Section outline

  • Lecture:  Overview of NIH and Research Strategy - Specific Aims

    Institutes, Deadlines, PAs, RFAs, NGA, era commons, Project Officers, funding priorities, etc.

    Faculty: Erin Van Blarigan

    Location (Access restricted to registered students):  Zoom URL

    • Slides for Week 3 File
    • Success Rates from NIH RePORT URL

    • Discussion: Discuss previous successful grant’s Specific Aims. Each student will briefly present one assigned grant’s Specific Aims to the group (orally; no slides). In ~5 minutes, what is the grant about? What research question do they propose to answer and how do they plan to do so? What strengths and limitations do you see?


    • Assignment 3, due 8a 1/25:

      1. Using your outline from Assignment 1, expand to sentences to create a full 1-page draft of your Specific Aims.

      a. Include training goals in your Specific Aims page.

      b. Include 1-2 sentences that describe your study methods (often in the paragraph before the bulleted Aims); include study design, study population, N, exposure, outcome. For example: To address these research gaps, we propose a prospective cohort study of 6,000 men with prostate cancer to examine whether physical activity after prostate cancer diagnosis is associated with higher quality of life and longer survival.

      c. 1-page limit

    • Assignment 3

    • Reading to be completed prior to class on 1/27: One of your classmates’ Assignment 3 (Specific Aims). The document you need to read will be assigned to you on Monday 1/25 by 9a. Please also review the scoring criteria for various types of grants: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/review_templates.htm

    • NIH review criteria for F31s and F32s File
    • NIH review criteria for K awards File
    • NIH grant review videos URL