rivka

If you're looking for a great way to jump-start a grey and chilly morning, I can heartily recommend an IRB audit. I am feeling very... awake.

The IRB is the Institutional Review Board, the university entity charged with protecting research participants and making sure that investigators follow all possible regulations. Last month they sent me a "self-assessment," a 15-page MS Word form with lots of checkboxes, most of which didn't apply to me. I had to go through and check them anyway. Which, in Word, means double-clicking each one to open it and then selecting the "check box" radio button and then closing it. For hundreds of checkboxes, most of which needed to be marked N/A.

This morning, bright and early, they showed up in my office. They spent about an hour asking me questions. Then they took all my informed consent documents, my regulatory paperwork binder, and my HIPAA (health privacy) forms and disappeared to a vacant cubicle down the hall. They're planning to come back in a little while and look over my "source documents" - the actual questionnaires completed by actual research participants.

I already have a list of things to fix from our friendly conversation. I'm waiting to find out if they have major problems with anything else. If they do - and they shouldn't; I am a careful researcher, and am particularly careful about subjects' rights - they can shut me down.

This is not fun.

It's time for my first ever performance review as a faculty member. (I was promoted to the faculty in July, as you may or may not recall.) I just filled out the self-review questionnaire, which happily skips over all the things I got evaluated for as a staff member, like "work habits," and cuts to the chase: publications, grant funding, teaching, mentoring, service.

At the end, there's a section titled "Summary of major accomplishments during the current academic year," followed by a section where you list your goals for the upcoming year. And hey, when I write my accomplishments out? I look like I had a damn good year. It's kind of funny, because I don't feel as professionally successful as the summary makes me look... and yet, there isn't anything there that isn't true.

( blatant self-promotion under the cut )

In conclusion: Damn. *I'd* hire me.

( How much money is it, and who's paying? )

( What are you actually studying? )

( What will this mean for your career? )

So this is a Big Deal for my academic career. But also: I think this is an important project which has the potential to make valuable contributions to science. I think this is research that Should Be Done. I am so excited to have the opportunity to make that happen.

It occurred to me this morning that I was supposed to hear about my grant application at the end of January.

As you probably won't recall, back in November I got an ambiguous score from the scientific review committee - on the border between the low end of fundable scores and the high end of unfundable scores. I believe that the exact words my Program Officer used were "not outside the realms of possibility." Then she talked to me about how I could revise the application to make it stronger.

So this morning, remembering that I ought to have heard by now, I checked NIH's electronic research commons. For the longest time, my grant had the words "Pending Council Review" next to the title. This morning? I was flummoxed to see, next to the title, the words "Pending Award."

Pending Award.

I clicked through to the detailed information page. The Council was recorded as having met on February 13. There was no other new information about the status of my application.

Pending Award!! I didn't quite believe it, having not actually heard anything, but as I headed off to the clinic to run subjects I let my mind linger on how totally awesome it would be to actually have my own funding.

When I got back to the office, I sent a little query to my NIH Program Officer, in which I tried to restrain my excitement as best I could. Then I googled "NIH pending award." And immediately found:

"For example, some applicants get excited when they see a "Pending Award" status for their application. But that doesn't mean an award is in process. Even some applications that are ultimately not funded will show the "Pending Award" status in the Commons for the remainder of the fiscal year. Read more about deferred applications [...]

And from there, I learned that some applications - usually ones just on the "payline," or the cut point between funded and unfunded scores - are deferred until the end of the fiscal year, when the various Centers know how much money they're likely to have left.

Oh.

It's still better than a rejection, of course, but my momentary excitement deflated like a balloon. "Pending award" doesn't mean that an award is, actually, pending. It means that they're still making up their minds. Which is totally better than having them say no outright, mind you. It's just not what I briefly had the luxury of thinking it was.

Sadder but wiser, I started to write up this post. In the middle of it, I got an e-mail back from my Program Officer. (Have I mentioned that she's a lovely woman? She's marvelous.) It said:

"They often say pending award, but in your case it is a real possibility. Have you sent in your JIT yet? If not, I think you should."

So. Welcome back aboard the Merry-Go-Round of Hope! I hope you enjoy your ride, and that the nausea you experience is only mild.

I just got my priority score for my grant resubmission. Alert readers may recall that the first submission was unscored, meaning that my three primary reviewers unanimously agreed that it didn't fall into the top half of applications and therefore shouldn't be discussed by the study section.

A study section is a group of scientists in a specific field (my study section was "Behavioral and Social Consequences of HIV/AIDS") who volunteer to help NIH review and prioritize grant applications. At the study section, the primary reviewer for each application presents the proposed research to the group. Everyone votes on a secret ballot, ranking the application from 1 (top priority) to 5 (lowest priority). The average of these rankings is multiplied by 100 to produce a priority score between 100 and 500. The lower the priority score, the better.

My score: 197.

What does this mean? Let's start with the good news: It's a much, much better score than last time. (Obviously my revisions were on the right track.) Half or more of the study section must have rated my grant a "1" - first priority. So that's pretty awesome, right?

Is my grant going to get funded? Here's where the ambiguous part comes in. A score of 197 is not in the "start spending the grant money" range. Nor is it in the "better luck next time" range. It is potentially fundable. One might perhaps call it fundable-ish. Whether it gets funded now depends on a variety of things: the quality of the other applications submitted under this program; the health of the budget at NINR (National Institute of Nursing Research, the sponsor for this program); NINR's own special priorities; how my project would balance with other funded and potentially funded projects; whether or not the moon is in Jupiter, and so on.

The second level of review comes in January, at NINR itself. Both NINR staff and external scientific advisors will sort through all of the reasonably-well-scored applications and decide which ones to fund. And I probably won't know a thing until they do.

I've been combing the net looking for some kind of data about the odds that a score of 197 will be funded. Every Institute has its own set of standards; it really does depend on how each application fits with their larger priorities. It would help if I had my percentile score, which shows how my score compares to other grants reviewed by the same study section. Some sections are harsher graders than others, and so the Institutes do pay close attention to percentile. But I'm lacking that information right now.

Some Institutes publish a payline, a percentile above which all proposals are funded. NINR doesn't. Some specific funding programs just go down priority scores in numerical order until the money runs out. Most of the information I'm finding about which scores are fundable is aimed at R01s - big, prestigious grants to established investigators, usually budgeted in the millions of dollars. I don't know how different it is for R21s, which are smaller exploratory grants often conducted by new investigators.

Really, there's just a whole lot I don't know. I have a call in to my Program Officer, who ought to be able to answer at least some of my questions. In my gut, I think that I'm unlikely to be funded with a 197. But it's possible, and it's certainly encouraging enough to keep me going. It's possible that one more resubmission would do the trick.

I just got the summary statement for my rejected grant, with critiques from the three reviewers who were responsible for sinking the proposal.

None of them hated it. Pulling out some of the positive statements: "The project is significant... this is an interesting topic, and one of potential significance... the proposal is well writen and organized... the purpose is important... the idea is interesting and potentially innovative... the application has many strong aspects... well-written proposal... the investigators appear to be well qualified to conduct this research... the aims of the study are significant and the study [...] is innovative... the proposed study is well-designed and will likely yield important insights."

Their criticisms: in general, all of them wanted to see a stronger "unifying theoretical framework" for the proposal. Two of them wanted a more detailed discussion of the measures and the data analysis plan. They want more information about the recruitment timeline, including details establishing that the clinic population includes enough of the right kind of patient that I'll be able to make my enrollment target. One of them thought I'd have trouble achieving gender balance without a specific recruitment target, which seems odd to me given that I reported that all of our previous studies have easily recruited a gender-balanced population. And one of them wanted me to focus on patient-provider interactions, not just patient decision-making. That'll be the hardest criticism to address, because it essentially boils down to explaining why I don't want to do an entirely different study from the one I initially proposed.

These critiques are both good news and bad news. They're surprisingly encouraging, given that they resulted in an unscored application; they all seemed to think that it was a good and worthwhile project. So that's good motivation for a resubmission. On the other hand, it's daunting to realize that a project which they all basically liked didn't even make it into the top half. The competition must be very very good indeed.

I've got just about a month to revise and resubmit. Guess I've got to get to work on this "unifying theoretical framework" thing.

Updated to add: My dissertation advisor just told me that his last grant application was unscored. I can't even begin to express how much better that makes me feel.

On May 16th, I got an e-mail from NIH telling me that my grant application had been assigned to a study section, and that if I went to the NIH eRA Commons website I would be able to log in and see the details.

Two institutes at NIH were involved in the specific request for proposals I responded to: the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Nursing Research. When I logged onto eRA Commons, I discovered that my grant had been assigned to the NINR, which probably made the most sense. I downloaded the list of study section members (volunteer scientists who review proposals made to NIH). I looked the various members up to try to figure out who would be asked to review my proposal, and what the section members were likely to think of psychological research. (This is an utterly pointless exercise, because there's nothing you can do with the information. But all the researchers I know do it anyway.)

I also noticed with nervous excitement that the study section was scheduled to meet on June 14th. I marked it on our office calendar. And I waited for the 14th with slightly nauseated anticipation.

See, a couple of days after my study section meets, my priority score will be made available to me on the eRA Commons website. Actual funding decisions won't be made until the fall, but once I know my priority score I'll have a sense of whether funding is likely, possible, or out of the question.

It's a big deal.

I logged on today to see if maybe, perhaps, just by chance, they already had the priority scores up. And I saw: Review date 7/12/07. Because they moved me to a different study section. An HIV-specific one: "Behavioral and Social Consequences of HIV/AIDS." Which makes perfect sense, and everything, it's just that I had no idea that I'd been moved... and now I have to wait another month for my score.

Argh.

I can't fucking believe this.

To whom it may concern:

I respectfully request that you consider accepting this R21 application, “Irrational and Mistrustful Beliefs in Antiretroviral Therapy Decision-Making,” although it will arrive approximately 15 hours past the May 7 deadline for the receipt of AIDS-related proposals.

The academic institution in which I am based, the Institute of Human Virology, is currently in the middle of making a transition from membership in the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute to becoming an institute fully contained within the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Some faculty and staff have become employees of the School of Medicine already, while others have not. Some administrative procedures have already been transferred to the School of Medicine, while others have not.

Because of the confusion engendered by the constantly-evolving status of the merger, it was not immediately clear which approval and routing procedures (Biotechnology Institute or School of Medicine) applied to a grant submitted during the merger process. Those questions were not resolved until late in the routing process, a few hours before the grant deadline of 5:00pm on Monday, May 7. At that point, a critical administrator whose signature is required for grant submission had already left the campus.

I would like to underline the fact that there were no delays or problems in the scientific and financial preparation of the application, and that there are no underlying administrative problems which would interfere with the conduct of the research if a grant is awarded. The problems which led to this delayed application are a one-time event, based on the fact that the grant deadline fell in the middle of the period in which our institution is merging with the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Therefore, it is my earnest request that you approve a slight extension of the 5:00pm deadline and accept this application for review.

Sincerely, Rivka, Ph.D.

Obviously, there's more to it than that. More later, when I redevelop the ability to breathe.

Grantwriting sucks. Why would anyone ever want to be a scientist?

Also: has anyone seen my ability to write a simple declarative sentence? Because it sure isn't anywhere around here.

My recent sparse, spasmodic posting style has left a ridiculous number of narrative threads dangling, hasn't it? My apologies to those of you who are reading for anything other than the cute Alex stories... such as, say, a sense of how my life is going.

Attempting to tie up loose ends in one big unmanageable knot:

( My research assistants, Alex, Michael's job hunt, my work, SUUSI, forthcoming LJ posts, the adorable YouTube video with otters swimming around holding hands, me being Brenchley. )
Well, that was fun! If nothing else, it gave me a chance to use this icon, which I like but rarely have occasion to use.