Santinio Jones, Weil Institute Proposal Development Specialist, receives U-M staff career development award
ANN ARBOR - Members of the Max Harry Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation who have worked with our Proposal Development (PD) team may recognize the graduate pictured on Eastern Michigan University’s homepage. Santinio Jones is a Proposal Development Specialist here at Weil who works with Institute members to develop and write competitive research grant proposals in critical care.
Along with recently completing his Masters in Business Administration (MBA), Santinio also recently won a staff award through the University of Michigan. To celebrate these achievements, the Weil Institute sat down with Santinio to learn more about his work, his award and… himself!
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To start, could you tell us a little bit about your role at the Weil Institute?
My role specifically as Proposal Development Specialist involves working with investigators and their teams to explain Weil Proposal Development (PD) services and support options we provide and identify their proposal support needs – which may consist of closely evaluating funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) to understand requirements and assess fit; summarize opportunities for teams as requested. Also, I help investigators plan proposal writing goals and deadlines, determine roles/responsibilities, provide timeline reminders as needed, and connect the proposal team to Weil units and other resources (e.g., clinical research, data science, graphics support, AD aims page peer review, admin support for meetings / biosketches), and provide comprehensive grant editing for all proposal files to ensure documents are clear, persuasive, logically organized, consistent, and grammatically correct.
What interests you most about proposal development?
What interests me most about proposal development is the various projects and investigators I get to work with at any given moment, which in turn, provides me with the opportunity to learn about all the fascinating work that is taking place within the field of critical care.
You recently received an award through the University of Michigan. Could you tell us about that?
The award I received is the Career Development Award for Staff. I received this award to increase my scientific writing knowledge and skills, strengthen my creativity and problem-solving abilities, and enhance my writing and editing effectiveness to provide the best service possible in our unit.
You also recently completed your MBA—congratulations! What are your next steps?
I would love an opportunity to work within management to leverage the business acumen I’ve been working diligently to learn. In the meantime, my immediate next step is to get more education due to receiving the above award. Most importantly, I plan to spend some much-needed quality time with my family this summer. It has been several summers that I have not been able to be fully present in my family life due to school, so I am excited for whatever unplanned journeys we go on. I also plan on improving my golf game this summer. My goal is to break 100 before fall! The fall is when I plan to think critically about my next steps career-wise. Until then, I plan to enjoy not taking exams and writing papers.
Is there anything new exciting in Proposal Development that you would like to share?
The PDU is working with Dr. Robert Neumar to submit an NINDS K12 Emergency Medicine Research Career Development Program in the Neurological Sciences. The goal is to develop research excellence among early career faculty with innovative ideas to improve the understanding and treatment of neurologic disorders in the emergency medicine field. Beyond this, we are excited to continue providing excellent service to the investigators planning to work with our unit to submit their grants.