Weil Institute to offer aims page reviews for members
The new service will give Institute members insight into how grant reviewers may interpret their proposal’s aims page, enabling them to respond to feedback proactively before the official submission.
Contact:
Kate Murphy, Marketing Communications Specialist, Weil Institute
mukately@med.umich.edu
ANN ARBOR - Members of the Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation at the University of Michigan will soon have exclusive access to a new tool for proposal perfection. Starting in January, a subset of Weil associate directors will provide NIH-style reviews of the draft aims page for any member’s critical care grant proposal. With decades of collective experience writing and reviewing grants for agencies such as the NIH, the directors will provide multidisciplinary, expert feedback that could give Institute members an edge over the competition.
To learn more, the Weil Institute spoke with Deputy Directors Kathleen Stringer, PharmD, and Robert Dickson MD, who are spearheading this new service.
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The aims page is the most important part of a new proposal. It’s the first file most reviewers read, and it establishes the tone for the entire grant. Your aims page must clearly communicate what you are doing and why your work is important.
After a proposal is submitted to the NIH, a small team of reviewers will look at it in detail and provide feedback and an initial score. If the proposal scores high enough, it goes on to a full panel review, where the first group will describe the proposal in their own words and bring up any potential weaknesses or concerns they might have. The rest of the panel, most of whom have not read the grant, will ask questions of their own, and then everyone scores the proposal again.
Yes, and that is something we want to prepare teams for through our peer reviews here at the Weil Institute. A great aims page will turn reviewers into advocates. As an investigator, however, it’s difficult to predict what other people will have concerns about. Your reviewers will also most likely not be experts in your exact topic, so your grant needs to be written in a way that will make sense to an informed non-expert.
By having a subset of reviewers here at Weil read the aims page and then explain it to everyone else in their own words, investigators can get a sense of whether someone who isn’t as familiar with the project “gets it”, or, if not, where and how the proposal can be improved before they officially submit it.
PIs can schedule a review through the Weil Institute website. These meetings occur on the second Thursday of every month and are first-come-first-serve, so we highly recommend scheduling as soon as possible. We also ask that PIs submit their aims page up to a week in advance.
The sessions themselves are virtual and run for 30 minutes. We spend the first 5 minutes reading the aims page, followed by a 10-minute panel discussion like in a typical NIH study section. Unlike in a typical NIH review, however, the investigator and team will also be present throughout and can observe. The final 15 minutes are then spent discussing feedback with the investigator/team.
First, this service will give investigators an idea of what reviewers might have questions about and will enable them to address these areas practically and proactively.
Second, our associate directors bring a range of perspectives and expertise to the table. If you are developing a device for sepsis, you will likely need feedback from not just a clinician but also an engineer. At the Weil Institute, we have experts in both—along with data science, TBI, pharmacology, cardiac arrest, product development, ARDS… to name just a few!
Finally, these aims page reviews could potentially serve as gateways connecting Institute members to other Weil resources and possibly collaborators. If we see a project that might be a good fit for certain funding opportunity, we can loop in our Proposal Development team to help the investigator explore that further. Or, if an investigator needs help generating preclinical data, we can connect them to our Large Animal Lab. This process can also serve as a way to connect Weil members and facilitate collaboration. Someone might sign up for just a review but get more out of it!