Friendly Advice for Your First NSF Pre-proposal

It is going to be okay. Very okay.

Let's start with the important information that until last month I, like anyone who needs to read this post, had never applied for, let alone received, US National Science Foundation research funding. Having been out of the US for most of my time since earning my Ph.D., and other extenuating circumstances, kept me from applying to this extremely important source of funds. As with my posts on applying for NIH and ERC funding (which I didn't get), I'm writing this not as an expert, but because most people who write advice on applying for NSF funding are to varying degrees experts, and have been doing it for so long that they have no idea what us newbies might not know. I've never been on an NSF panel, I've never been to NSF, and all my attempts to talk to NSF employees have been unsuccessful. I am, like you, an outsider. So I learned a lot along the way, much of it later than I should have, and I'd like to share some key points. Before we begin, let's take a moment to contemplate this bodacious caterpillar I found in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum last summer:

 

Wow!

Alright, now that you remember that you love science, and brim with important and exciting questions about the world, let's delve.

1. NSF, we can agree, does not have the funds to support more than a small fraction of the grant applications they receive. Other huge governmental funders of science, like NIH, are in a similar situation. (I am assuming here, perhaps in vain, that the US government under El Presidentisimo continues to invest in funding basic research at some meaningful level.) This is a problem not only in terms of almost-everybody-doesn't-get-funded, but in terms of the phenomenal amount of time that scientists squander writing unsuccessful grant applications. In many cases, months of each year are spent applying for funding that is not available. On the flip side, NSF has to harness huge amounts of scientists' time to serve on committees, wading through the reams of applications finding reasons to reject as many of them as possible.

NSF has attempted a partial solution to this problem: the preliminary application. Basically, one starts by writing a short (four pages of text, plus many ancillary documents, including a one page Project Summary) version that has to be approved by a committee before one is invited to submit a full application. Most applicants (about 75%, in the program I'm applying to) only have to write the short version before being rejected, and the committees mostly have to read piles of short applications, with relatively few longer ones coming after that.

2. Writing the preliminary application was honestly not that bad. Several reasons: No budget is required, and many of the ancillary documents that NSF needs before they can fund anyone don't get submitted until your preliminary proposal is approved. More importantly, I have good collaborators, who are in practice writing these things. There is a huge amount to know about NSF specific 'grantsmanship.' When the committee gets to our application, after having already scanned scores of others, they will be both eager to find something really interesting that keeps them awake, and eager to find some reason that the thing can be rejected, so that they can get it over with. They will be looking for key phrases that everyone should have, and possible pitfalls indicated by things only people who have served on these committees (or maybe only that particular committee) know about. In short, it would be tremendously surprising if someone who just had phenomenal scientific ideas but no insider guidance as to the evaluation process ever got funding. I am lucky to have had that guidance; while it means I did a lot of rewriting to try to conform to a culture I've never encountered, it also, hopefully, means we have some chance of being invited to submit a full proposal. If so, that's what I'll be doing this summer, again with about a 20-25% chance of success.

3. As with any funding application, reading past successful applications to the same program is important. Notice not only the language used, the level of methodological detail given, and the structure of the proposal, but also the scope and scale of the proposed science.

4. Write, and revise, the one page Project Summary, and make sure everyone in the project agrees on it, before bothering with the longer Project Description. I made the mistake of drafting the Project Summary, receiving only minimal feedback on it from one of my collaborators, then writing the rest of the grant. By the time I got more extensive feedback from this collaborator, I had only a few days to reconsider the scope of the work being proposed and extensively rewrite. The proposal ended up much better for it, but I could have gotten a lot more sleep if I'd pushed for more feedback after writing just the summary.

5. The whole thing really isn't that much writing. Given that one knows what one is doing, and has good communication with collaborators, a good draft can be banged out in a couple of solid days.

6. In most cases, the one page Summary has to be uploaded as unformatted text, and it takes up more space the way NSF automatically formats it than it would if you or I formatted it according to their rules. I, and a few people I've talked to, ended up hacking down the one page summary very shortly before the deadline when we figured this out.

7. In order to apply, you need an "NSF ID." Looking on the NSF web page, you will find lots of information on retrieving your NSF ID, what to do if you have two NSF IDs, whether NSF ID is the same thing as various other identifiers NSF has used in the past, and so on. You will not find any information about how to get an NSF ID if you don't already have one. If you call NSF to ask how to get one, they will be so confused by you that they won't be able to help you, as if you had called to ask how to breath in before speaking. You just do it, and you must already know how. So I will tell you the secret: somewhere in your university or other approved research organization, there is some individual with the official power to communicate with NSF to get you your very own NSF ID. You will have to find out who that person is and request the NSF ID several days before the application deadline. My collaborator at another university didn't get a reply to his request until a few hours before we submitted, and we were actively discussing what would happen if we had to leave him off the PI list. Don't let that happen to you.

8. Which reminds me of another important point. I was advised to contact the NSF Program Officer for my application when I had a nearly final Project Summary worked up. As mentioned above, that didn't happen until less than a week before the grant deadline, at which point the Project Officers were all swamped by others trying to meet the same deadline. I emailed the Program Officer, and got back a very short email, but never got to talk with her. Finishing your Project Summary early will allow you to get input from your Project Officer.

9. Be smart, work very hard, and have extremely good luck.

How to tell if your aphid is done reproducing.

If you want to know if a parthenogenetic pea aphid is all done reproducing, look at her abdomen. If there are eyespots, she still has embryos in her. If not, she's done. If she is post-reproductive, she's likely to move to the edge of the colony, where risk of predator attack is highest. Details are here, in a paper written with some very talented undergraduates at Bates College.

Old pea aphids

You are a post-reproductive pea aphid. You have spent a long and happy life sucking the juices out of a pea plant. As the plant has grown, so has your large and clonal family, who you love as you love yourself, because genetically they are self. You were born with all your daughters already developing in your ovaries, and now the last one is out, and already reproducing, and what are you going to do with yourself? You may be only halfway thorough your lifespan. What to do with the remaining weeks? Pompano Beach is out, too many insecticides.

The obvious answer if you are a natural selection minded aphid is you'd like to help all the clones of yourself you've created to grow fast, live long and reproduce a lot. But how? Reproductive adults contribute more to the growth of the colony than do the young'uns, so throughout your reproductive lifespan, you've tried hard to stay at the center of the colony, where there is a touch of protection from predators. So maybe now you should move to the edge? If a hungry predator comes along, you can martyr yourself for the good of the clone. You don't have any chemical defenses or strong sharp pokey bits, and your kick is frankly rather unimpressive, but maybe if the predator eats you, it will allow time for your great-great-grandkids to escape, or at least make the predator full enough that it eats fewer of them. And maybe, just maybe, when that predator comes, you will be brave enough to just stay put and get eaten for the team.

Or perhaps rather than just sitting around waiting to get eaten, you can help to feed the family? Aphids suck sap, so if you could either put some chemical into the plant, or create enough suction, you could stimulates flow to that part of the plant where your family resides. Your young might grow faster or start reproducing sooner.

I mean, I don't really know. No post-reproductive aphid has ever sought my advice before. I'll do some experiments and get back to you.

Who has an adaptive post-reproductive life-stage?

To establish a case for an adaptive post-reproductive life-stage, one needs to show (at least) the following things:

(1) Prevalence: Across environments, but especially in a wild or non-protected environment, the population experiences more post-reproductive lifespan than is expected due solely to demographic stochasticity.

(2) Utility: Post-reproductive individuals do something selectively advantageous, such as helping younger kin to survive or reproduce.

In many cases, one would like to also address

(3) Advantage: Those individuals who become post-reproductive have a selective advantage over same-age individuals who simply continuing reproducing indefinitely.

However, this third is more complicated, because in many cases there are no individuals who fail to stop reproducing to compare to. For example, 55 year old women giving birth are rare and not easily compared to those who stopped at a more usual time. So testing (3) requires extrapolation and counter-factuals. This assumes that if continuing to reproduce past the current age of cessation were selectively advantageous, that the species' reproductive physiology would allow for it. In many cases, theoretically advantageous traits simply don't exist in the population, and therefore cannot be selected for. If the choice is not between ceasing reproducing or continuing, but rather between ceasing and being useful or ceasing and not being useful, useful wins.

So we are left with basically two fairly simple tests to make decent case an adaptive post-reproductive life-stage. And after some decades of interest in the evolution of post-reproductive lifespan, for how many species has this case been convincingly made? By my count, three. Humans, orcas and a gall-forming social aphid, Quadrartus yoshinomiyai. There are several other likely candidates. Short-finned pilot whales, and possibly other social cetaceans. African and Asian elephants. But I've become very interested in a much more accessible and experimentally tractable species. It lives in multi-generational groups of (very) closely related individuals.  Individuals play subtly different roles in the group throughout their lives. Older individuals stop reproducing and can (assuming no one comes along and kills them) live for extended periods post-reproductively (on the time scale these things live). You may have it in your garden.

Any guesses? Later this week I'll give you the answer.

Teaching mark-recapture with dor beetles

The key step in the planning of any good field course is to spend some time at the field site observing and asking questions. What is the habitat like, what lives there, what are the facilities, what are potential challenges or dangers to working there, etc? When I first went to do this at Svanninge Bjerge, the location of my zoology field course, I immediately started seeing big blue dung beetles all over the place. Bikuben Foundation, who operate the place, run cattle there. There is no lack of dung. These big plodding dor beetles (Geotrupidae) were all over the place, and it didn't take me long to decide I wanted to work them into the course. I wanted to introduce mark-recapture methods, and these seemed like perfect subjects. Mark-recapture methods involve catching animals, marking them in some way that would allow them to be recognized if re-sighted, letting them go, and then trying to recapture them. Such methods have a huge range of applications from tracking individual movements and estimating population sizes to monitoring growth and survival and studying behavior and sociality. To teach this in a field course, I wanted an invertebrate animal that wasn't too likely to leave the study area, that is easy to capture, mark and handle without damage, and that has enough charisma to capture students' attention. Dor beetles have all this. They are big and slow, and so easy to find and catch by hand. They don't bite or sting. They will collect in large numbers in pitfall traps baited with cow dung. They have big hard upper wings (elytra) that can be marked in any number or ways without harming them (we used this system with nail polish, but I've now got a battery-powered cautery). They are extremely numerous. They are shiny and blue. They can fly, but don't often do so.

Students mark a live beetle for release. Photo by Kim Lundgreen.

They make such an ideal intro to mark-recapture that I almost worry that I've given the student a false sense that this is easy, where in fact such studies are often very hard work. Still, if you want an efficient system for teaching mark-recapture methods and have beetles like this at your location, I strongly recommend them to you.

20C

Hungry buzz heralds spring
Watchful grin, floating. Smack
Bloody bugs

Friendly advice for your first NIH grant application

I've just submitted my first National Institutes of Health grant application (or rather administrators at my collaborator's university have submitted an application that I wrote most of). In preparing to write it, I read a lot of online advice ranging from the general 'how to write an NIH grant' to the specific 'the clause-structure I use while writing my cover letter for maximizing the chances that it will be sent to my preferred review committee.' People who regularly apply for NIH money refer to NIH funded research as an industry, and like any industry, there is a lot to know to compete successfully. NIH pays or invites some people to write advice on 'good grantsmanship' and many others, for a variety of reasons (perhaps on their blogs) write advice essays. Most of this advice starts with a paragraph or two along the lines of, "I've been conducting NIH funded research since 1982, and am currently involved in seven NIH funded projects, four as PI (Primary Investigator). I've served on 12 review panels and helped to amend the rules on permissible administrative expenditures on research grants in 2002 and again in 2006." And so on. The message is, "I am an expert on NIH funding applications and therefore qualified to advise you." While these people certainly are qualified and anyone planning to apply should read as much of their advice as bearable, there are two points I would like to make about this that they may not have considered. The first is that the way they write their advice, including the way they lay out their qualifications, reads very much like an NIH application. It makes me wonder if becoming expert in these applications makes it hard to write a love letter that isn't in the form of a funding application."Specific Aim 2: Produce a rapid natural release of endorphins, aiding current pleasure, speeding forgetfulness of discomfort and fomenting pair-bonding."

Second, and more seriously, I have the impression that none of these people nor the people writing the instruction books or the FAQs on the NIH websites have any memory of what it is like to not already know how to apply for NIH funding. The instruction book is full of rules that are explained not in terms of what you have to do, but in terms of how what you have to do is different than what it was before the changes to regulation #SF5326BB777. They use all sorts of words that are normal English words but don't mean what they normally mean, without explaining, because however NIH usually uses a word is its normal meaning to them. (This, by the way, is very close to the technical definition of jargon).

So I'd like to offer a few pieces of advice to people considering applying for their first NIH grant. I am not an expert, have never served on (or been invited to serve on) a review panel and may or may not ever have any NIH funding, but when I was a kid my dad worked just a few blocks from NIH headquarters, and I once spilled an incredibly powerful neurotoxin on myself inside an NIH laboratory. Before I start, consider this unrelated photo (of a 2.5 inch long weevil I once found in my hair) that helps to break up the text:

Notice that its sharp mouth parts are at the end of its huge nose. Cool huh?

Okay, here goes:

1. Before doing anything else, ask yourself if you can spare the two or three hundred working hours your first NIH application is likely to take you. If you can't, don't. Subsequent applications may take an order of magnitude less time, but this is going to be a slog.

2. Before doing anything second else, find colleagues who know all about applying for NIH grants and buy them beer, chocolate, whatever it takes. Wash their cars, baby-sit their kids, fix their refrigerators, do their laundry. This will save you so much time. If you are very lucky your department/institute/whatever may even have someone whose job includes guiding you through the process. If so, flowers and a gift-certificate to a nearby spa are in order. If you can by any means obtain copies of past successful grants to use as Rosetta Stones in figuring out what the instructions mean, then you have some chance of retaining your sanity.

3. Next, find out who is your SO (Signing Officer, an administrator officially authorized to sign legal documents on behalf of your organization). You don't submit the grant, the SO does. She also has to do various other registration tasks, meaning that they need to know that you will apply several weeks before you actually do. If you just found out that the deadline is in three weeks, relax. There will be another deadline some months in the future, and by then you may have found some other way to fund your work. The SO will need all the forms you are to prepare at least a week before the official due date, as there are a whole bunch of other forms they have to fill out seperately.

4. Don't panic. Download the 264 page instruction book (a.k.a. "SF424 (R&R)

Application Guide for NIH and Other PHS Agencies"). Here is a picture of a moorhen to help you not panic as you download:

Can you see how long its toes are? Fricken' long. Imagine soaking your extra-long toes in a nice summer pond.

5. Do not print out the instruction book. It is 264 pages. You will need to constantly jump from section to section to hunt down the clues and riddles needed to fill out each of the approximately 30 forms you will complete. Keep it digital so you can search for relevant terms.

6. Do print out this glossary of NIH terms. Then read it. Then read it again to see if you understand it any better. Keep in mind that while necessary, this glossary is wildly incomplete, because NIH people can't guess what terms non-NIH people won't understand. Also keep in mind that when they use a term to define itself, they mean well.

7. The National Institutes of Health are called "Institutes" because they have quite a few different topic-specific Institutes, plus a bunch of Centers and several Divisions. You are supposed to know which of these is most likely to be interested in funding your work, contact the appropriate PO (program officer) and pitch it to them before then writing in your cover letter than you contacted that PO and she encouraged you to apply to that Institute, Center or Division. There are very detailed guidelines you should follow in writing to that PO. You are supposed to already know which PO within the appropriate branch is the appropriate PO. The only way I found of finding this out was to spend countless hours on the NIH web pages learning about the structure of NIH, then countless more hours reading those pages before making a wild (and wrong) guess. Luckily the person I wrote to (who wasn't even at the Institute I thought she was at) directed me to another person, who told me that I was heading the wrong way. Eventually I made a decision.

8. Go through the instruction book and make a list of all the forms and attachments you will need. Depending on the specifics, there could be anywhere from 15 to infinity of them. On your list, make notes as to the purpose of each form and what is an attachment to which extension to which sub-form. Also note which parts you have to do and which parts the SO has to do, and then confirm this with the SO. Then look at these pieces in the pile of example applications you've gathered.

9. Don't plan any vacations for before the due date. Plan a vacation for after the due date.

10. You may notice that I have not yet mentioned anything about science. At least once a week, think about the scientific goal of your application. It is very easy to lose track of the fact that there is some reason you are putting yourself through this.

Reproduction

The ladybugs are successfully reproducing on our mint plant. Oh frabjous day! The larvae are crawling all over the plant scarfing down aphids like mad, and the adults are laying more eggs. It is exciting to see them doing so well.

Bedside ecosystem

Most mornings I spritz the chocolate peppermint plant on our bedroom windowsill from a spray bottle of water. It loves to be damp. It is growing so well these days, is so juicy and luscious, that the aphids are maintaining a healthy population on it despite my best efforts to squish them and the depredations of the ladybugs. This of course leads the ladybugs to congregate on the mint, as the aphids, thrips and whiteflies have been picked clean off our other plants. And you know what happens when beetles congregate in the spring. This morning as I was spraying, I noticed one of the ladybugs laying eggs on the window frame!

There are about 30 eggs so far and she is still laying. The great thing about this is that labybug larvae are wonderful aphid predators, and don't fly away the way the adults do. So I'm going to transfer the eggs onto a leaf and hope they hatch.

Computer bugs

We now have enough ladybugs in our window plants that the aphids and white-flies won't last long. However keeping the predators concentrated in the little ecosystem for that long requires some doing. We find these little red happy pills wandering all over the apartment, and occasionally find them congregating in some warm dark niche. They like to be in groups, as their defensive chemicals and colors work better that way. This morning I found them assembling a conclave on and in the wireless router. Warm. Dark. Dry. Connected. Perhaps it is time to supply some hidey-holes in the planters under the plants.


P.S. Yes, I know that they are actually beetles, not bugs, but who has ever heard of computer beetles?

March of the Beetles

I like to have edible plants in the house. We have mint, basil and a Thai chili plant at the moment. We had oregano, but it didn't make it through the long sunless months. One of the drawbacks to having edible plants year round is that it means we also have aphids year round. All winter long I have been keeping them in check by spending a few minutes each morning squishing them or wiping them off the plants, but it is impossible to eradicate them this way.

So you can imagine my excitement and disappointment when on my way to work this morning I saw that wonderful eater of aphids, a ladybug, squished on the sidewalk. This is practically the first outdoor insect I have seen this spring, and just the one I wanted to catch and put on my plants, but it had been stepped upon.

Knowing that the ladybugs were waking from hibernation, I kept an eye out for them on the rest of my walk, and at lunch time. I collected a dozen, and am prepared to offer advice on the finding of ladybugs on cold spring days. Look for them climbing out of dense vegetation (evergreen shrubs, tall dead grass) upon which the sun is shining in places sheltered from the cold wind. If you see one, look closely for more nearby, as they tend to overwinter in groups. Ladybugs are poisonous to most things that might want to eat them, and will come out of cover into the sun even when they are too cold and slow to fly or escape, and are therefore easy to catch. Generally a slightly moist finger touched to the wing covers will adhere enough to lift the beetle into a jar without risk of squishing them. Once you have handled them they will arouse quickly, and attempt to climb to the top of whatever container you have but them in. Apply them liberally to plants infested with aphids, whiteflies or other pests, and expect to find them crawling around your apartment.