Open Threads

I’m the lead scientist (known as a Principal Investigator/PI) for a small R03 grant application going to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  I want to look at how people make choices when premiums don’t matter.  I’m just finished reviewing the final pages. I sent the document to my pre-award grant administrator.  She’ll review everything for format and then send the files to the main University level review/grant administration team.  They’ll give a thumbs up and submit the entire grant  for the February cycle sometime this afternoon.

It has a cost cap of $100,000 in total expenses over 2 years.  Costs are split between direct and indirect costs.  Direct costs are my salary and other costs of my employment (health insurance, 401K etc and the stipend for the graduate student who I want to hire)   The University of South Carolina receives a 49% indirect rate for federal grants.  Basically every $2 of direct research costs leads to $1 of federal support for the USC research infrastructure.    Those research infrastructure costs are wide and varied but they include paying for the library and a lot of IT support as well as maintaining the buildings where the research happens plus the ethics and administrative supports that the feds (rightly) require.

I am extremely unlikely to be awarded these funds in this round.  That statement is true in this factual universe, it is true in a counterfactual Harris or Biden presidency universe, and it is true in a universe where NIH is acting as it was from 2017-2020. It is a true statement because it is the first submission of an idea by a new PI.  The typical R03 goes back and forth for review and revision between the PI and NIH multiple times if it will ever be funded. First submission funding is WEIRD!

My objective for this round is to get good feedback that I can incorporate into a second round in the Fall.

Once the grant application goes to NIH, it is screened to make sure it is administratively sound.  Is it the right budget for the grant mechanism?  R01s are big budgets (~$2 million for 4 or 5 years, R03s are tiny, and R21s are in-between).  Is it an application with a clinical trial component going to a non-trial grant mechanism?  Does it have all the appropriate signatures?  Once it is administratively clear it is assigned a “study section.”

The study section is a group of respected researchers with skills in the broad area of a bunch of common applications.  My grant will be in a study section of health economics/behavioral social sciences grants.  Over the next couple of months, at least three members of the study section will read the entire application and grade it on two key criteria — is the proposed research Important and is the proposed project Doable?  Every grant application is graded.  The grades are then collected for all grants and the top half of the grants advance to the next review round.  The entire panel meets either in-person or virtually.  Here each of the top 50% proposals is discussed for 10-15 minutes and the entire study section scores and ranks each grant.

Each study section sends its scores to “Council” which is run by NIH and most of the recommended grants get funded and some grants that did not score high but covered really important topics might receive funding too.  All the other grants are then sent feedback from each of the three reviewers.

Assuming I was to be funded on this grant, I would receive a Notice of Award (NOA).  The NOA would tell me when the money would arrive and kick off a bunch of new administrative tasks.  I would likely start the research that I want to do in September or October.  I would have funds to cover six or seven weeks of my salary per year for two years and I would be able to hire/fund a PhD student for a good chunk of their time during the grant period.

The most likely case is that I get good feedback this cycle so I could revise the application.  I might have a decent chance of funding for the Fall submission window so the money would likely arrive at this time next year.

This is the short and straightforward/hopeful version of the academic grant writing and funding cycle.

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