Endocrine Abstracts

The song ‘Money makes the world go round’ could have been written for biological scientists, because it is hard to conceive of a research project in endocrinology that could proceed without many thousands of pounds in funding. This means that a key skill for career scientists is the ability to write successful research grants. Despite government assurances of increased budgets for scientific research, the reality is that within the environment of responsive mode grant applications, competition is increasing, and it is steadily more difficult to obtain funds. Committees are no longer faced with the choice of funding good research and rejecting flawed applications. Many applications that would have been considered competitive 5 years ago now fail to be funded. To enhance your ability to be in the pool of funded applications, it is necessary to consider the ways that committees assess grants. Excellent, novel, timely, pervasive science is an essential requirement, but even those attributes will not guarantee success of an application if it is not crafted to make the point unmissable to reviewers, committee members and even lay readers. As few committees cover in detail the subject areas of all applications that will be presented to them, it is essential to build the case for support for your research idea from a simple concept, perhaps a disease condition, through the current knowledge, to gaps in information that limit advances, leading to the need for the research you propose. In this era of spin, it is likely even that the visual presentation of a grant application affects its likelihood of success. A well-constructed case with subheadings, hierarchy and illustrations is easier for the hard-pressed reviewer or committee member to understand, and may score higher than a dense mass of text at the limit of the permissible font size!

This presentation will highlight a few of the pitfalls commonly encountered by new applicants for research grants, and hopefully provide an insight into the review process that will make it easier to provide what committees want to see.