CIHR Project Grants 

Question:

It looks like my institution is going to take advantage of the volatility in the U.S. right now by poaching one or more U.S.-based faculty. What do established researchers new to the Canadian funding environment need to know to be successful with Tri-Agency?

 – Anonymous, Research Grants Facilitation  

Answer:

The three funding agencies united under the Tri-Agency umbrella have their own processes, norms and expectations when it comes to research grants. Last month, I shared my top tips for researchers applying to the SSHRC Insight and Insight Development Grant competitions; next month, I’ll have suggestions for NSERC Discovery applicants.  

This month, let’s focus on CIHR, and specifically on its premier funding mechanism for investigator-led research: the Project Grant competition. This free 70-page PDF provides excerpts from my interviews with 70 peer reviewers from 42 of the Project Grant competition’s 47 distinct review committees. I’m still working to speak with at least one reviewer from each committee, but I’m publishing this PDF now so that it reaches applicants to this fall’s competition early in their drafting process.  

Why interview peer reviewers, when CIHR publishes its grant application instructions and evaluation criteria? Because, as one reviewer from the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology committee told me, “If you talk to the CIHR people, they will tell you what is in the textbook, but, in practical terms, things can be a bit different on the panel.” In grant peer review, there can be, as another reviewer put it, “silent rule[s] that we apply.” 

While there are many gems in the details of this free 70-page PDF, in this month’s article, I’d like to highlight some of my main takeaways from my conversations with CIHR Project peer reviewers:  

1. Understand the breadth of expertise on your committee 

Both new faculty members and new-to-Canada applicants make errors in selecting the best committee and in writing for the full breadth of expertise on that committee. People who are accustomed to writing for NIH will write too narrowly for a CIHR Project audience, and new assistant professors who are accustomed to writing for journals will likewise need to be supported in scoping out their frame of reference.  

Applicants who are either new assistant professors, or accustomed to the NIH system, should refer to the CIHR Project committee mandates to ensure they are submitting to the committee that is best positioned to understand and judge their proposed work. Once an applicant has chosen the most appropriate committee,  the next step is to turn to the list of former peer reviewers and identify the people who have recently served on the selected committee. 

By Googling all of last year’s peer reviewers and making a list of their areas of expertise, Project applicants will be well-positioned to write for the full scope of their committee. By knowing just how broad a Project peer review committee truly is — because, remember, everyone on the committee gets to vote on each application’s overall score — applicants will understand how broadly they need to scope out in their research proposal, particularly in their literature review and in their articulation of the intellectual contributions of their proposed work.  

2. When reapplying, know how to read the previous application’s score and any associated feedback.  

With funding rates as low as they are, it’s common for CIHR Project applicants to resubmit at least once before receiving funding. In this tight funding environment, it’s worth understanding how the peer review process works, so that applicants know how to respond to the feedback they receive from CIHR.  

Before each peer review committee starts discussing applications, a streamlining or triaging process occurs. The bottom 60 per cent of applications submitted to a committee aren’t discussed; instead, discussion time is allocated first to the ones that everyone already agrees should be funded, and second to the massive pile of “maybes.” The peer reviewers then rank these top 40 per cent of applications, placing them above or below a fundability line.  

For applications that are discussed, any feedback the applicant receives from the scientific officer reflects the committee’s consensus. If, however, an application scores in the bottom 60 per cent of the committee’s pool, any feedback passed along will reflect the perspectives of the two or three individual peer reviewers who scored that application, since it was never discussed in committee.  

For applicants resubmitting, those whose applications were discussed should put more weight on the feedback they’ve received than those whose applications weren’t discussed.  

We all know the tragic situation of the researcher who feels like a ball in a pinball machine, responding to their first set of reviews by dramatically changing the direction of their application, and then reapplying and being told to dramatically change it in another direction, and then reapplying and being told something different once again. I suspect that there’s a higher chance of that kind of tragic pinballing when applicants put too much faith in suggestions from individual peer reviewers that don’t reflect a committee consensus.  

For applications that have been discussed, the response to previous reviews needs to attend closely to all comments while also re-emphasizing feasibility and significance.  

For applications that haven’t been discussed, though, the proposed work likely needs more substantial revision, perhaps to its methodology, its articulation of significance, or its feasibility. Only once an applicant has strengthened those do I suggest engaging with the feedback from the peer reviewers, and — unless the applicant believes that they have to make dramatic changes — I advise against letting that feedback move the project in a wildly dramatic new direction.  

3. Know the dollar range of successful applications to your committee 

It’s very likely that applicants may be investing too much time in the development of their budget and budget justification modules.  

The peer reviewers that I spoke with were generally happy with the budgets they reviewed, and they emphasized that budgets aren’t discussed during committee meetings until after the committee has decided how they plan to proceed with an application. So, as long as an applicant’s budget is aligned with the proposed work and is considered reasonable by the committee, Project applicants can anticipate that, during committee deliberations, their budget will only be minimally scrutinized.  

By searching the CIHR Funding Decision Database, applicants can review all the projects that have been funded by a given committee in the past few years. Doing so gives applicants a sense of the total dollar requests put forward by recent successful applicants, and thus a range within which they might target their own request for funding. While keeping their total request within that range (ideally near the top of it, to account for CIHR’s usual ‘haircut’ across the budgets of all funded grants), applicants can determine how best to allocate the funds they need to complete their project, as long as their proposed expenses are well-justified. 

In next month’s column, I’ll share the fourth and final instalment in this series, focusing on the perspectives of reviewers to the NSERC Discovery competition.