Revision — Improving Your Grant Application
Funded or not, the process is not over! If you did not get funded, then revision of your grant application is the next step. Don’t take it personally if your grant is not funded. Think of grant-writing as a highly competitive game—most people cannot simply walk in off of the street and expect to win the game. It is unusual for a grant to receive funding on the first submission, so you should be prepared to make revisions and improvements to your grant based on the comments of reviewers and your own continued reflections. In fact, with the expectation that you will have to submit it a few times before receiving funding, the process of grant revision should begin the day after the grant is submitted. Once you receive notification that your grant has not been funded, you should arrange a meeting with your mentor and design a plan of action to improve your grant before the next submission deadline. This is essential to submitting a successful revised grant application. In addition to responding to reviewers’ comments, here are a few important ways to improve the fundability of your research grant application.
- Publish your work in a peer-reviewed journal. This provides evidence to grant reviewers that:
- Your hypotheses and the direction of your project are credible within your field of study
- You are capable of performing the proposed experimentation.
- Add new preliminary data to your grant proposal. This can further illustrate your ability to successfully accomplish your specific aims.
- Take a grant writing course at your institution, or participate in a young investigators mentoring project, such as that of the “Bone and Joint Decade.” These types of programs are designed to assist young investigators as they work to develop a fundable research grant.
- Take initiative and get involved in study groups (NIH, ACR) and research organizations (FOCIS, CARRA, Bone and Joint Decade) so that you may become acquainted with successful researchers (key players,) and likewise they can become familiar with you.
- Consider establishing interdisciplinary collaboration to strengthen your project. Collaborating with nephrologists or pathologists to investigate lupus glomerulonephritis is intuitive. Collaborating with neurologists and endocrinologists to develop antigen-specific regulatory T cells for the treatment of SLE is less intuitive, until you consider that this same process could be significant to those with multiple sclerosis and type I diabetes mellitus.
Even after you receive grant funding, realize that the monies and the period in which to use them are limited. Therefore, continuously improving and preparing for your next grant application is important as you seek to maintain funding for your project over a longer period of time.
