What Are Research Grants and How Do You Write One?

 

 

Merlin Crossley, Lab Head

 

What Are Research Grants and How Do You Write One?

 

Once upon a time research was cheaper and simpler.

Charles Darwin put down a stone slab and watched as the months passed and it sank into the earth, thus demonstrating how earthworms churn through top soil. Bunsen is honoured by the invention a burner and Petri a dish.

These days we dream of super colliders, square kilometre telescopes, and DNA sequencing machines capable of listing the genomes of every lifeform in a bucket of sea water.

Thousands of people are involved in research these days.

And it all costs money.

Universities and research institutes are big operations funded by a mixture of student fees, taxes, contracts from industry and contributions from philanthropists. But no institution has enough money to support all their staff to pursue all their research dreams.

So staff write grants to special research funding bodies.

Researchers may write applications to specialist agencies like the State Cancer Councils or Heart Research Australia or to general government agencies, like the National Health and Medical Research Council, that covers all health research, or the Australian Research Council that funds all areas except health.

There are different types of awards – fellowships support the salaries of researchers and grants provide costs for materials, machines, and sometimes also staff salaries and student scholarships. Grants typically support specific projects. But the support is nearly always finite – typically 3 to 5 years.

So during a scientific career researchers begin by working in a ‘supervisors’’ lab supported by funds won by that supervisor. Then they start their own lab, supported by ‘start up funds’ provided by the institution that has employed them. Then they have to go out and compete for funds to continue their work.

Typically, researchers will need to have two or three project grants to have enough resources to compete on the world stage. So most of us write grants every year. We may even write two in the hope of getting one funded. Each grant may be 50 to 100 pages long.

The competition is intense. Ideas are ranked and between 10% and 30% of grants will be funded. Missing out on a grant can spell the end of your scientific career, as you have to scrimp and save and try to eek out new results ready for the next round of applications a year later, where you will be competing against those who were funded.

It is pretty intense – as I expect it is when one is in the thick of many professions – sport, acting, law, finance, business etc. There is angst and understandably a constant questioning of whether the system is right and whether the ranking is fair. The intention is to support excellence and a lot of excellent work is supported but a lot also misses out. There is some luck and there is politics. I guess that’s the case in all professions.

Writing a grant is not just about sitting down and explaining where you are up to in your experiments and listing what you want to do next. You have to put your best foot forward. Here are some suggestions.

1. Einstein said things should be as simple as possible but never simpler. Do keep things simple. Reviewers ranking grants want to understand but it is hard for them to appreciate all the complex details. Make sure you have a clear message.
2. Don’t oversell but do explain why your plan is at the forefront of knowledge and will be creating a new territory into which others will follow. You need to be asking a big and a sensible question.
3. Do provide as much evidence as possible to back up your assertions. This may include preliminary data. Some critics say that grants are awarded only for work that is already done. That isn’t quite true but it is important to prove that the work is feasible and that you can do it, and showing recent successes is a good way of doing that.
4. Treat writing a grant like a paper – begin with your aims, flesh them out with preliminary data, then go back and write an introduction to cover the background that is needed, and then a conclusion highlighting the importance of answering the questions in your aims.
5. Consider the quality of your team and their ability to demonstrate their capabilities. Grants are scored on the quality of the ideas and of the team so you have to put energy into both aspects.

So does the system work?

It does in the sense that only the most highly ranked research is funded so this ‘quality’ filter ensures that research supported by tax payers or benefactors is always impressive science.

But it remains very hard to tell genius from madness. It is particularly hard to identify new stars and those who have had career interruptions and therefore are effectively new. There is an understandable concern that the old guard of established researchers rule the roost, and it is very hard for new players to break into the team. I think the same thing happens in some cricket teams.

To combat the ‘silverback’ advantage there are a number of ‘early’ and ‘mid’ career schemes where ‘like competes with like’ and a few, but not enough, schemes for those who have experienced a career interruption.

The community tries hard to constantly improve the system but the better things get – and research is growing – the more people are drawn into the competition so in biomedical research at least we are currently in a very competitive period. There is more opportunity than there has ever been but more competition than ever too, so getting a grant is no walk in the park.