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Academy News: May 2005Applying for an NIH K08 grant Of the approximately $28 billion invested annually by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in medical research to improve the understanding, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, greater than 80% is awarded to researchers by means of competitive grants. One of the most important types of grants is the Career Development or “K” award. This article provides information on the Mentored Clinical Scientist Development Award (K08). You should apply for a K08 award if you want a career as a medical scientist and don’t have more than $500,000 lying around to fund such an endeavor. The grant will provide financial support for you, as you perform important medical research and learn how to be an independent medical scientist. Funding lasts three to five years, and provides for your salary and benefits, lab supplies and equipment, and educational expenses. The application process “cycles” three times annually, with applications due on the first of February, June and October each year. Here are the Web site links:
You will need letters of support from your mentor and collaborators, and assistance from administrators for the institutional information, budget, and approval, if you plan to use human subjects and/or animals in your research. The NIH strictly enforces parameters on the format. Don’t let your application be rejected immediately because you violated a rule on font size, margins or page limits. Once your application is submitted, it will be assigned to one of the institutes, and a scientific review group (SRG) will review it and give it a “priority score” based on your merit and the merit of the proposed research. Applications are ranked according to priority score, the lower the score the better, with 100 being the lowest/best possible, and funded according to NIH budget constraints. Better scores are more likely to get funded. The largest part of the application is the Research Plan. In 25 pages, you must provide:
The latter should be the most detailed. Successful applications are those that propose research projects that will expedite the NIH mission. Your application should clearly describe how and why your proposed research is important to understand, prevent, diagnose, and/or treat disease in order to improve the health of the nation. Most importantly, your proposed project must be possible. If the goals are not achievable or the methods unlikely to succeed, the NIH will not fund the project. Perhaps the most easily overlooked aspect of the process is the mentoring. That’s why the NIH put this word first in the grant title—to alert you to this critical aspect. You need a mentor. Contrary to widely accepted tacit belief, a mentor is not someone who hires you to do his/her scut work and tells you things like, “Work hard, be smart and strategic, and you will succeed.” That’s not advice that you can’t get at the local butcher shop. A mentor is someone of middle to high academic rank who has the talent, resources (time and space and money), and active interest in helping you learn and mature into a scientist. When you are writing your K08 application, your mentor should work closely with you, going through multiple rounds of editing and revising the research plan. If your mentor lacks the talent, resources, or interest for teaching and training you, and making your development into a superior, independent scientist a high priority actively and selflessly pursued, then you don’t really have a mentor. |
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