Speaker 1  0:00  
Sam, good afternoon, and welcome to today's webinar. TTOs can be PIs two competitive grant application and management presented by autm. My name is Sammy Spiegel, one of Autumn's professional development managers, and I will be your staff host for today. All lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio, and today's session is being recorded. If you have a question for the presenters, we encourage you to use the Q and A feature on your zoom toolbar. If you have a technical question or a comment, please feel free to use the chat. Should you need closed captioning during today's session, the Zoom live transcript feature is turned on and available on your toolbar. Before we begin, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank Autumn's online professional development sponsor, Marshall Gerstein IP, thank you for your ongoing support. I'd now like to welcome today's panelists, Eva garland and Dana Upton with Eva garland consulting and Jennifer Webster from University of Tennessee's office of research, innovation and economic development. Their discussion will be moderated by Ian Clark, UK, innovate, ADP and autumn, immediate past chair, we're so excited to learn from you all. Today, the presenters will each be sharing a bit more about their backgrounds and expertise in a moment. So for now, Ian, I invite you to get us kicked off and started

Unknown Speaker  1:15  
Great.

Speaker 2  1:16  
Thanks, Sammy, and thanks for everyone for being being here with us. We've got a great group. Was really excited about the the registration numbers for this, for this important topic, and this is a topic that that we've been talking about sharing more broadly and talking about more broadly with with the autumn membership, because it's an important topic, and it's one that more I have just noticed more and more conversations being centered around. And so we thought it was time, time to have a webinar, time to discuss it openly, and the time to bring some experts like we have here on this discussion, to share what they know, to share their knowledge base with with us so we can get better at this thing that is that is a bit new to us as a tech transfer profession. So before we get started, I'm going to ask each of our panelists just to quickly introduce themselves and a little bit about their backgrounds, just to make sure you all are so impressed with the brain trust that we have here on this webinar. So I'm going to look at my Brady Bunch boxes here, and just let's start with Dana.

Speaker 3  2:27  
Well, thank you for inviting me today. My name is Dana Upton. I did my PhD and my MBA at Wake Forest University. So my background is in genetics and genomics, and then the mea was in healthcare and marketing, and I've been working on strategic direction, competitive direction and grant writing ever since I graduated about 10 years ago now. So I've been with Eva garland consulting for a while, and working on these larger economic development and tech transfer grants is one of my favorite things to do. So thank you.

Unknown Speaker  3:03  
Thanks, Dana and Eva.

Speaker 4  3:08  
Thanks Ian. And also want to say it's great to be here today and a lot of fun to have this opportunity to speak with with autm members. My background, I've got a PhD from Caltech and came out to North Carolina to join the faculty of the NC State University. I left and started a with a startup company, and so I had the great experience of working with the fabulous tech transfer office at North Carolina State and starting a being part of a founding team as part of that process, really learned about how grants can be helpful in the tech transfer process from the from the perspective of someone who's actually, you know, working on the startup, but also kind of, more broadly, you know, grant funding in general can be just An enormous resource and helping to get technologies translated into commercialization. So I founded Eva garland consulting about 10 years ago, with the sole focus of helping scientists and academics and all sorts of different groups who had science that needed you know that funding to get it kind of kicked forward and into commercialization. And we work with developing the strategy. So what you know, strategically, how do you think about grants? What kind of grants are right for you? Are you going to be a good fit? Am I going to be putting in a ton of time on this effort of writing a grant proposal? And, you know, do I have a shot? Do I not have a shot? What are all the logistics? So that's a big part of what we do, and we also do a lot of work on the grants management side. And so once I have that grant, what are my obligations? And you know, what do I need to do to make sure that I'm in compliance with the federal regulation? So that's the scope of what we do. Our firm is 50 employees, all located in North Carolina, and. Serving companies and universities throughout throughout the US. So put a background on us.

Speaker 2  5:06  
Thanks, Eva, and last but not least, Jennifer, thank you

Unknown Speaker  5:10  
all for inviting me to join you today. I'm really, really pleased to be able to be part of this discussion. My name is Jennifer Webster, and I'm the Chief of Staff for the office of research, innovation and economic development at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy, which is deeply useful for proposal development, and a master's in political science. I've worked for UT for the past 14 years. For the first five I was a research administrator working on both pre award and post award assignments. So during this time, I reviewed and approved over 1000 proposals to federal, state, local, nonprofit and industry sponsors, and I was responsible for post award non financial management of UT's two largest award portfolios, NSF and DOE. I then spent six years as a Research Development Manager, where my primary role was concept development and comprehensive project management for center scale proposals. But I also supported collaboration, facilitation, faculty development programs, limited submission competitions, internal seed funding programs, award, nomination, sponsor, portfolio management and so much more. And then for two years, I was the interim director of the same team research development before I stepped into my current role. Now, I work on projects and problems that cross CTS entire research enterprise, and I learn a lot every day. Thanks,

Speaker 2  6:24  
Jennifer. And now you can see why I have invited all of these amazing speakers to join us for this conversation. So let me just level set for a few minutes before we before we dive in the sort of Who knew, right? Who knew that the autumn technology transfer membership needed a discussion, needed to level up their own understanding around what it means to be a PI right. Grants pursuit, grant development proposal, development grants management, pre and post award Jennifer just listed off a whole list of buzzwords that like are not in our vernacular, right? Or they just, they have not been. Or maybe we just sort of, we heard those words from our faculty that we work with, right? And we certainly know all about grants, because we have to work in and in and through them. And maybe, maybe it was for I Edison compliance reporting. Maybe we've, we had to understand grant mechanisms, because we help support mo use or inter institutional agreements, or, you know, advising on the commercialization sections for SBIR grants. So certainly, grants are part of what we do. But this discussion here is focused on the tech transfer office, the tech transfer professional, the economic development organization and and purpose that we serve, and those professionals that work in and through those means we now are looked upon as target. Pis, right. We are now a part of proposal, squarely. Proposal, well, let me put it this way, solicitations that are being published by agencies now are being pushed intentionally to autumn and saying, hey, send this to your membership please. Right? That's never happened really before, right? So, you know, so maybe EDA Venture Challenge and I six, I cool. So we have been involved, some of us, in grants in the past, but things have changed right now. We have NSF engines and EDA tech hubs and EDA build back better regional challenges. And I mentioned Venture Challenge and capital challenge from EDA, NIH REACH program, Ni, GMs, I read program. These are all just in the last we'll call it one to three, four years right new programs intentionally designed for the involvement and the leadership of the Technology Transfer Office, and that's new for us. And so we had a panel at our last annual meeting in Austin. It was led by Alice Lee from Cornell. I was on it Kelly Sexton. We had a great discussion around alternative sources of funding. But that discussion was interesting because it was about the ways that we can build capacity, build programs with grant funding. But then afterwards, we walked off the stage, and we had a host of people who had questions, not necessarily about, you know, all right, how do you build the tech transfer office with grant funding, but more about, how do you find these grants? How do you put a proposal together? How are you building these teams to go get these grants? How are you actually winning these grants? So I realized that we need to level up quickly, because, frankly, obviously we know about the NSF art program that is translational research activity, and it has been intentionally pushed to our community. And so we're going to spend the next hour or so, learning from some experts here, from Dana and Eva and Jennifer and I'm just going to be here to listen and learn as much as you all just to talk about the do's and don'ts, the tips and tricks, especially as it relates to things like building competitive proposals, putting teams together, strategic use of internal resources and and I just think it's going to be really both interesting and helpful, and it'll be a theme that we will continue on. This is going to be a series here for autumn, and a theme that we hope to grow as again, as our membership, as our our profession, is being looked upon with greater emphasis to go get and lead these, these grant mechanisms. So let's get started with a presentation from Dana and Eva that's going to be kind of a level setting of the do's, the don'ts, what do we mean when we talk about pursuing grants, developing grants, managing grants. So I'm going to hand it over to Dana and Eva for you all to get us started, and then we'll jump into a live conversation. By the way, please, as Sammy mentioned, put your questions in the Q and A, if you have them, we'll address them at the end, but please send them as soon as you have them, and we'll give them some, some, some great consideration, and hopefully, hopefully some, some great responses. So Dana Eva,

Speaker 4  11:51  
take it away. All right. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and pull up the slides in just a second.

Unknown Speaker  12:02  
I Okay,

Speaker 4  12:04  
and so what I'd like to do is to, you know, speaking of Ian's a reference to level setting, is get us all level set in terms of what to do. How do you even start thinking or looking at a potential grant opportunity that may or may not be appropriate. It could be huge for your university. It could be, you know, not, not relevant. You may not be a good How do you even get started? And it seems simple, but of course, the best way to get started is to always take a look at the solicitation. And these solicitations can be really long and painful to read through, but that is absolutely the number one thing you've got to do is to read every word of the solicitation. And there's going to be some words that are foreign cost sharing, you know, budget, budgetary items that are going to be quite confusing, and that's okay, just, just take note and keep reading, especially if this is your first time reading through an RFP. The some of the things that you're going to want to pay attention to are due dates. One thing that we see a lot is that there may be a due date for solicitation, but it's, you know, say it's June 15, but the solicitation also requires you to put in a pre application or to notify the agency that you're planning a submission, and that deadline may be well in advance of the actual proposal deadline. So really pay attention to these details, because details are things that can get in the way when you have a beautiful proposal ready to go, and then you realize that you've missed something that was in the RFP that you have to do. Pay attention to budget restrictions and get a sense of whether partnerships are allowed. That's something you're going to need to know really early on. A lot of agencies we're seeing are more and more putting out solicitations where they want to see cross institutional collaborations, and so pay attention to see if that's in the RFP itself, whether it's allowed, whether they're mandatory. Once you've read the solicitation, hopefully you've identified a number of questions you have. The next thing to do is to actually contract contact the program officers who are listed as contacts on that solicitation. I remember the first time I read through an RFP, I felt really nervous about picking up the phone and just calling a program officer. But that's why they're there. I mean, their whole purpose is to help you understand the solicitation to talk through they're really interested in, you know, what are you thinking about doing? It's their job to, you know, get, essentially, manage giving away this large amount of money. And they want to understand sort of where their applicants can see potentially having programs and ideas that match what they're looking for. So don't hesitate to reach out to the PO they can often give you inside information they may know more than what's in that RFP that they had to publish. Maybe a month prior, and so there's more information that they might have since then related to specific areas that they're looking for to fund. Maybe they can give you an idea of how many anticipated applications they're expecting. Are they expecting hundreds and hundreds of applications and they've only got one award to give, or is it going to be something that you know maybe be less competitive. That's all useful information to know right up front before you contact the PO. You don't want to go and just say, Hey, can you tell me about this solicitation? You want to have some specific questions. Show that you've done your homework, show that you've read the whole solicitation. And also don't be concerned if the PO doesn't respond right away. They're often extremely busy. Sometimes you may need to email a couple times. Go ahead and provide specific times you're available for a phone call. Anything that you can do to sort of help make their job easier is nice, because they're getting contacted by a lot of people. Another thing that can be helpful, don't give up. You know, if you aren't able to get in touch with the program officer? I do think that this is a really important thing for you to do as part of the process, so you can look for alternative program officers, other people who may be in the same department, the same Institute. There's sometimes there's turnover, so maybe the PO is no longer at the organization, and so really do your homework to find somebody who can speak to you about that solicitation. The third step. Now you've read the solicitation, and you've got a sense from the program officer that you potentially could be a good fit. Could be what they're looking for. Now it's time to get started with the hard work, which is actually putting together the proposal. And it can be, like I said, overwhelming. There are a ton of components to these proposals, and what you're going to want to do is to get yourself a clear outline to make this a manageable project, start with the deadline and then work backwards. Make sure that you've got some wiggle room for yourself at the end. So what I like to do, if the deadline is May 15, is maybe just put a big circle may 10 or may 5 on my calendar and say, I want everything done by that date, and that the next thing you want to do is make sure you hit all the long lead time items. Anything that relies on somebody else is a long lead time item. And so your pre award office is going to absolutely need to know right away and make sure you understand their timelines. I've seen some institutions that require up to three weeks in advance of the actual deadline. They need that full proposal. Others are you know, can, can can work closer to the deadline. Make sure you understand both your Institute's policies, but also, if you have any partners, maybe their institutes have different policies, and so make sure you have all those numbers down all the timelines, and just give yourself a nice, clear timeline of what needs to be done, when, and then who's going to be responsible for each of these different parts of pulling the proposal together. You also one thing that we see a lot at EGC is people go on vacation, and it's just seems like their vacations just hit right when those proposals are due. So pay attention if anybody key to the proposal is going to be on vacation, and make sure you include that in your timeline as well. Okay, so then you've got your timelines down and you're ready to start the writing, what I always suggest is to go ahead and put together a full outline of what your project scope is going to be before you start filling in all the details. That can save you a lot of time in the end, and make sure that everybody involved in pulling together the proposals on the same page with regard to the overall scope and components. So the things that you need to make sure that you all agree on up front are the who's going to do the different parts of the project that you've proposed, what it's going to be, how it's going to be done. Where is it? At your Institute, a partnering Institute, when and then create a checklist with all the responsible parties who would be leading each of these different components, make sure you've got buy in from your collaborators and subcontractors. They're really critical to pulling together the proposal. And if you don't have their buy in, and if you know they aren't excited about it, they're going to be less motivated to be able to give you the information that you need to pull together the full package. One thing that we always advise to do right up front is to get a rough sense of your budget. We've seen plenty of last minute surprises where we might have a sub award that we're expecting to go, you know, for a couple 100,000 and we get a budget from that institution and it's a million dollars. So make sure right up front that you're on the same page in terms of sort of budget expectations for

Unknown Speaker  19:42  
the tasks to be done, and

Speaker 4  19:46  
then you're ready to write. So in terms of writing the proposal that can be really overwhelming, that's a big part of what we see with our clients, is they, you know, happy to, you know, strategize and say, Yes, let's go for this. And then then writing is tough. And. Some of these proposals can be hundreds and hundreds of pages long. So what you first of all, make sure you've got sufficient time allocated, make sure you've determined who's going to do that writing. Is it going to be you yourself? Do you have grant writers at your institution who can help? A lot of institutions have departments that can provide writers who can help is it others in your department, but make sure that you've got those people identified who are actually going to be writing the content as you do your writing. Make sure you're addressing all the aspects of the solicitation. It's great to be creative, but grant writing isn't really creative writing. It's really filling out exactly what they're asking for. One thing to make sure that you've got all the supporting documents. So there's often a main proposal and then there's a lot of different supporting documents. Sometimes people are surprised the first time they put together the proposal that they have to put the same information in four or five different places, once in your project plan, once in your abstract, once in your budget justification, all these different places are getting the same information, but it is a requirement. Sometimes it's because different people are reviewing different parts of the proposal. But there are reasons why the granting agencies do need to see a lot of redundancy sometimes in the proposals. One tip that I have that makes it easier for you know us to remember to get all of the content into the proposal that is required is a lot of solicitations will give you kind of specific areas that need to be covered within the proposal. So they'll give you a line item, 56789, areas that need to be in the content, and you can make those into your section headers. That makes it so easy for the reviewers to figure out where to find all the information, and gives them kind of a direct correlation between what the RFP is asking you to do and what you've been what you've provided to the reviewers. And then make sure that you're not doing this in isolation, engage others to peer review your writing, and both kind of as you're writing the individual components, as well as when the whole proposal is ready to go, have somebody take a final look at it with fresh eyes to make sure that everything is complete. Finally you're ready to submit. Make sure that you have a very good relationship with those at your institution who are responsible for actually submitting your proposal, like I said, pay close attention to the lead time required. Know the process and the timelines, and for once you've submitted the proposal, be aware that the program officer may contact you a month, two months later, and ask some questions, maybe some clarification questions. This may be clarification questions that came out of the reviewers, and maybe questions that they have prior to sending the proposal to reviewers. Reply really quickly. Make this your highest priority. If you get an email from the program officer to get back to them right away. Part of it is, you know, you're going to have, you're going to need to work with the program officer. Once you get the grant funded, you're going to want to start that relationship on, you know, as good of a foot as you possibly can, and that starts even in the pre review process. So make sure you get back to any questions very quickly if you end up getting, you know, the notification that your proposal is not funded. That's okay. That happens more often than not. Those of us who've been in the field know that this is, unfortunately, the more common of the two outcomes, and so don't despair it. Does it? You know, you've put a lot of work in this proposal. It's very possible you're going to be able to reposition it for something else, and but you definitely want to understand what were the factors that led to the decision, and that gives you so much information and helps you in terms of you know the next time around. So I always recommend reaching out for feedback on why the proposal wasn't funded. And then a good trip too, is to figure out what was funded and to kind of, you know, do an assessment of all how is that different, maybe from what you had proposed, and maybe you can even reach out to the, you know, funded project and potentially join as a collaborator, join them, right? And whether for you, for the existing project or for a future project, I think that's a really great way to learn from those who may be a lot more experienced in getting these grants, and don't hesitate to try again. It is a process, and I think the statistics are something like maybe 10% of PIs get the grant on their first try. Second try, maybe you're up to 20% third try, you know, 30% so your odds keep increasing, the more shots on goal that you have. And finally, of course, if you are funded, congratulations and you're ready to start the project. So I am going to get a turn this over to Dana, who is going to talk more specifically about grant opportunity. Opportunities for tech transfer and turn it over to Okay,

Speaker 3  25:04  
well, thank you, Eva. So I wanted to walk through art as an example. It's one of the ones that's coming out of the as a response to the chips and science act. So there's been a nationwide call for more work into building capacity and infrastructure for use inspired and translational research. So I think we're going to continue to see calls for this. And so this is really one of NSF ways to try to build the infrastructure for increased capacity. It's not just infrastructure, though, because there's also going to be a training aspect. We want to train the next generation of researchers into what they need to know for translational research in the future. And then there's also going to be the art network, or the art ambassadors, and these are going to be the cheerleaders who are really driving institutional change for fundamental research to be translated into something that's of use to the world. NSF is defining this very broadly, so translation doesn't just have to be products that are going into healthcare or a product that makes it to a specific person, think about how you can also impact your communities and the country more broadly. So when Eva was talking about read through the request for proposals and jot down notes. These are some of the notes that I jotted down when I read through it the first time. So the first thing I noted were the due dates. Art had a different due date to start with. It has been changed to May 23 so that's something to keep in mind. Sometimes you get a little bit more time, so you might want to keep going back and checking just to make sure that you're not pushing yourself faster than you have to. So after the May 23 due date, it's then going to switch over to the third Wednesday in September each year. So my other notes, when I was going through this, okay, we've got 6 million that can cover four years that needs to cover not just what you're doing for building capacity and training, but some of that fund, some of those funds, need to be set aside for translational projects. The other thing I noted is that this is a cooperative agreement. So this is not a case where the NSF is just going to give you the money and you report back in four years about what you've done. This is cooperative agreements implies that there's going to be a lot of back and forth, and the NSF is going to have a lot of say in how you structure this. The next thing I noted were my limitations, so I can only put in one application per organization as the lead. So you can be a sub, you can be an advisor. You could be something else on somebody else's proposal, but you're only allowed one is elite, and then there's only one application per pi, so you can't be pi on multiple so let's talk about what it means to be the principal investigator on art. A PhD is not required. They're wanting someone who is going to be the head cheerleader. This is going to be the person motivating change on campus for really transformational projects, taking an institution that doesn't have a ton of translational research right now and turning them into an example of somebody who really bridge the gap between fundamental research and translation, and they want somebody that's going to provide a lot of leadership. So our last thing I noted were the things that I'm going to get judged on. So NSF Standard is you always have to address intellectual merit and broader impacts. You're going to need to work this into the application in a couple different places, including in your summary. So when they do start funding projects and start posting them on their website, when you look at the description of the project, broader impacts and intellectual merit will always be part of those descriptions. But the other things that they're looking for and other reviewers expect to see, how are you building capacity? How are you addressing education? How are you addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, not just for the participants, but also for the projects that you're picking for translation, and then again, the specific projects. So this is brought at the NSF. This really covers all of their areas. So it's not just Biological Sciences. Keep in mind that this can include math, physics, geospatial, economics. There are a lot of categories here that this is very open across the NSF. So. So again, scientific and technical fields. So they've listed a handful of program directors that you might want to talk to. I pull this information from the information about the funding opportunity, and they suggest that you use the art@nsf.gov email address to reach out. Again, all fields. So the other thing I noted when I was reading through it, what are they supporting? What are they wanting to see? So they are looking to increase scale and the pace of advancing discoveries. So I just made a middle note, if I'm going to write one of these, I better make sure that that is coming through on the page. A lot of my grant writing is I want to cover the fundamentals, but I want to tell a good story. So I need to be able to tell my good story, in this case, about increasing scale and pace. So also noted, what activities will they support? They want to build infrastructure, and they describe it as for places that have low levels of translational research, you can define that a lot of different ways, and they're leaving it up to you to define it. So that's something. Hey, maybe I need to include some data here about how I'm defining it. I can't just assume the reviewers are going to know what I'm thinking they want to see training. What are you doing specifically for the postdocs and for the grad students, they want to see specific translational research activities, and we're going to come back to that one in a minute. And they want to see art ambassadors. They want to see these cheerleaders. They want to know who are you picking, who's going to lead it to start with. So I also noted down things that they aren't going to support. And that kind of helps me decide, well, maybe I should or should not go for this. So if I'm an institution that already has very high levels of translational research, this isn't the grant for me. They're going to limit you to one art award total. So So you've already had one, you're not going to be able to apply again and get it. They're not going to fund additional fundamental research doing this, this particular program, and then they also don't want to fund transfer translational research, if it's not going to be treated on par with the fundamental research. So this is something where they're really looking for institutions where this is going to be involved in faculty decision making and promotions and tenure and recruitment. So if I feel like I'm not going to be able to support that, this might not be the opportunity for me, and I should go back and look for a different opportunity that would be a better fit. So as Eva was saying, I want to find out what the reviewers want to see, and I'm going to make headers for these. So they want to know what are my plans for building. That's the short term, the four years of project. But they also want to know that this is going to be sustainable. So you're going to want to speak to now and later. They want to know, what are the details of how you're going to do this training? Who are your people? Who are your art ambassadors? How are you providing support? So it's not just enough to have the header. You need to give specific details on all of these. They also want to know, how do you pick your translational research projects that you're going to be seeding using this fund. How do you know if they're performing How do you know when somebody is ready to graduate out of the program, or when somebody isn't making progress and needs to be removed from the program and you replace them with somebody else? And to go along with that, there's the idea of SMART goals. What are you doing that's measurable and specific and achievable? How do you measure? How do you give a time frame for this? So they're not telling you specifically what they want you to say for each of these, but they're saying this is what we're looking for. We want to see your thought process. Tell us what you're doing and why you picked it so, underlying all of this data, justifying what you're saying, and then going back to the you want to tell a good story, why you How will NSF funds really advance what you're doing? Why will NSF make a difference in what you're doing that you would not be able to do without the NSF. So include that in your storytelling here. So just a reminder, it's not just our we've got a ton of stuff that's currently open or about to open or will open again in the near future. So as we mentioned earlier, you've got the regional

Speaker 3  34:45  
I cannot speak today, innovation engines. ARPA H is currently looking for hubs and a nation, nation, national network of spokes. You might want to consider, maybe you should reach out to a hub and become a spoke for them. So. The EDA has multiple opportunities. I listed the regional technology and innovation hubs, but we've also got the built scale program, which would be the Venture Challenge and the capital challenge, and then they also have the University Center Project. You might even want to consider their new STEM talent Challenge program, and the NIH has the research evaluation and commercialization hubs. You might not be eligible to apply directly to I read with NIGMS at the NIH, it would be eligible for small businesses, but maybe you have a small business that you want to partner with and be their collaborating institution on their STTR for I read. So in thinking about, how do I find these? I find it useful to go to grants.gov, and just type in some keywords and then start looking from there. But there's tons of opportunities available for you, so I hope kind of walking through one as an example of how do I think about it, and how do I start thinking about storytelling was useful. Thank you.

Speaker 2  36:08  
Thanks Dana, and thanks Eva as well. That was a great summary. And so now I've got some specific questions, and I'm going to try to ask some of the questions that I feel like maybe this audience will have, I noted one really important thing in Eva's presentation, which is she had six steps in her sort of, you know, steps to grant proposal development and grant writing didn't arrive until step five. Right? The first time that, when I came to University of Kentucky, I didn't know a thing about grant development. And the first time someone asked me, Hey, Ian, I think you should go after that grant. I said, Great. How many pages do I need to write? And I was ready to go, right, and I did not realize how much work necessarily is done before you even put pen to paper right. There's a ton of information you have to digest a ton of people, internal resources you need to get with, to plan, to strategize, to be competitive. The writing is the easy part. There's a lot of other components you have to get to before that. So let's just get so internally. Right? As we think about our organizations, most of I'm just going to make an assumption that most of the people here are tech transfer professionals. We view ourselves, maybe as research administrators. I know my role within the University of Kentucky as an Associate Vice President for Research is a research administrator. I am the PI or or CO I on 34 million in grant awards before I came to the university. As I mentioned, seven years ago, I had no idea what a grant was, and so I had to learn many of these things. And it wasn't because I was a research administrator. I had to learn a lot from research developers. So Jennifer, what is and Jennifer told me, this is one of her favorite questions, what is the difference between a research administrator and a research developer?

Unknown Speaker  38:06  
Thanks, Ian, I am going to be speaking specifically about research administration, kind of in the context of sponsored programs or sponsored projects. So in that context, if you reduce a proposal to its two most essential components, those are compliance and responsiveness. Compliance pertains to federal, state sponsor and institutional policies and procedures. So have you followed the basic instructions in the solicitation and the umbrella grant guide? Are you missing required documents and forms? Are the things in your budget reasonable, allocable and allowable? Have you done something that might get your proposal returned without review, or worst case scenario that might land you in jail? That's compliance side. Responsiveness pertains to ideas. Does your idea align with what the sponsor is trying to accomplish? And if it doesn't align, it first, how can we work to reveal the full potential of your idea through iterative concept development, through persuasive writing and through connections to a network of relevant resources at your institution or in your region. Before the proposal deadline, a competitive proposal is both compliant and responsive. You do need both sides, which is why you need research administration and research development working together.

Speaker 2  39:18  
Yep, I love that. I love that we at the University of Kentucky. And I'm not going to make the assumption that every university has a proposal development office that supports pre award, reviewing a NOFO, identifying the key parts, helping to provide templates and guidelines and review drafts and provide edits. But just, just quickly, Jennifer, and I know I'm gonna, I'm gonna come back to you on this real quick, because I know you were a professional. Are a professional, proposal development professional? We'll just, we'll call it that. You're an expert at this. What does that mean, and what well? And we're going to stay sort of in the pre award context. In that context, what does a proposal development offer? Support mechanism do for someone that wants to be a

Unknown Speaker  40:03  
pF, what doesn't a Research Development Office do? I'm going to focus my answer to that question specifically on what rd professionals at UT can do during the proposal development process, specifically. And the caveat, like Ian has sort of alluded to, is that different institutions may ask their already staff to focus on different things. So your mileage may vary. At UT rd professionals can help you find a funding opportunity that fits your idea. They can provide competitive intelligence to help you make a go or no go decision about applying. They can help you find collaborators for your team, and they especially excel at helping you find collaborators who are not related to research per se. So if we're talking faculty research, these are these are people who can contribute to things like workforce development, diversity evaluation components. They can secure previously funded proposals that you can learn from as you prepare your own application. They can help you develop your proposal concept on large or complex proposals. They provide project and document management support for the 400 800 plus pages of other content outside your proposal narrative. Sometimes they can make proposal graphics, or they have access to a graphic designer. They can contribute heavily to developing a budget that supports your scope of work. They can organize color team reviews, and if you're lucky, site visits prior to the award you're going to get. And finally, they can write or edit content. And I want to dig in a little bit more about this point. Already, managers do come from all different kinds of backgrounds. Some will have stem backgrounds, as it sounds like Eva and Dana both do, and some do not like me, but we're rarely subject matter experts in the disciplinary spaces of the proposals we work on. I don't describe myself as a grant writer because I don't feel that that's really what I'm able to do. But I can pull together content from different subject matter experts and edit it into a compelling and responsive narrative. I can write certain proposal sections and documents the less a proposal is focused on the deep details from a particular discipline, like chemistry or nuclear engineering, the more original content I can write for my customer. I can absolutely write something like a management plan or a diversity plan, an education program, an institutional capacity assessment, things that people who don't work on proposals for a living might find more intimidating. I've seen 1000 different examples of and I can really help with those sections. So proposals like NSF regional innovation engines or EDA is good jobs challenge, are great examples of proposals that where a research development professional can actually make more substantive writing contributions to and I'd also argue that those types of proposals are ideal for TTOs to help write as well for similar reasons.

Speaker 2  42:41  
Yep, awesome, awesome response. So you used Jennifer, you used a couple of words that I think are really, really important, compelling and responsive. I think the the misguided assumption I originally had was to win a to win a grant. I just need to be compelling, right? I need to write something that's it'll knock them off the chair. They you know, something new, something that wows them. But I appreciate it over time how important responsiveness is, being directly and acutely responsive to the NOFO, the Notice of Funding award or the solicitation. People call it different things. Dana, the review you just did right of the art proposal that was showing us how we net, we need to be responsive to individual things, right? Can you just talk really quickly about and so you you quickly honed in on some things that if I was going to read this very long NOFO for NSF arts, I would hone in on those kinds of things. Personally, I quickly. One of the first things I try to look for is eligibility and limited submission. Can you just talk quickly about what those two things mean and why it's so important that for grants like this, especially big ones like the engines, the EDA tech hubs, where the eligibility is not as easy as you're a scientist, you're eligible. Go get it right. It's a little different. Can you just talk to maybe what response being responsive means, and then looking at important things you might you must be responsive to, like eligibility or limited submission?

Speaker 3  44:19  
Yeah, responsive would be they have a set of requirements that they're looking for funded grants to fulfill, and they might have it in their minds, I'm only going to fund four year colleges that can show that they do X, Y and Z, and so they might have an eligibility requirement of you have to be a four year college that does X, Y and Z, and if you do A, B and X, you're not responsive if you don't have the Y and Z, or if you're a two year college, and they wanted a four year examples, of course, but there's something that they're looking for to fund they might have. Been told by government, here's who you have to fund in terms of the type of organization. So it's always heartbreaking when you start pulling together an application and you spend a ton of time on it, and you've put all this work into telling this really comprehensive, cohesive, compelling story, and then you go to submit it, and you go, Oh, no, I'm not actually eligible for this. So that's one of those. You're going to want to figure that out first, that would be my day, one of thinking I'm going to put this grant in. I want to make sure that I'm actually eligible. The other thing that I will note with eligibility, which might not be a problem for most institutions, but something you want to keep an eye on, and you might want to talk to your pre award office just to confirm. They often require certain registrations with government websites and entities, and some of those expire annually, and you need to make sure that it gets renewed in a timely manner, or that if it's a registration that you don't have, that you get it in time, because some of them take a little bit of time, and if you're finding out on the day that you go to submit that you don't have it, you're suddenly ineligible. So that's what I'm thinking about in terms of eligibility. I think you also had a question about limited competition, so I wanted to quickly touch on that. So I think I gave an example with art about there's one proposal per organization. So there are some opportunities that say, we welcome all applications. And if, let's say University of Kentucky wants to put in 73 different applications, great, but then there's some that say, no, no, no, no, let's not get 200 from this place and three from this other place. That's going to be an unfair competitive advantage. Each institution can submit no more than four, or each institution can only submit one, and that's when we start getting limited. That might mean you need to reach out to your pre award office very early on to see if you are internally eligible to submit. So I know different places have different rules. Some do first come, first serve. Some do give us a summary of what you're working on, and we're going to pick what we think are the strongest three, and some of them say we're going to review it, and we'll reach out to the people that we want to have them submit an application. So figure out if it's limited, and then figure out what how your school or your institution handles limited to make sure you've got that internal eligibility

Speaker 2  47:44  
good. And I'm glad you touched on that. And the reason why I asked the question is because a lot of these grants, the ones you just showed regional innovation engines, EDA, tech hubs, will be the same way. NSF, arts, they're all limited submission, meaning you as an institution can lead one, or you as a Pi can only be a PI on one. And I know, talking with a few people on the NSF engines process, that some people went far down the process of putting a proposal together without first touching base internally with their proposal development office or someone and realized, oh, there's already one going forward that the institution is making their one. We have a limited submission internal competition process at UK. Whenever there is a federal grant NOFO that says only one per institution, we have an internal competition. There's an internal publication. People have to respond within a certain amount of time, and then there's a review committee set up that decides which is going to be our proposal to submit. So check on that internally. Tech transfer, office people, we're not used to that, and we see these grant publications, and we think that's for me, NSF art, that's me. And then we go and write or put it together. Please be aware that there are probably other people within your institution that have seen this NOFO and may already be working on it and have already achieved the internal competition steps or things like that. Okay, let's move to one thing that I love about competitive grant proposal developments, which is competitive intelligence, right? It's not just always about what I do well or what we do that they certainly would want these reviewers, but certainly want to hear about. But there are many other external factors, especially when we look at these regional hub based, multi institution type grant mechanisms, competitive intelligence is critical so Eva, what is competitive intelligence look like in the grant proposal development process? What are those things that are so important to look at and consider? Yeah,

Speaker 4  49:50  
I think there's two aspects, and one is doing your homework and researching everything that you can find in terms of what has the agency funded? Previously, what are some examples of some awards? And all of that is online, so you can really do your homework to figure out what has been successful in the past, whether it be for this particular opportunity, other opportunities. But then the second step, and this is a hard step, sometimes for scientists, I think those who work in TTOs might be a little more comfortable, but it's actually building your network that's that's really important to talk to people. There's only so much that you can find by doing your research online, but getting out and don't hesitate. I mean, I think people who've gotten awards are generally, you know, happy to share that information. I mean, and is, you know, just a wealth of information and and is always just so willing to share, you know, his experiences. And there's others out there as well who have been successful in the process and are happy to share with you the pathways that they've taken to be successful. What are their tips and tricks? And you kind of assemble those along the way, and, you know, use what you can in order to kind of create, you know, the most competitive proposal that you can pull together. Another thing that I'll say along those lines is that no individual, no institution, is going to have everything that's needed to have the strongest proposal. And so the more that you can form synergistic collaborations is really helpful. And so identify what, what are the areas that you are strongest at, what are areas that you know maybe you're less strong at, and then devise a plan to fill those gaps. We do that a lot. I mean, just a lot of just making introductions. It's cold calling. It's sort of the old fashioned way, but it works. I mean, more times than not. I would say that when we reach out, and what you're offering is to be part of something, you know, really cool that you're building. You know, more often than not, you're going to be get, you know, buy in and, you know, make friends along the way, and then that's all good. So those would be the suggestions I'd have is, you know, do your research. Read about published, you know, projects that are underway, talk to individuals who've been successful, and then don't hesitate to reach out to to make sure that you're putting together the strongest possible overall project.

Speaker 2  52:11  
Good. I think it's, it's, it's really important messaging. So how do you, Jennifer, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tack on to this with, how do you assess whether you're competitive or not? Like, what are there? Are there secrets here? Certainly, as someone who has reviewed 1000 work on 1000 of these, you would know, how do you how can, you know, have a pretty good sense of confidence when you submit it that I think this is going to be a competitive proposal.

Unknown Speaker  52:36  
Um, you know, it's a lot like when you see a job opportunity you're interested in, and you're trying to decide whether or not to apply. Very few people are going to have 100% of the experience and qualification requirements in the job posting. But there will be some that kind of are essential, and some that maybe, you know you can, you can negotiate on. If you have 80% plus those, really, those required things, you should go for it. If you have 50% it starts to feel like you, you know, it's a little bit more questionable, and you want to sit down and assess where you think you sit. I have very few things posted on my wall at work, but one of them.

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