After a long wait, I got the good news from the National Eye Institute in November 2019. I never dared to think that I would actually get the award until that morning when I received the email notice from my program officer. Since then several friends asked for my application package as a reference for their own. But the most valuable things that I have learnt in this K99 journey aren’t written anywhere in my application. Of course, whatever I am sharing here is just a case study. I haven’t had many R01 to give people a recipe for a definite success. But hopefully some of my experience would be helpful to you.
1. Is my research topic good?
Of course this is important! Everybody knows this! Yet again I want to emphasize this, because I think my success is mostly because I had a research topic that is important and understudied. My proposal focuses on people with dual sensory loss, which is a combined vision and hearing loss. This is a large and increasing population, but there hasn’t been systematic research on this population. If there is one thing about my application that I was confident, that is my research topic.
Ask people if you are not sure. I had interest in this group of people before I had any thought about K99. I talked to people about this and often got positive feedback. After I started planning for K99, I asked more people — I had never been that shameless in my entire life. I sent cold emails to people at VSS conference and talked to them about my thoughts. I only gave them big picture description because I didn’t even know exactly what will be my three aims. The positive feedbacks really built up my ambition for this application.
Most importantly, ask you program officer. My mentor, Gordon, suggested that I send an one page research description to program officers of several institutes to ask whether my topic will be of their interest. I emailed the program officers of National Eye Institute and National Institute of Aging, and got positive responses from both. I didn’t quite understand the importance of this email but I did it because Gordon has to be right. I only realized how important this is until two years later when I became much more familiar with the system. Every research institute has their interest and mission. Your program officer knows well which research fits their mission. It is especially important to have a catching topic when you have a score in the bubble and have to compete with many applicants with similar scores.
Make sure your topic is different from your mentor’s. This is something I learnt from others when I was searching K99 tips online. Because K99 is a career development award that gives early stage investigators the opportunity to explore and establish their own line of research, you should not simply inherit your mentor’s research topics. I myself didn’t have this issue, but I have heard stories about reviewers commenting on the novelty of the applicant’s topic.
2. Am I in a good position?
As a career development award, K99 put a clear timeline for your eligibility. You cannot be a postdoc for more than 4 years at the time of your application. Some people might want to wait until they feel “competitive”, but what I have learnt is that you should always start early and don’t miss any submission cycle.
However, there are other items on the checklist that are more implicit.
Am I productive in the last couple of years? Grant reviewers and job reviewers care about publication in recent years, partly because a good continuity shows good productivity and momentum. I was short in publication when I was preparing for my K99, so I had to spend a lot of time writing papers at the same time. I have always been a early riser , but I hit an extreme at that time. The reviewers were happy about my publication record, so it all worth the effort.
Am I too established? This is also something I learnt when I was searching K99 tips from others. Again, because K99 is a career development award, the funding institute doesn’t want to give it to a person who is already quite established. I have heard stories about excellent researcher not getting K99 because they had too many publications. Of course this situation is not even remotely relevant to me, but apparently this could happen too.
3. Let’s be honest: institute and mentor do matter
Now I realize that many of these things that I am saying here is about “understanding the mechanism of the grant”. Let’s use some lame metaphor: you are a healthy seed that wants to grow into a big tree, K99 gives you the nutrition (literally), but you still need good soil. To prove that you have sufficient infrastructure and intellectual support from your hosting institute, you need to submit several documents describing your environment and a support letter from the head of your school. Initially I thought these are just housekeeping documents that no body will actually read, but my mentor Gordon strengthened these drafts quite a bit. My reviewers were happy about University of Minnesota and my department.
I think I have given quite some evidences about how important it is to have a great mentor. I wrote every draft by myself, but Gordon’s rich grant application experience has pushed me on the correct path. Gordon is probably the reason why I could survive two submissions and stay a sane person, which I will talk more in the “personal story”. Mentors are not only important in making suggestions and revising drafts. Two other things are very important. First, it helps if your mentor have mentored many successful researchers for the field, because this means they have ample experience to help you succeed as well. Second, your mentor’s statement is a strong document showing that you have great potential and that you will get the best support.
4. Build a strong team.
You can’t be good at everything, but make sure somebody in your team is good it. My research topic is about dual sensory loss, using computation approach and has a clinical emphasis. Apparent, I can’t know everything about basic vision science, basic audition science, clinical vision science, clinical audition science and computational science. But I was very lucky to be able to gather great collaborators with these specialties in my research team. This team really helped in proving that we can successfully conduct my proposed research.
A side note: I also wanted to say please don’t over build the team. Mentors and collaborators are humans with limited energy. They will distribute their energy based on the roles they are playing on each project they have committed to. The larger the team gets, the more ambiguous and dispersed the responsibility gets.
5. Some nitty-gritty about the research proposal
[Personal Opinion] Make a smooth story from the three aims . This is the strategy used by myself and other application packaged that I have read. K99 application requires three specific aims, with the first two aims for the K99 phase (the mentored phase) and aim 3 for the R00 phase (the independent phase). In other words, the aims 1&2 establish a foundation for your independent research by proving the concept of your proposal and arm you with necessary skills. My aim 1&2 focus on clarifying the problem, and aim3 focuses on possible solution. A smooth story makes it easy to follow the flow. You can also cite your other aims here and there, which will present a well-organized research line.
Balance big picture and details. This is probably one of the most challenging part for grant proposal. Especially when we have only 9 pages to write a five year plan. I admit that I don’t have a good strategy for this. I think even Gordon won’t say for sure how to make the best balance. For K99 application, aim1&2 required more details, but aim3 can be more high level because you will likely make changes to your aim3 based on your aim1&2 findings. However, you must show enough excitement for your aim3. One of my review comments from the first submission was that my aim3 lacks motivation.
Pilot data, Pilot data, Pilot data! The K99 instruction book said that pilot data is not a necessity, but what I learnt from my and other’s experience is that you have to have some pilot data. So besides writing the application document, writing manuscripts, I also collected pilot data at the same time. My friend who got K99 before me and helped me a lot on my application once joked that, it is funny there were so much data collection even before getting the grant. However, one of the critical role of the reviewers is to evaluate whether your research plan is feasible. Actual data is much stronger evidence than lengthy jargon.
6. I hope you won’t need this: about resubmission.
Resubmission advantage. Every new submission has one opportunity of resubmission. When resubmitting, we can provide a one page introduction on the major changes we have made — just like a journal article revision. [Anecdotes alert!!] This is probably not written anywhere officially, but it seems that reviewers would have slight mercy on resubmissions. It is possible that they will focus on the previously raised questions and will be pleased to see you have addressed them well.
Reviewers may have different opinions. This is not a challenge specific to grant application. In my first submission, one of my reviewer commented that my research proposal lacks theoretical emphasis on brain mechanisms, and another reviewer commented that my research proposal can’t provide direct benefit to patients. It was a dilemma which side to strengthen. I think in the end we decided to emphasize the direct benefit and completely rewrote aim3. In fact, the lack of theoretical emphasis was raised again by the reviewer in my resubmission.
[What do you think?] Just resubmit. I often see the advice that you should always resubmit if you are a tad unsure whether you will get funded in the first round. The reasoning is not to miss a submission cycle. Many people found that their first submission got accepted after they put in a resubmission. It is surely a good strategy to compete with time.
7. Be organized — with documents and time.
My first submission was quite messy. You can tell from my application folder. The documents were mixed together, and each document had about 20 versions. The “final”s and “finalfinal”s are in a folder called “For Liz”, who was the grant staff in my department. Liz retired after my first submission, and I am still grateful how patient she was and didn’t throw her keyboard on me. I didn’t have a good plan for the timeline, I just kind of played along as Gordon guided me forward. How can I know the budget needs to route through department and school, not simply submitting an excel? How can I possibly have spared mind to realize that I need to send the documents out for people to sign early enough. Fortunately I didn’t start preparing too late, and I have a mentor who knew clearly that I knew nothing.
My second submission folder was nice and clean. I had 26 numbered folders, one for each document. In each folder, I had subfolders called “reference” and “history”. I am still proud every time when I see the 26 folders. My resubmission was at a big grant season. My new grant staff was quite swamped by the grant applications on her plates, but I was able to cause minimal trouble for her.
Grant applications were team efforts. The preparation involves me, my mentors, my collaborators, the grant staff in the department and the administrative staff in the university. It is not like a lecture assignment that you can submit the last minute, because multiple people needs to review and approve. I think it is wise to be organized — at least don’t make the grant staff hate you. But this is difficult too.
8. Respect the system, but the system is run by human
I visit a grant forum run by “writedit” quite often. People repeatedly ask similar questions about their grant application, and most of the time writedit would suggest “ask your program officer”. I don’t know how many people actually did it or actually got the answers. But one last important thing that I want to share here is, try to communicate with your program officer.
As I said earlier, my first communication with my program officer was to ask whether my research topic is of their interest. National Eye Institute has annual symposium at ARVO conference, so I got to listen to my program officer’s presentation once and also had a brief chat with him in front of their exhibition booth. In this past two years I consulted him about my summary statement and scores, asked about resubmission and chance of getting funded. Program officers are very busy — they are often handling the submissions from several cycles at the same time, but I am only one of the desperate applicants. I understood their busy schedule and always managed to write follow-up emails without being too pushy. Waiting can be frustrating, but not communicating is worse!
Lastly, I wanted to share what Gordon often reminded me “There are a lot of noises in the system”. Now I think about it, perhaps factors that are less important would be easily masked by the noise, but factors that are most important would likely survive and become determinants regardlessly. So, can we identify and secure the most important factors in this system?