Enhancing Competencies in Securing Federal Research Grants: An NIMH Chairs' Roundtable

In many fields within the health and human sciences, Federal research awards are key sustainers of scientific research. Cumulative national investments of billions of dollars have spurred discovery and deployment of many necessary interventions and strategies; these, in turn, have resulted in positive outcomes for persons and their communities. This research support system currently faces unprecedented challenges. This circumstance requires that potential applicants better understand the National Institute of Health (NIH) funding system, enhance skills in idea development, understand program alignment with their research, and learn how to craft compelling applications that can heighten the probability of success given the smaller pool of available research resources.

These goals will be operationalized within this Roundtable, which brings together three past Chairs of the National Institute of Mental Health's (NIMH) Services Research Review Committee, and a former NIMH research administrator. The three chairs are academic scholars with a history of Federal research awards, and span the time from 2014 through 2020. The former NIMH administrator retired after a 36-year career with NIMH, was Scientific Program Officer in the Division of Services and Intervention Research, has helmed several research programs at that agency, and will share knowledge of the review process. NIMH is an important source for research support for many social work scholars, many of whom do services research (i.e., work on intervention development or implementation).

This Roundtable consists of four parts. The first part is a brief informational overview of NIH in general and NIMH in particular, and discusses grant mechanisms, submissions processes and compliance, study section assignments, and review. Participants will be directed towards resources that will allow them to learn about the mechanics of grant development and support. The remaining parts will emphasize grantspersonship. In the second part, each speaker will share their experiences regarding how interests can be cognitively shaped into potentially fundable ideas, what makes an idea compelling, and the role of idea development as a team activity. In the third part, speakers will share experiences of best practices in grant writing, how to reify ideas into an application, the importance of a conceptual model, how to construct a team, ways to select methods, working with program officers, and lessons learned in the writing of applications. This part will only focus on preaward; this Roundtable will not cover situations that arise after an award is made. In the final part, speakers will open the floor for discussion so that participants may share their experiences, questions, and strategies as they develop their own applications. During this part, speakers will serve as resource persons, providing suggestions and experiences to assist scholars with their own potential applications. In the interests of time, we will privilege questions from postdoctoral scholars and pre-tenure faculty.

Enhancing skills in, and knowledge of, the federal research grant process is a salient solution to the problem of constrained resources. This Roundtable aims to provide attendees with information and ideas that they can consider as they develop research applications to Federal sponsors.