and easy to read I think it's reasonable to bold the aims and underline the hypothesis those kinds of things but don't just be careful not to get too carried away with that. That's essentially the three and then the fourth that fourth paragraph is your payoff paragraph, and that's important in terms of that's kind of setting saying, where's what's the expected out why if someone, if you get this money and you do this study, what's, what's the greater good to the world. So is, you know, I can start with something like upon completion of these aims the expected outcomes are. It's about the really conveying this very significant positive impact of this work. And depending on what you're writing for it, then it's, you can also comment to next steps. So you want to convey it like the pure benefit of the benefit of, you know, why this which why this work will change the world why it's so important. It will if it's if you're saying doing a PSF, you know, either a pilot grant particularly or international endowment grant. You're also, you're going to want to comment about how this is going to lead to other other other investigations potentially extramural funding, the next bigger steps, I think that's really important. And then I think also with the. If you are applying for any of the, the training grants, this is also an important point to talk about sort of where your contribution is going to lie and how you're going to be at how this training is going to help you be a better investigator and so you want to make sure the others have made the comment is sometimes you get research, you've got a great research mentorship team you go and you don't mention enough, because you're like was the specific aims is just about the study. But it's so important it's like a 5050 thing in terms of sort of how much, how the two aspects are weighted there so make sure that on a specific aims page you also tie it back to sort of say, and this will, I will acquire these skills that will allow me to then mature as an investigator and be successful. So I think that sort of, there's a lot we get happy to take questions about the specific aims because I do think there's a lot you could talk about in that in terms of how you put those all together. Again, a plug to sort of grant writing courses I think is really great because it's just it was kind of funny today when you mentioned that book I'm thinking, yeah, I haven't looked at this book in a long time but even looking through anything I get there was a bunch of things I think I could do better on that there's things that I've forgotten about so thanks for that reminder Sam course. Well, thank you both. We actually had one question from somebody Nicole will be Polly chinko asking about specific games and maybe this goes to something that Andrea you had mentioned about kind of domino or interrelated names and when being qualitative when being quantitative. But the question was about if you develop a material. You need to test it into. Sorry, anyone you develop a material into you test it. How can you set this up so that this is not a domino or interdependent aim. Do either of you have any thoughts about that. And maybe do you want to take that one. Yep. I guess it depends. I think if you. If you're developing a material and then testing it. I think in order to convince the reviewer you'd you'd have to have some preliminary data saying that there was some material that you'd be able to test and aim to because I think if, if you don't have any preliminary data and you're telling the reviewers you're going to develop something and then test it. I think that's going to be a fundamental flaw so if that was what the grant was focused on I, I would have something that you'd already created and that was workable and maybe in that first aim you could say you were going to modify it somehow and test it but I think you'd have to have something that was already made. Yeah, I had the exact same thoughts as you. It would be super beneficial if you had preliminary data describing or documenting some stuff about the material itself to de-risk it. But I think that would potentially be one way to to minimize the risk of domino aims, but we have time for maybe one more question. Somebody raised their hand. Nithin Sinha. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me. Yes. Yeah, so I have a quick question to Dr. Pusek and Dr. Green. A wonderful, wonderful introduction for the specific grade. So the question is primarily related to the format. Now, as a reviewer, what type of specific aim page would you like? A, for where the aims are mentioned and the sub aims are mentioned or B, that in addition to the aims and sub aims in the specific aim page, you would also like to see one line on the object. Objective or hypothesis and approach. NIH provides both types of format. And, you know, I see conflicting views in the reviewers. So what is your take on this one? Andrea, do you want to answer that? You know, I suspect you're more on the basic science side of things. I do like it all tied together to a hypothesis. And so I would I would say the latter. I would probably take I'd like to see the hypothesis and overall objective as well with it. Yeah, I just and just before you go, I just want to make sure that we also just cover the Paul Sutter and I just called out something which I do want to make a quick before we sort of move on. It's just to say I neglected to mention that the when the essay page and putting that all together, not the essay page, as in like the wordsmithing, but the overall get in your specific aims. Right. Like sort of and showing it to a bunch of people probably is, I would say, is about half of the time that I spend writing the grant. And it's probably even more than that. But it's kind of like it's the thing that you're working around your head for months in advance that because it's so important to get that right. And it's really easy to if you if you get feedback about that and you've been thinking about things, but you can start again, you go, OK, let's let's let's do that differently. Whereas once you've written a whole bunch of pages, it's really hard to let go of it. So so I just before you start. So I get just to stress that for others to make sure I appreciate Paul, you bringing that forward because it is I take it for granted that we spend so much time getting the essay pages going before we actually start writing. So, Aaron, if you want to comment again about Mifune's question. Yeah, I guess even just to follow that up, I personally I do the same thing with writing research papers. So the first thing I do whenever writing a research paper, I actually write the abstract and then, you know, the background methods, results, conclusions. And then I extrapolate that and write the rest of the paper. I think the same paradigm happens with games for most of us is I would start with that and then and then expand, you know, for the rest of the grant and then getting to that question. I mean, I think we all have our own preferences. I like the one that I showed. I think, you know, that works for me that, you know, method with each aim. And then I start with the background, you know, background hypothesis approach that works for me and in my mind. And, you know, I don't think there's one absolute method. I think that the theme is to be clear and simple. Yeah, I would agree with that too. I'll just take one quick comment about Lisa. Lisa asked a question here too about how many specific aims, I would just say the one of the do's and don'ts is having like too many aims for a small grant is that's that's a don't in my mind is just because it's just not going to be doable. It's unnecessary complexity that I think puts the reviewers off. I think, say, you know, if you say National Endowment Grant two aims to me would seem like a, you know, I mean, it's not a hard and fast rule but but people do get it's a it's a it's a negative if somebody thinks that they're going to try to do too much in too short a time period with not enough money. Thank you. All right. Great. Thank you, everyone. Why don't we move on to the next session then. All right. Great talks from everyone. Our next session is moving into some information that might be good for people who are starting out in their careers or faculty careers. So Ben Levy from UT Southwestern and Jen Walgy from University of Michigan will be talking about converting that K grant to an R grant. All right. Can you all see my screen. Yeah. Okay, great. Let's see if I can get this. Okay, so, um, it's great to see everyone on this. My name is Jennifer Walgy. I'm at the University of Michigan. I'm excited to partner in this with my colleague, Ben Levy. And we're going to tag team these slides. And when I start off with the first one, I think both Ben and I can agree that This is sort of what success looks like. Sometimes this is sort of a bumpy winding road, but we're excited to share with you our thoughts on the K to R transition. So, Ben, do you want to kick off our first slide. Sure. So, um, I think this was one when we were talking earlier about, you know, making that transition really is going from, you know, being a mentored researcher to an independent researcher. And so they want to see that you have established yourself as an independent researcher. And to do that, you really need to, you know, towards that end of your case, start thinking about how am I going to, you know, start my career as an independent researcher. And so I think, you know, it's thinking about the foundation of your group. And that's everything from like, how many times a week do you guys meet as a group. When you do meet, what are you guys, what are you going to talk about? What are you going to share? What are you going to talk about? And how do you stay connected? What types of technologies and interactions do you have? And what's the cadence of that? So, you know, as an example, one of the things that we've been talking about a lot is, you know, how do you stay connected? How do you stay engaged? How do you stay connected? How do you stay connected? So, you know, as an example, we'll have like a board meeting where we'll all meet on Monday mornings to go over the plan for the week. And we all come together, we first share something fun we did over the weekend. And then we'll talk about what are the different areas that people are working on, so that way, people can start collaborating. So here's, you're really building a culture of, you know, how do you stay connected? And how do you stay engaged? And how do you stay engaged? So that's a culture in a group that will kind of set you going forward. And then when you have your lab meeting, so are you going over interval data versus are you going to have people presenting their full project, you're sending a message to your team that, you know, if you have interval data, you want it, you're expecting to see things every week, or are you discussing, we often discuss a success and a challenge that everyone had in the past week, because again, research is all about failure and how to get through that. So you want to have that kind of culture in place. So that way, your lab is set up for the long term, I think. So that's, I think, just a background I wanted to give. And then I think to your next point that we had about publishing often, I think, you know, you'll hear people discuss whether having one large impact paper versus a bunch of small impact papers and what's important. I think as you make the K to R transition, you do want to have a publication record, because again, they're investing in you as a independent investigator. If you haven't shown that you can publish on your own on that topic, and that you're starting to get ready to be a senior author, they're maybe less likely to support you. And Jen, if you want to jump in here and give your thoughts. Yeah, I think you touched on this concept of what are our goals when we meet as a group? A lot of times we're talking about, you know, what are our short term goals? What do we want to accomplish over the next, you know, six to 12 months, but also having a long term plan, where do you see yourself going in five to 10 years? Where do you see your team going? And where do you see your research trajectory going? Because a lot of times when you're writing these grants, you're really planning for work that's going to happen three years from now. So being mindful of what those trends might be, I think is really important. I think in the next slide, we'll see a familiar picture. So lots of us have talked about this book here. So during your K, when we think about preparing to write your grant, we've heard this a lot already during this session, but starting early is really critical. There's lots of great workshops that are out there. But also sometimes just finding writing partners can be helpful in some of the research groups that I'm in. We have both K award writing workshops, our award writing workshops. Given that we all have really busy lives, it's very helpful to keep me accountable to make sure that I'm writing every week. Writing for other grants, because really it's just like every other skill that we have to develop. It's practice and practice and practice. And then starting to collect data intentionally during your K award that will serve as the platform for your R01. And then if there's opportunities, sit on study sections so that you can get the perspective of grant reviewers. What is it like when you're reviewing somebody else's proposal? Do they have a power calculation or not? Does this topic resonate with you? Is there innovation here? All of those things make you a better grant writer. And do you have other comments on the slide? Yeah, so I think, yeah, I didn't recognize this. And I think I learned in one of these workshops is that if you have a K, you can email the program officer and sit on a study section for NIH. And even sometimes if you don't, they'll give you, usually on your first time, they'll give you less grants and they'll make you like a secondary and tertiary reviewer. It's just a good opportunity for people to get to know you and for you to see like, what are the grants that are scoring well? And the grants that don't, what are the typical areas that are falling behind? So I think here, you know, you made a point, you really wanna, identifying the partners is really important. I think in the same way that you need a mentorship team for your K, you need a mentorship team for your first R. You still wanna show, again, you know, it's, you'll have this page for early stage investigator that says how you're gonna have the support to help you make that transition from, you know, dependent to independent investigator. So having those close collaborators and during your K really setting that up. I think for any of these grants, so it's not a writing contest. It's not who wrote the best grant, even though that's very important. It also is, you have to set the track record and show that you, you know, have mastered that the topic that you're researching, have the publication record, have the collaborators to help you do that. So I think that that is a good point that you make. And you wanna kick us off on the next slide? Sure. Yeah, I guess building on the last one, just, you know, never rush these grants out. The study sections you'll go to, even though sometimes you'll submit to more than one, they get to know you. And so if you submit like a, you know, something that's not your finest, they'll remember you on the next one. So just really, if you're getting close to the deadline and you don't feel like it's in a good place, it's not worth rushing out. These things start early, you know, make sure you're on, I don't like to hear what other people say, but usually when I'm submitting, I'm on like version, you know, a very high version, like 50 or above before I'm submitting. So just making sure that you try over and over again, having many people edit your grants. And looking at other grants, you know, people are always willing to share. And I know that the PSF has some as well that they have for examples. Another thing that I didn't recognize, I learned from all these grant writing courses is for your ESI. So your early stage investigator, you only have that one time. And so your grant, when it goes to study section, it gets scored before all the other grants. And so it's a little bit, you're graded a little bit easier. So if you can wait an extra cycle and submit more than one at the same time, you actually will get both of those scored at an easier level. So use that ESI wisely, don't be a co-PI with another person on your first R01, because then they'll take advantage of that competitive advantage that you have when you're first time submitting. Yeah. And for the study sections, these do change regularly. So particularly for health services research, this recently just changed. So be sure to look up these on the NIH website and make sure that the grant that you're submitting fits that particular study section. And you can certainly talk to the SRO for that study section to understand if your grant is the right fit for that particular one or for the program officer. And you can talk to the program officer for that institute. Okay. So resubmitting the grant. This is incredibly common for every single grant that you will write. So have many people review the comments. The comments that you will get back reflect the discussion in the room. Sometimes they change based on the discussion. Sometimes the reviewers will just submit the comments that they initially had from the review. And so you're really trying to kind of deconstruct what happened and what were those score-driving criteria. So it's really valuable to have a bunch of different people look at those comments as you're trying to figure out how am I going to reshape this grant for success? Again, reevaluate the study section in the institute that you submitted it to, because that will influence some of the comments that you probably received. And address all elephants in the room. What I mean by that is when you write that response to reviewers or the introduction to the revised proposal, it's really important to address everything. Whether it's fixable in the grant or not. Obviously when you're doing a resubmission, you want to fix as many of the critiques or address as many of the critiques that you possibly can. But some of them you might not be able to. But it's important not to ignore those in the resubmission because the reviewers are going to be looking for that. So acknowledge it, recognize it as a limitation, acknowledge it in the grant, and then try to put forth the best grant possible that you have. And then talk to both the program officer and the SRO after you get those comments back. Many times they'll help you distill down what were the really important score driving criteria for the score that you got. Yeah, I think that pretty much hits everything. I think the program officers will be very helpful. Another thing that I typically do I think is helpful. So you could figure out who's on the study sections that you're submitting to ahead of time. So I'll usually PubMed those people and the topic that I'm submitting on. And you can figure out who is going to likely be reviewing your grants and make sure that you cite those people's work. Because one of the things that they're grading you on is the rigor of the prior research. And most scientists feel that their work is the most important work. And so if someone on that study section is an expert in that field and you don't cite them, it might hurt their feelings. So make sure that you look about who's on that. And then if it goes to a study section that you didn't want it to go to, you actually have the ability to have it changed. So you can reach out to the scientific group that assigned study sections. And let's say you had two that went to the same study section or you want it to go somewhere else because you felt it wouldn't be reviewed appropriately somewhere, make sure that you reach out. You do have the opportunity also to, if there's a reviewer on there, you can get it would be a conflict. You can state that also ahead of time to the SRO. So just thinking about all the things that you can do to optimize your chances for this. Okay, here are parting thoughts. Find great collaborators. Heard this multiple times throughout the session, start early, embrace failure, try again. And then this is your quote here. Yeah, I think that our one is for resilience. I mean, we all get grants that get triaged. We all have grants that score poorly. You know, the people that are getting more grants are the people that are writing more grants and that have written more non-funded grants. So it's completely normal. You know, you can't let it, you know, I have a tough time like looking at when I get the summary statement back, like I won't even look at it for a couple of weeks just because like I know emotionally it'll upset me. So, you know, take your time and then approach it, you know, from a good place. Make sure that you understand it's not a personal, someone going after your work. It's just, they're looking for ways to improve your science. So that way, when you actually are doing the work that the results that you get are meaningful. So I think just really, you know, trying and trying again. You can, so it used to be where you only had two shots. So now you submit, let's say you get a review back, you resubmit, it doesn't get funded again. You can still take that grant, revise it based on the second set of reviews and submit a new proposal with that. So that's something that has changed within the last year or two. So it's just a good thing to keep in mind. So just because you fail once or twice doesn't mean that like that grant is done. You could also ship it to a different study section on that second time around, and I've done that before as well. Those are some really great tips. Thank you so much, Ben and Jen. I think these are definitely things that apply to not just K to R transition, but in general for so many grants. And I just want to echo what Ben said about, you know, people remembering when you don't put your best work out there, everything ultimately matters and it's reputation on the line. Okay, so I guess we can move to the next section. And this will be on staying continuously funded, tips on grant renewals, definitely something that I want to hear a lot about, especially at my stage in my career. But we have two speakers that are experts at this, Gail Gordillo, who is Chief of Plastics at Indiana and Kevin Chung, Professor of Plastics at Michigan. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Justin and Derek. Wonderful session. I don't have any slides. In fact, I think it's better for us not to have slides. Dr. Gordillo and I, we just have a coffee together and we just discuss certain things that you may find useful. When I reflect, Gail, in that we started the Plastic Surgery Foundation funding mechanism many years ago, we got a lot of pushback because people say that, oh, you only give us $10,000. You want us to write a R-type grant? I mean, you know, for $10,000, why can't I just write a two-page thing that we always do and you give us, you know, $10,000? Well, yeah, right. Okay, so anything you want to submit to the NIH now, anything, even if it's 50,000, if it's $10 or 5 cents, it's going to be reviewed like a R01. They don't think, the review section, they don't think about the monetary value of your grants. They look at that it is your best work. And I think that's the spirit of the PSF now is that submit your best work. We don't particularly care how much money we're giving you. And I think that it's so wonderful that it's a conduit for us to, in plastic surgery, to have an opportunity to compete at NIH level. I mean, look at the enthusiasm of this particular panel. Many of you may have graduated from the PSF pipeline and have been highly successful, get an NIH grant. I think that high expectation by our specialty really motivate our specialty to get, you know, more R01-type grants, even R21, R, you know, K awards on a regular basis. So, Gail, what do you think? So, Kevin, I'm sort of reflecting, and I have to share one thing that, every time I think of grant writing, I think of you, Kevin, and because way long time ago when we did one of these, Kevin, who is the least, probably, cosmetically-oriented plastic surgeon said, you are a plastic surgeon. You must write an aesthetically pleasing grant. And I still remember that. And, you know, I think that's part of it. You know, you have to write, and you talked about highlighting and bolding. I mean, you are a plastic surgeon. You need to write an aesthetically pleasing grant. You need to have good figures. You need to be spaced out. You need to impress upon people what it is, particularly that you, as a plastic surgeon, bring. I mean, we have such a unique perspective and such an opportunity. And what I would tell you as you go from, say, like I went, I had a K, and then an R, and then another R, and now I have, you know, a Co-PI and some other stuff and a U01, and one of the things that they're going to want to see is that your science progresses. And so it's what I proposed as a K or even my first R, you know, you get, like Ben was mentioning, your ESI status, you get a break on your first R01. And the saying is the hardest grade to get is not your first R01, it's the second one. And because you're not, you're not, you're not giving a break. They're not cutting you any slack. You're swimming in the deep end with the sharks. So you need to show, I think, that your science has matured and gotten better. You need to show particularly that you addressed the aims in your first grant. As everybody has mentioned, they're investing in you if you're not publishing, if you're not presenting, and they look very closely at that. And not to diss the White Journal, but I can tell you, I have been a standing study section member and I'm just about to go on study section again. And I remember hearing a reviewer say, do they have any JBC papers? And I don't know if any of you know what JBC is, but it's Journal of Biological Chemistry. I, of course, have several of those because those are the people that are gonna evaluate me. So it varies, obviously. I think if you're in basic science, it's different than if you're in health services or outcomes research. But for me, I need to show that I have high impact in basic science. I need to be reviewed by my basic science peers, which is why I don't have a ton in PSF or PRS. So keep that in mind. They're really looking at the quality of your science and what you've produced and that your science is progressing. Those are nice, Gail. Those are nice grantsmanship type advices. So let's talk about grantsmanship because we talk about the styles of writing things and the specific aims, all that stuff. But I think that when you get to be a mature scientist, everything becomes a grantsmanship issue just because the differentiation between one who is funded and one who is not funded is very, very marginal. So if you consider the five criteria for NIH grants, let's think about this. Okay, which one of them can you control? You have significance. You're a plastic surgeon. Anything you do is significant. So you got that down. You got that conquered. Don't worry about that. Anything you say is gonna be significant. Investigator, ah, that's something that you can control. What do they want to see? When I have 20 packages of NIH grants coming over, the first thing I look at is who you are. Have you suffered enough? Have you gone through a lot of training? Have you done 10 years in postdoc in long acres lab? I mean, if you have done that, you have suffered enough, I would give you a one just because you have put in the effort. But if you have five publications, you know what? Unless it's cell nature science, I don't think I'll be very enthusiastic. I think that grant probably go down the tube very quickly because that's one of the five major criteria. And then the next one is what can you control? Environment. You can control your environment. Be sure you go to an institution that has a lot of infrastructure to make you successful. I'm not saying that if you go to a small place that you cannot be successful, but you know what? The name recognition is very, very important. The study section look at all the places you all work in and say, this is a place I want to find. So I think environment can control. Investigator, environment, significance. Now you have three out of five. So what do you need to do? You need to look at innovation. Well, again, that is in your forte because again, you're a plastic surgeon. How can you not be innovative? So anything that you write, most likely you can be innovative. So the only thing you have to worry about is approach. Now, can you actually do the study? Can you actually make it work? And that can be a bit tricky. So I think that if you look at those five criteria as a plastic surgeon, you have at least three of them in the one, two, and three range. Gail, what do you think? So I think those are great points, Kevin. One of the things I would bring up about environment, even if you're not at a big name place, you need to play to the strengths of your environment. So your institution will have something that they're really good at. And play to the strengths of your environment. Find some way to align what you're doing with the infrastructure in your own institution. So if they have a really good single cell sequencing core, use it, play to the strengths of your environment. And the other thing is those areas of the grant, it's tight, it's tight to get in all the information that you want, take advantage of those spaces to highlight strengths in your proposal. I used to think, well, this is a, the very first time I did one, I'm like, this is a dumb waste of time. It's not, you need to take advantage of those sort of peripheral spaces to still try and pump up your grant. Yeah, those spaces are limited. And nowadays, when, let me kind of ask you, Gail, when you get 10 to 15 grants coming to you from the NIH as a study section member, and you have administrative things to do, you have surgery to do, and you're going to spend the entire weekend, maybe even a few weekends looking at them, how do you differentiate one from the other? The way I differentiate one from the other is that, now, how do you make your grants so easy for me that I can read through it in a relatively effective amount of time and I can understand things? Which means that if you have a grant that you spend effort making diagrams, making cartoon, dump it down for me, because many of the grants, I have no idea what you're talking about. Topic is not my interest, nor is it anything that I'm familiar with. But if you were to be caring enough of my time and make the writing so crisp, free of errors, specific aims, so understandable, and you have diagrams, pictorials, make things so easy for me, I think that that grantsmanship is a highlight of a successful investigator in the sense that not only can you talk the language, but you can make it understandable to someone who's outside your field. What do you think, Gail? I call that an elegant grant. So they can, if somebody can take a complicated or a complex question and write piercing set of experiments around it and explain it to me in a way that is very readable, that's someone you know that has a real mastery of that topic. And I call them, because you read lots of them, they're very elegant. And those are the ones you put the, somebody mentioned, I think it was Alison, don't put the reviewer in a bad mood. Don't make it hard, because we'll miss things, even though we may miss things that are relevant, but it's just so buried in this morass of technical extraneous detail that it blunts your message. And so the more clear, the more direct, the more pointed, the more elegant it will become, the better it's going to get scored. I totally agree. I think that, Gail, I think that's also a maturation process. One is starting out, one get nervous, and one kind of said, please don't be dismissive of my work. So I'm going to make my concept as complex as possible so you respect me. Well, that's going to be a problem because when I see your sentences are XXS comma, whatever comma, whatever which comma, and then this whole sentence is like five lines. You know what? I am in a bad mood already. So make sure that your writing is, I mean, I'm not asking each person to write a simple sentence, but I think the sentence structure is really, really important. The differentiation between a good grant and the average one is the detail. Because if you have a few misspelled words, I think that having two or three misspelled words may be okay, but if it's become a persistent issue, a syntax problem, when you spell the word effected, when effect is a noun and make into a verb, that really would drive the reviewers a bit nutso because, because if you cannot write a good grant, it's very difficult for the reviewer to give you the money because you're asking for money. So I think that that stake is a bit higher. What do you think, Gail? I think that I totally agree with you. I think the language that you use is really important. And one of the most common things I see, especially around younger investigators is descriptive terms. I want to characterize, oh my gosh, that's a, that's a huge red flag for me. And most of the times in the grant is your, are your specific aims pointed so you can answer them with a yes or no question, you know, expression of MCP one is required for tumor formation. And then you're going to do a series of experiments that are going to show why. And so, you know, that, that, again, it's that elegance, there's a really boiling it down to an essential fundamental question. And then taking me through the individual steps, it's going to lead me to conclude that yes, you've shown that through all these pathways, that is the driving force behind this phenomenon or this effect that you're, you're witnessing. So, so your language and your directness really, again, gets you that more elegant, that more focused, that more experienced impression as a scientist. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's really no substitute in learning from senior members who has been successful. And most of the time, the reason they're successful because they've failed so much. And I think that having a, a senior investigator who is willing to give the time, look at your grants, but of course be respectful of your mentor in a sense that you put in tremendous effort to write a grant before you send it to your invest, to your mentor. Because I mean, if you send something to a mentor that's half-baked, that's not going to be a good relationship. So I think that, I think that grantsmanship, if you want a renewal, even the beginning, I think that grantsmanship issue is something that no one can really teach you, but something that you can experience, but it is a critical component of having a grant being separated from all the other, let's say 19 grants out of 20. Gail, any, any parting advice for the team? I'm not, I'm not trying to scare all of you, but I'm not, I'm not scaring all of you, but, but I did mention that, that by virtue of you being on this call and being in our specialty and then being in a great institution and having suffered enough through your training and have enough background in research and so forth. I think that everyone on this call is capable of getting an NIH type grant. It's a matter of whether you are not deterred, you're persistent because you'll fail more than you're successful. However, I think that's going to be an additive process that's with more trying, the chance you become successful will be higher. Gail, what do you think? I agree that you just can't, you can't give up on it. It's so much about desire. It's so much about how bad do you want this and how much does this mean to you? So I think everybody here wants it pretty badly. And the one thing that I would say is, you know, Kevin, when you talked about the PSF, I'm so impressed at the number of people here, like I would agree with you, the number of people that are funded. I mean, for a long time in plastic surgery, it was really low, really low. And the pipeline has grown tremendously, tremendously. So it's been quite impressive. Well, thank you. Thank you both. I think we still have grant mentorship session later on this evening, and we have a couple more speakers left. Justine, do you want to introduce the last two? Yes. So I really love everything that everyone's been saying so far, but it's been kind of heavy because it's been pretty much specifics on what we do and a lot of things that we persevere through. But ultimately, the only reason we do this is for the love because it's so fun to us. And so my last two speakers that we're going to have is two of our favorites, Dr. Paul Cederna from University of Michigan and Mike Longacre from Stanford University. And we titled this with my money on my mind, or I'm sorry, with my mind on my money and my money on my mind, because Derek and I are from SoCal. And in the words of the great Snoop Dogg, take it away. Is that nitrous oxide? Paul, it's not working. So thank you, Justine and Derek. I can't really hear what Paul is saying. I don't know if he can hear me, though. Okay. I'm not sure what Paul, did you want to go first or do you just want me to give some comments? Is he muted? No. Why don't you go first, Mike? There's some audio issue with Paul. Okay. So I'll just give you kind of my overview to NIH grants and grants in general. I think the first thing is you want to make sure that you have a skill set that you've acquired that makes you competitive for funding. And for many of us, it's a graduate school training or postdoctoral training. For me, it was four years of postdoc and middle general surgery. For Justine, she was an MD, PhD at University of Chicago, and Derek was a postdoc in my lab. So have some dedicated amount of time that you can acquire some skills where you're applying for grants like PSF grants and things appropriate for the resident or fellow so that you kind of get your feet wet. I would say the other piece of advice I would have as we're waiting for Paul is the NIH funding levels are kind of what they are. So if you're as old as I am, you had a 34th percentile of funding level when I applied for grants. That's not the case now. There's nothing you can do about that, but just be cognizant of what those funding levels are. I'll just give you some personal biases. I think it's important to publish outside of surgery. I've been on study sections. I've chaired study sections where if a journal has surgery in the title, I'm just going to be honest with you, it's discounted. So the more you can publish in journals that don't have surgery in the title, not that any of our journals are bad or good. It's just a bias for non-surgeons on the committee, particularly at the NIH. So I would encourage you to try to publish in journals outside of surgery, but within the area that you're investigating. I think when you think of a job, if you're a resident, look at the niche, look at the supportive structure in that department, division, or whatever you're joining. Do they have an appreciation for federal support? What does that look like? Is it valued within the division? And then participate in study sections. I think it's only by doing that that you really develop an idea of how study sections think and what comments they're making. I think collaborations are key unless you have a very large group. And even if you have a large group, I think collaborations in different disciplines are great, particularly if they're bringing a different skill set to your grant. So I always encourage people to collaborate. I joke with Derek and Justine and others, you want to be the worst scientist on that team. So if you surround yourself by really talented investigators, your ability to do science goes up. I'll just say my two easy ways to get collaborations outside of surgery, do grand rounds in departments outside of the Department of Surgery at your location. That's easy, particularly if you're giving talks in the basic science departments. And then my own way that I've been able to get the grants I have now is that essentially, and I hate to say this because this is not what you want to hear, that the grant is essentially done. So the last four or five R01s that I've put in, and some of these have been with Derek where he's put in, we've really had the aims done. So I know that's probably not what you want to hear because you're thinking, how do I get those data? But in a very competitive environment, I think pick aims that you have a lot of preliminary data in support of each aim. I'm not so picky on the wording as long as it's succinct. And I think you want to have a very readable grant. And then lastly, I'll say everyone needs a mentor. You need mentors at every stage of your career. So don't hesitate to reach out to someone and ask them, what do they think about your grant? Or what's their experience with this study section? Or what's the funding level at this institute? I've been on Institute Council. So I'll simply say I can pop all the myths. Funding levels are not determined by the council. We meet three times a year. It's determined when the money runs out. So if you look at the year, there's the most money in the first pot, which is a council meeting in January, and then March, and then June. So there's slightly more money early on. There's trickle down. But funding levels are not determined by council members. And I'm saying that as a past council member, they're determined when the money runs out. So it's not a set line, if that makes sense. Program officers have a lot of latitude with what they can do. So I think I'll stop there and let Paul say something. I think he's back online now. Hey, can you hear me now? Yes. Is this better? Yes. Way better. Yes. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Mike. Sorry about that, everybody. So first of all, congrats, Justine and Derek, for doing this. This is awesome. I'm excited to see everyone on here. There's a lot of people on here for a Monday night. This is amazing. I remember the very first one we put on, we had hoped to just have 25 people show up at the thing, and now we have 60 plus. So this is exciting. So thanks, everyone, for being on. So listen, I'm just going to say a few different things. I've got to tell you, I think the biggest and most important thing to have a successful career in research is do something you're really, really passionate about, period. I will tell you that when I started doing research, I was chasing money. There was a grant over here. There was a call for proposal. And I thought, well, I could write a proposal about this thing. And even though I might not have really loved it, I'm like, well, but there's money there. So maybe I'm going to go do that. And I found myself chasing money. I found myself getting grants. I found myself doing stuff I didn't really care about. And at one point, I was even going down a path of neuroimmunology. So A, I don't know anything about immunology. B, I hate immunology. And C, I'm never going to read a thing about it. But I got a grant on it, and now I'm stuck doing work on it, and I hated it. And I just bailed on it when I realized that I just hated it, and there was no future in that for me. So you've got to do something you're passionate about. So I happened to find something I really, really love now. And now I have free time. I want to work on this thing. I mean, I would much rather work on this thing than watch reruns of 90 Day Fiance. Okay, well, that may be a lie. But anyway, I think you have to do something you're passionate about. Second of all, as Mike mentioned earlier, everyone needs a team. I think small research is done in small labs behind closed doors. I think big ideas, big research, big developments, things that change our specialty are done in big groups with lots of people with lots of different expertise. And if you are willing enough to admit that you don't know everything, and you can build a team around you of people that have expertise in all these areas, you can make great strides. And so I have this team of people. It's a huge team from all these different areas of expertise. And if you build this amazing team, and you let people contribute, and everyone on the team is equally important, whether they're an undergrad student, or they're a med student, or they're a postdoc, or they're a full professor, everyone is important to the group. That group is going to do really, really well. I think another thing that's important to be successful is failure is part of the entire process. So Jen and Ben were showing this path to success. Everyone thinks it's a straight line, but it's really this circuitous thing with all sorts of disasters along the way. And the reality is, in our lab, we have this approach, fail early, fail often. So the first time I heard it, one of my partners was talking about it. He is a mechanical engineer, Brent Gillespie. And he says, my plan is fail early, fail often. And I told him, I said, that's the worst plan ever. My plan? Never fail. That's the best plan. The only problem with that is it's actually not possible. So we actually now have this approach where we have these ideas, and we know we can go down a couple of paths. So we designed two killer experiments. And the killer experiments are not killer, meaning they're super sweet. They're killer experiments. They're killer experiments because they're designed to kill an idea. And so if something's a bad idea, I want to find out it's a bad idea up front, and I kill that thing up front. So you can't actually be afraid of failure. You actually have to embrace failure. And embracing failure gives you an opportunity to rapidly progress through so many different options to ultimately get to that thing that's going to be successful. And for us now, I think that's been really great. That means, though, that you have to accept this concept that there are no bad ideas. There are absolutely no bad ideas. All of them are worthy investigating. All of them are worthy pursuing. But find out early so you don't spend too much time on them. And the last thing that I think is really important, at least for me, is I think everyone on the team has to have an opportunity to share in the spotlight. I think everybody has to be able to shine in the team. There cannot be a single dominant figure in that lab. There cannot be a single dominant person that overshadows everyone else. And if everyone on the team is making progress and everyone is contributing and everyone has a chance to experience that satisfaction of giving a talk at a big meeting, being first author on a high-impact paper, something like that, that will give you a team that will be with you forever. And that gives you the longevity you need to successfully compete for those grants as you evolve in your scientific advancement. So, I mean, we have this incredible opportunity in plastic surgery. We're like we're all creative people to begin with. And then we're surgeons, so we operate on things. So, we actually see problems that other people don't even see. And we think of solutions that people have never thought of before. So, all of these people that told me over the years that you cannot be a successful academician, you cannot compete for grants if you are a surgeon, I think that's just so wrong. I think we have an unfair advantage. In fact, because we can think about things that people have been working in areas for decades and never even thought of something that we're just sitting operating and we're in the operating room looking at the problem in front of us and we just think of it like that. And now we solve something that people have been working on for decades because they never were in operating room before. I think we have an unfair advantage. It's just up to us to walk up, put our hand in the pocket of the granting agency and take the money out. You have to follow all the rules that everyone said during these sessions and other sessions that you learn, but actually the money is there for the taking. We just have to go get it. So, in the immortal words of not Snoop Dogg, but T.I., go get it. So, anyway, congrats on a great session. Derek, Justine, thanks for organizing it and for all the speakers. This was really good. Yeah, thank you everyone for coming on. Before we segue to our grant mentoring session portion, we do have a couple of awards that we need to announce. Can we move to the next slide? So, the PSF has been awarding a Bernard Sarnat Excellence in Grant Writing Award each year to recognize investigators for their excellence in grant writing for their projects submitted to the PSF in the prior year. This award honors the contributions of Dr. Sarnat, who for several decades at UCLA made incredible contributions to craniofacial biology. His influence was far-reaching, and Justine Lee, my co-chair, also holds a chair named in honor of Dr. Sarnat. So, this year we have two award winners. The first award winner is Paige Fox from Stanford for her proposal entitled Topical Antibiotic Elution in a Collagen-Rich Hydrogel for Chronic Wound Healing. Paige, if you're on, just wave and say hello. Thank you. Thanks, Paige. Our second awardee tonight is Kathryn Gast from the University of Wisconsin for her project entitled Qualitative Evaluation of Goals and Expectations for Gender-Affirming Surgery. So, Kathryn, if you're on, please say hello. Hi. Thanks so much. Congratulations. So, both of you will be receiving a plaque as well as a $1,000 check mailed to you from the PSF. So, congratulations. And so, finally, I'd like to thank all the participants tonight on the panels who have provided some of their time tonight away from their families to give us lots of phenomenal tips and insights into how to successfully put together a grant proposal and get funded. As a reminder, the session was recorded and will be made available to view again at the PSF website. Again, please also check out the PSF website for more details about each individual grant program that's being offered. Also of note, I was there earlier today, but on the website, Brett Phillips and Howie Levinson have put together a fantastic slide deck also on top 10 common PSF grant writing mistakes that you can also check out. So, finally, we have 13 mentees tonight who have submitted proposals. And Justine and I have matched up different mentors who can provide feedback. These are going to be occurring in breakout rooms. And if you're participating in this, you'll automatically be switched out to one of these rooms. After you finish your mentoring session, you can sign off. The current room that we're in will stay open for an informal question and answer session with anyone that would like to remain on. So thank you again for all of the participants, the panelists, the mentors who are going to be providing feedback on the grants. Thank you all for dedicating a couple hours of your night tonight to helping some of the younger researchers put together successful grants. Thanks, everybody. Super appreciate everyone being here. Nice job. All right. Thank you, Justine and Derek. Thank you. Allison, you want to take it away?

research grants

plastic surgery

workshop

grant writing

interactive session

grant opportunities

clear applications

collaborations

project planning

specific aims

mentorship

award winners

academic recognition

mentoring sessions