AAS | Events | 14-15 February 2008

Brendan Crabb Brendan Crabb is an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and an International Research Fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA). His is the incoming Director of the Macfarlane Burnet Institute of Medical Research and Public Health (Burnet Institute) in Melbourne.

His laboratory’s research interests include the study of malaria focusing on molecular, immunological and epidemiological aspects of this disease. He is currently active in malaria vaccine development and in building capacity for malaria research in countries where this disease is endemic. He was formerly Senior Lecturer in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at The University of Melbourne. He also has an interest in science education, currently through involvements in educational and curriculum development activities for high school students and teachers.

Indeed, grant writing is a very onerous task. I won't be telling you how to write 'great' grants; that is what Doug Hilton would have done if he were here. Unfortunately, Doug couldn't make it, so I am going to tell you about writing 'ok' grants and my experience in the granting arena in general – from the perspective of a grant writer but also as someone who has sat on a fair few panels.

One of the things that malaria does is to open up the international arena, so I have been exposed quite a bit to granting bodies that are a little bit different. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, NIH, the Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation, WHO are all international agencies that many of you, at least, will come across at some stage, and they all have different schemes. We have heard Warwick Anderson talking about the myriad schemes just within the NHMRC, and these all have a huge range of schemes as well.

I am not going to, in 20 minutes, dissect any of those things in any detail, but will just address some of the common philosophies, common issues that I have come across and think are important. I have tried to rank them, almost, in order of importance as generic issues that are relevant to writing a grant. I am certainly conscious of the fact that grant writing is just one issue of that very large list of things that Bob Williamson discussed.

It was terrific hearing the talks this morning. I hadn't intended to talk here about mentoring beyond grants, but one or two things Bob said really resonated with me and it is probably worth while for me to spend a moment or two telling you about how that is relevant to me.

Bob mentioned that not always the best scientists make it, with a 10:1 ratio of those who get PhDs to positions in Australia. I certainly feel that I am a living example of that. I never felt a particularly strong scientist; I was certainly not somebody who achieved brilliant marks. I just felt that I enjoyed it and I was good enough to have a place in it. I certainly was never under any illusion of being brilliant at it, and never had that epiphany – or whatever you might call it – in the middle of the night when I might wake up and worry that people would all think I'm a fraud, because I never felt that way at all. But what I have come to realise is that, apart from the fact that I love it, there are all of these other things that matter. Bob mentioned quite a few of those, and some of those things I am quite suited to.

I certainly have a great passion for science. I have a great passion for communicating the science. I have a passion for working with other people and seeing them succeed, and have always been more interested in that than in any great publication that I might get myself, beyond wanting to survive in the system. I have certainly wanted to survive in the system, and I have understood that we need to be pragmatic about that and that you need a strong CV to be able to do that. But these other things really do make an enormous difference to whether you will progress in a career in research, in particular, and in the other streams of science that were touched on earlier.

So my own background is certainly not one of stellar scientific achievement, but I am still here and still in a position where I can make a difference – I hope.

Probably the most common thing that I hear about every December in the Australian system, especially in response to NHMRC grants failures, is all of us finding excuses for why our grants didn't get up. I don't exclude myself from any of the foibles that I am going to point out today; that is why I know about some of them.

People will say that for grants there is a game that needs to be played, that it is almost a game of smoke and mirrors; that you have to almost trick your way to success. Perhaps that is a little bit too strong, but you will hear that a lot from people excusing why their grants didn't get up – 'I didn't know how to play that game.' Or they will say that it is simply a matter of luck, that it's a lucky dip – 'You've got to be in it, and if you're in it, you might get up and you might not. And this particular time my grant didn't get up.'

There are other reasons given, of course: that it's a boys' club or a club of successful researchers only, or, 'My track record was the only thing that mattered; I don't have enough strong papers so I didn't get it.' And finally there is the approach, 'We all know that you need to have done all the research before you applied for the grant.' They are some common ones. I am sure there are others.

None of them are true – none of them. Of course, there are elements of each one that you could say have influenced things at some stage, and occasionally your grant is going to be a marginal one at the cut-off, and is going to fall above it or below it. The first and most important thing about grants is taking responsibility yourselves for whether they get up or not.

If your grant doesn't get up, at least in the schemes that I have been involved with, which are rigorously fair – not perfect systems but certainly rigorously fair and transparent processes – the main reason on almost every occasion is that your grant was not competitive enough. There was an element missing. It is a very important thing to accept before being able to move forward to the next stage of success in grant writing, and perhaps the most important thing I'll say today.

All great grants are based on a great idea! I am not going to spend any time on this, because of course you have got to have great ideas for your grants. Grant writing is an extension of the scientific process, which first and foremost is a creative process, and you have to have great ideas. That goes without saying, so for everything I say after this, this is a given. You certainly need to have a great idea, you need to be thinking innovatively and then moving forward to, 'How can I take this great idea to actually find out whether it is true or not? The first thing I need to do is to get money, and therefore I will need to write a grant.' So ideas are absolutely crucial.

The most important practical issue, after ideas, as far as I am concerned, is to think strategically, to think a long way ahead about the great idea you have and the proposal you are going to put in.

You might think that some of your senior mentors and so on think about the grants that they are going to put in for a few months beforehand. That is almost never true. These things have been planned a long way ahead, many years ahead in some respects, but in a practical sense with the one particular, let's say, project grant that you might be thinking about, it's at least a year of time ahead – often with data and ideas fairly well thought through, even at that stage.

So, thinking strategically in all sorts of ways: that will be a very individual thing, depending on the granting scheme, depending on the nature of the project and so on, but I can't emphasise enough how important it is to think in this way.

You will have a lot of ideas, you will have a lot of projects. Which one is mature enough to be put up for competitive funding? It is not a lucky dip, as I have mentioned already, and I am not a 'put in a grant, and suck it and see' type person. That doesn't have a high chance of success. Put in grants when they are ready to go. You don't always have that luxury, but you need to try to plan for it.

Of course, the choice of scheme is crucially important. That comes with experience. It certainly comes with discussion with other people who have experience. There is no other way to know, when there are such a myriad possibilities available. You heard from Warwick Anderson about the NHMRC's complicated schemes; they certainly are multiplied many times over. Your project really must fit the priorities of the scheme. It is no use putting a marginal medical research project in to the NHMRC. It will struggle. It could be a brilliant research project, but one of the first things that any panel considers in the NHMRC is significance within the context of that scheme. So it is crucially important – don't kid yourself about it – that you are ruthless with yourself about what the goals of that scheme are, and ensure that your project fits that scheme.

I like all grants, if at all possible, to have a sense of being contextualised in a grander scheme. That is what I mean about integration with other projects: talking about your grants appearing to be a part of a greater vision. There is tremendous power in that. It really does get around all of these sorts of interests. It certainly demonstrates that you have a vision. It gets around issues relating to potential overlap and just the level of significance against what others are doing in the field. You discuss in your background this broader vision that you have, and how this grant fits within it.

On the issue of competitors and co-applicants, all I will say here is to assemble the right team to do the project you want to do. Don't play politics with grants, in a sense. Get together the best team to do the job you want to do, and don't pay any attention to competitors or to games that need to be played to have investigators on; just assemble the right team.

In my opinion, having fewer grants is always better. Having three grants in, in a particular year, does not necessarily give you a greater chance of success than having one grant in, and quite often the chance is less. So having fewer, well thought through, carefully planned grants in gives a much higher chance of success and is a better long-term strategy.

Keep discussing things, discuss them openly as often as you can, and err on the side of openness as opposed to protecting your ideas. That is my opinion, and it certainly has paid off for me.

The last point is perhaps amongst the most important: with all of this planning that you are doing, all this strategy, you will have written the grant through all the discussions you have had, through all the thoughts you have had, without having put pen to paper. It will be very clear what that background is, what that context is, what your carefully thought through aims are, what level of preliminary data you need to convince the panel that this is likely to be a successful grant. So I strongly encourage you: don't put pen to paper too early. Have it completely clear and crystallised in your own mind – it is a great way of checklisting the whole process. If you can do that, you are ready to write the grant.

I will address the other priorities very quickly. You need to balance the issue of risk versus safety. I have mentioned the importance of innovation: every good grant must be innovative. It also has to be feasible, though. And so, while you have got to have some originality, often it won't be from left field. It will be built, usually, on your own area of expertise or the success of somebody else.

So it is this balance between risk and safety, and exactly how you write the grant and how much information, especially how much preliminary data, how many alternatives you give in your research plan, depends a lot on the degree of risk. You might provide two or three ways of doing something; you might provide safety nets; you might provide aims that are going to give you results regardless of the high-risk things that don't work. Think very carefully about that, but you must err on the side of innovation in your grant. They are not safety-first systems, usually.

I cannot emphasise enough how high-quality preliminary data makes a difference, and also how that preliminary data is presented. I am going to mention again in a moment that most of the people reading your grant will not be experts and yet preliminary data is incredibly important. How do you reconcile those two things? Even in the presentation of the figures and the figure legends you must have sufficient detail for any expert, and yet it has got to be digestible by the intelligent non-expert, because they are actually the ones who are going to make the decision and who will look at that data and try and digest it for themselves. So perhaps write it in the same way you would write a figure or a figure legend or a results section for a top broad journal, for example, because the same principles hold there. It is important (a) that you have it, but (b) that you communicate it effectively.

The next point is so often overlooked, yet to me it is very, very important. Your grant needs to be a beautiful document. It needs to look good, it needs to be easy to read, and it needs to be enjoyable to the reader. It is not easy to do that. That is one of the reasons why you spend so long doing it ahead of time.

As I have just mentioned, grants should never be targeted only to the expert. They certainly shouldn't be simple and simplistic to the expert, but they should never be targeted that way. This is a really crucial point, not to have pages with just slabs of text without aesthetically looking good as well as reading cleanly and easily, where it is very easy for the reader to find out what is being done.

So of course you are positive and put your best foot forward, but the best grants are considered, thoughtful and really sincere in the picture that they paint and the context into which this work fits. You have to have faith that the idea is a good one, and you are going to convey this message – you don't need to oversell it. In fact, you need to place it in the appropriate context, where you think it really belongs.

On the various panels that I sit on, there is a crucial stage in whether or not your grant gets up. This is when it is in front of the panel. It has gone to reviewers, it has been through a peer assessment process, now it is up for discussion. Perhaps you have had, depending on the scheme, a chance for rebuttal and there have been documents exchanged and so on. Then it comes down to this remarkably short process. In the case of the NHMRC we might spend 15 minutes a grant, but the primary spokesman – say this is within the project grant scheme – might have three to five minutes to speak about and digest all of those complexities. This is the time that really matters.

It has a lot to do with how beautiful a read that grant was, with the narrative that you provide – in a sincere sense – because that spokesman is looking for the positives, the negatives, your way around those negatives, the degree of significance, the back-up plans that you have. All of those things need to be provided to that spokesperson. This is a crucial point. Often grants are far too dense for that, and as a panel member you have to work very hard to work this out yourself. Provide the narrative for your spokesperson.

And it goes without saying that you need to pay incredibly close attention to the guidelines, as difficult as that may be with the wads of information that are out there.

Finally, consider the assessment method really carefully – it is just so often overlooked. Almost always there is a breakdown in how things are going to be assessed: how much, what percentage of the score that is going to be given to a grant, is on the track record, for example. Pay attention to that, if there is a weighting, and write the grant accordingly for each of those sections.

The track record issue comes up again and again. You don't need to take a one-dimensional approach to track record. It is not simply what papers are there and how good they are, and what great journals they are in. Draw attention to the relevant components of the track record, draw attention to the key paper that has made a big difference and your role in it. Draw attention to the fact that one of those key papers was cited a lot, in recognition that it really was that conceptual advance that you said it was. There may not be big numbers there, but there are other ways of drawing attention to the positives in your track record, in an open and honest and very useful way for the panel. (Papers do matter, of course.)

I was writing something on the topic of common errors and looking at the web at the same time, and I found quite a number of web pages on how to write grants. I think virtually every university in the world has got something on how to write a good grant. Jacob Kraicer, from the University of Toronto, has got a particularly nice web page with tips on grant writing. He talks about junior researchers and senior researchers, and about common errors that are made, amongst many other things.

He has summarised common errors pretty well on his web site. I have touched on many of his points already, but for junior researchers these are the ones he mentioned.

The first is that being over-ambitious, with no clear time lines, going through a lifetime's work in an individual grant is a very common problem – I can understand why that happens, but it is important to see it as a problem – and that leads to a lack of clearly defined priorities.

I think very often the background, as I mentioned before, is not contextualising the work, not thoughtful enough – accurate, but not thoughtful enough.

The issue of preliminary data I have touched on, but time commitment was not one I had thought of. It is probably true, though, especially for more junior researchers. You certainly need to demonstrate that you are making a substantial commitment to this project. It is amazing how many proposals I get from first-time or second-time would-be grantees that have a minimal time commitment. It sends the wrong message.

That is all I have to say. I hope it is useful. I am very sorry that I won't be hanging around – I'm between two jobs at the moment, with tomorrow being my last day at the Institute. I will be moving to the Burnet Institute of Medical Research and Public Health, and in that respect I want to say one final thing on mentoring. I will be going as the director of that institute, and the mentoring and support I have received from my own institute, WEHI, has been amazing. Professor Cory, the Director, and Nick Nicola, the Deputy Director, just can't help outdoing themselves with ongoing advice and support. When I was speaking to the two of them, the last thing Nick Nicola told me in explaining why they were giving me ongoing support was that they felt my success and the success of the Burnet Institute was their success. That's how they felt about it, and it left a very powerful mark on me. Mentoring does continue right throughout your career.

Discussion

Susanne von Caemmerer: Thank you very much for a very instructive talk on how to write grants.

Question: I wondered whether you had learned a lot in the process of writing grants by reviewing them.

Brendan Crabb: I have learned a lot more from reviewing them, and certainly from panel work, than I have from writing them, because it is only from the panel work that you really know what is required. That is why I can speak so strongly about the myths, because whether it is the panel for the EU or the NHMRC or the WHO, three that I have done in recent times, it is exactly the same: there are very good processes, and they are looking hard for the best, most innovative science to get funded. It sounds really simple, it sounds as if we should all know that, but – and I was as much a part of this as anybody else – we start thinking that we need to play some sort of game, whereas it is actually a lot simpler than that. And I learnt that through panel work.

Question (cont.): To follow up: is there some advice you can offer us on how we might get that panel experience?

Brendan Crabb: All I can say is that there are a lot of grant panels, and tremendous change-over. Warwick Anderson has been really active in ensuring that there are many new, younger researchers going through panels – and chairing them – at a really quite junior age. Perhaps Bob can address that a bit further.

Bob Williamson: I actually think that what you need to do is to go to your mentors, to your senior people – head of department or dean – and say, 'Hey, it would really help me if I could go onto a panel.' What annoys me is when people say to me, 'Oh, I've been asked to go onto a panel but I'm too busy.' I think, 'You are dumb,' because you learn so much from being on a panel.

Brendan Crabb: Absolutely.

Bob Williamson: I think that anyone who is a middle-grade postdoc will have the opportunity to get onto a panel if they are in the medical research area, because it is a growth industry. They have so many panels now that they need to put people on.

Brendan Crabb: You need to do it for what you are going to learn, but it is also your obligation to do it. You can't just take; you have really got to put back into the system.

Question: A lot of the points you listed made a lot of sense in an idealised world where one has an idea and then works on it for a year and is ready to write a grant. How do you reconcile that with the situation where a lot of institutions and universities, I think, see their researchers as ATMs, so that whenever there is a grant in line you are expected to write something for it. Sometimes they are just happy that you wrote something and not too worried about whether you eventually get it. I feel as if there is a lot of pressure from the grant structure just to write grants, and not necessarily to let your ideas germinate until they are real killer ideas.

I was wondering whether that is a common problem, and what your attitude is, if every time there is a grant deadline you need to write something.

Brendan Crabb: What I have said today really comes in response to that exact issue: do not be duped by that. What you say is very right. I am from the University of Melbourne system, before I was at WEHI, and I think there are those pressures. But I am saying to be strategic.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you have completely mapped out which granting scheme you are going to go to. What matters is the maturation of projects into bite-sized pieces that are mature, well thought through and ready to be funded, so that then you can respond quite quickly.

The point I was making about the senior researcher saying in December, 'I'm going to have my grant in in January,' is true. But the plans for that, the thinking, the genesis of the plan for that grant really have been occurring for a long time before that. So I am saying to ignore those issues – think strategically. That is the recipe for longer-term success.

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