A Pediatric Department's Innovative Grant Writing Workshops

Abstract

Sustaining the pipeline of engaged, productive physician-scientists in pediatric departments is crucial to the mission of academic pediatrics. Today, however, physicians are less likely to pursue biomedical research than ever before (1-7). While retention, promotion, and tenure guidelines are changing at academic institutions, obtaining extramural funding remains one of the most important measures of scholarship (1). Despite the academic importance of extramural funding, grant awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other funding agencies to physician-scientists are declining (8-12). Here we describe our department's innovative investments to prepare fellows and faculty ('participants') to write impactful grant applications that are competitive at the national level. The investments are made through the Department's Grant Writing Workshop (Workshop). The Workshop is a two and a one-half day, immersive-writing program at which participants develop their grant applications. Workshop AttendeesParticipants applying for our intramural Primary Children's Hospital Foundation (PCHF) Career Development Award are required to attend the Workshop prior to submission. Faculty who are transitioning from K to R awards also attend the Workshop. The number of participants is generally capped at 10, the majority of whom are members of the Department of Pediatrics.Faculty-mentors are established investigators with a history of NIH funding as Principal Investigator. At least half of the faculty mentors are also members of NIH study sections. A biostatistician also attends the Workshop.

Pediatric Neurology Research in the Twenty-First Century: Status, Challenges, and Future Directions Post–COVID-19

“…This finding suggests that more widely available grant-writing workshops would be helpful and should be supported at programmatic levels. 18 Other problems, all self-identified, were a lack of preliminary data and publications, which are dependent on funding and protected time. Because child neurology residency has little protected research time, this places a burden on departments for protecting the time, income, or further training (such as a master's degree) of newly hired junior faculty.…”

Variations of a group coaching intervention to support early-career biomedical researchers in Grant proposal development: a pragmatic, four-arm, group-randomized trial

“…Our study’s potential impact is expected to be high, given the limited systematic studies of interventions specifically aimed at promoting biomedical grant proposal submission and funding acquisition. Although grant writing training for biomedical researchers is not new (professional development opportunities are provided by institutions, funding agencies, scientific societies, and even the private sector), most are limited in their duration and scope, ranging from brief workshops to week-long programs with different training priorities [ 10 , 11 ]. In some settings, grant writing training is addressed in graduate-level coursework [ 12 – 14 ] or embedded into more comprehensive, multi-year research training programs [ 15 – 19 ].…”