Abstract
Chapter 4 addressed the first half of the Application Process: Ideas, Planning, and Forms. Chapter 5 addressed Application Content. This chapter continues the application cycle by focusing on Peer Review. We describe the stress-inducing peer review process so you can be strategic in how you put forth your case for funding to maximize the technical appeal to reviewers and suggest ways to use reviewer feedback to improve competitiveness for revisions for reapplication. It ends with a brief overview of approaches to reviews by other US federal agencies.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | SpringerBriefs in Public Health |
| Pages | 77-89 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2019 |
Publication series
| Name | SpringerBriefs in Public Health |
|---|---|
| ISSN (Print) | 2192-3698 |
| ISSN (Electronic) | 2192-3701 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.
Funding
Once your application for a grant or contract has been formally accepted by the funding institution, it goes into their scientific review and vetting cycles. We make a distinction here between peer review by an IRG for technical merit (Initial Review), and funding institution/agency vetting for prioritizing awards (Secondary Review). You gain a strategic advantage when drafting a grant application if you understand the process of how it will be evaluated. Thus, this chapter offers considerable grantsmanship insight. At NIH, scientific review and vetting are firewalled within the institution. This enables program staff to play an active role in administering the programs of research under their cognizance. Firewalling also allows POs the freedom to help applicants maximize project-mission fit with the IC when crafting their applications. Not all agencies bar program administrators from participating in review. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a good example. NSF does not involve their advisory councils/boards in discrete grant funding decisions. After peer review, it is normally up to the discretion of program officials to make award decisions based upon technical merit alone because NSF's focus is on basic science. Conversely, most other federal agencies need to tie funding decisions to mission goals. As we touched on in Sect. 1.4, once a project is funded, your assigned PO/PD oversees administration of the research for the life of the grant in the role of Project Officer. There is only one PO per grant, but that PO might have a steering committee of POs for some Extra-Large RPGs involving multiple ICs. outstanding projects or your project was relatively expensive. Therefore, NIH institutes will often wait one or two funding cycles to see if the next applications are less competitive or less costly than yours. Those residual funds might add up to your grant award. All Veterans Affairs research is intramural. Although the VA publishes FOAs similar to the NIH, only in-house VA researchers may apply for funding. If you are on a campus with a VA Medical Center, you might be able join a VA research project if invited. Many VA researchers have or pursue joint appointments with medical schools to conduct research. Thus, the VA is having its intramural cake and eating its extramural cake too. The VA can also solicit contract work on FedBizOps.gov to tap technical expertise in areas such as prosthetics and surgical instruments. If you are on a campus with VA ties, find out who is working in your area and explore collaboration. It might lead to more than a joint appointment. National Science Foundation (NSF) With an annual budget of roughly $7BN, NSF funds about a quarter of all university-based basic science research. FOAs are posted on Grants.Gov. Similar to NIH, NSF supports training and career development grants. As we mentioned earlier, NSF POs are more directly involved in award decisions than are NIH POs. As such, NSF POs are more limited in what information they can offer to guide application development than POs at NIH. NSF advice to applicants is normally limited to clarifying FOA content and providing general information on the application and review process. NASA funds intramural and extramural research primarily through solicited proposals for grants (see Grants.Gov), and relies upon cooperative agreements, contracts and arrangements with other agencies, non-profit organizations, industry and academia. Solicitation mechanisms primarily used are NASA Research Announcements (NRAs), Announcements of Opportunity (AOs), and Cooperative Agreement Notices (CANs). A few unsolicited proposals are also considered.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Science Foundation (NSF) | |
| National Science Foundation (NSF) | |
| National Science Foundation (NSF) | |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration |
Keywords
- Application assignment
- DOD
- NASA
- NSF
- Not discussed
- Review meetings
- Scoring
- Unscored
- VA
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Health Policy
- Health Informatics
- Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
