Writing Successful Grant Applications

A conversation with Dr. Christina Schütte on practical advice, pitfalls and what makes a successful grant.

MC: Christina Schütte, you have been advising many researchers and laboratories in their search for funding over the past 7 years. You have also participated in the evaluation of grant applications for various funding agencies. What do you think makes a successful grant application?
CS: The first thing that comes to mind is clear aims. There is no such thing as a successful scientific project that does not know where it is going. Every project must have a clear topic and a detailed plan for its execution. The topic should be very specific and clearly limited. One cannot solve all questions using every available method in one project. The execution of the project should be clearly stated and planned. Mentioning what could go wrong and how problems will be addressed is also a plus. Accessibility is also extremely important. Careful attention should be paid to the fact that reviewers are possibly not absolute specialists. Too specific scientific jargon should be avoided and the project should be well integrated in the current socio-economic context.

A large part of your activity also consists of training researchers in grant writing. Could you reveal to us a couple of your tips? Do you have specific guidelines while writing a grant application?
It is important to understand the process of grant application and evaluation as a whole. My first advice is always to start by reading the guidelines for applicants and those given to the reviewers, if they are provided. It is important to imagine what one would expect as a reviewer of the project. The next step is to clearly define your aims and make an outline. Then comes the hard work: writing. Finally, it is always advisable to have others read your work, ideally someone who is not directly from your field: a colleague from the department or a fellow student is always a good person to ask.

Christina Schütte obtained a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Bonn in 1999. She followed this up with a postdoctoral training in the Department of Neurobiology at the Max Plank Institute for Biophysical chemistry in Göttingen from 2000 to 2003. In 2004, she founded ProSciencia with her associate Hans-Wilhelm Berghoff in order to help individuals, laboratories and companies in getting funds and managing projects.

What are the major pitfalls when writing a grant application?
I can see two major caveats often found in many applications: On the one hand, we have projects that are too vague, that try to tackle big questions but fail to define a clear plan. This type of mistake is often found in projects written by early career applicants. Another pitfall is to get too technical, use jargon and fail to capture the attention of the reader with an easily understandable problem. The lack of structure in the text is also clearly a killer for any application. There is nothing more difficult to read than long blocks of text over pages of technical descriptions.
Applicants often neglect skills they sometimes do not even realize they have. Some funding programs encourage applicants to provide details about themselves, like describing their leadership qualities. Applicants, in particular at the early stage of their career, often disregard this step. This is a mistake.

Do you know what applicants tend to find difficult while writing their application?
Writing is hard work and is often underestimated. What I can see in my classes is that first-time applicants in particular have a hard time clearly writing down their plans. Lots of them also tend to underestimate the time required to write their applications and achieve certain goals.

Prosciencia is a consulting company providing communication services to companies, scientists, researchers and start-ups of the technological sector. Today, about half of their activity is centred on training workshops. For instance, Prosciencia provides four highly attended two-days training sessions at Humboldt Graduate School per year. Contact information can be found at http://www.prosciencia.eu

What are the odds for a PhD student or a postdoc to find their own funding solution in Germany?
I could not answer this question precisely, but information is generally available on funding agencies website. I know for example that the DFG's standard "Sachbeihilfe" has been known to fund up to 50 % of applicants. After the recent crisis, Germany has been betting on research and funding for basic research has increased. This situation has made Germany a very attractive country, as the situation in neighbouring countries tends to be much harder.
The research policy in Germany can nowadays be considered a bottom-up approach. It is relatively easy to start a project on any topic, provided one is able to propose a clear plan.

In addition to this bottom-up approach you mentioned, do general science policies decide on what type of research and which science field is funded?
Of course, like in most countries, research policies are decided by politics. These decisions are taken through very long processes whereby expert researchers are regularly consulted about the "hot topics" in their field. Ministries and foundations are always listening to the experts (i.e. researchers) and make calls for projects in particularly promising fields. Researchers can actively participate in these processes by signing up to news services, for example, at the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) or at the national contact points (NCP) for EU funding. (mc)
 
More information:
"Sachbeihilfe": http://www.dfg.de/foerderung/programme/einzelfoerderung/sachbeihilfe/index.html
CORDIS: http://cordis.europa.eu/news/home_en.html

Interview by Maximilien Chaumon,
This article originally appeared 2011 in CNS Volume 4, Issue 4, Funding in Science

How Wearing a Fitness Tracker Can Change You

Lately, a big market for fitness trackers has emerged. Different wearables and apps can measure a number of fitness-related parameters, including heart rate, GPS tracking, steps, distance covered, pace, calories burned or even sleep quality. In many cases, you can also log your caloric intake to get an even better profile of your performance. But the psychological aspect of fitness trackers is just as important as the technology behind them because they do more than inform: they reinforce, motivate and reward.

The Advertised Effects
Fitness trackers and apps are advertised as beneficial for your health and lifestyle. They provide an objective measure of your activity so you can’t lie to yourself. Wearable trackers should get you to be more active, motivate you during exercise and provide information about your daily routine or workout without requiring manual calculations or notes. Furthermore, they should help you to reach your fitness goals.
These devices and apps are becoming increasingly popular in personal healthcare and promise easy lifestyle changes. These promising words fall on fertile soil. Most adults are aware of (or at least suspect) not meeting their recommended daily activity guidelines. However, there are no objective research results to bolster up their promise of improving physical activity levels.

Do They Work?
Fitness trackers are great for those who really have no idea how many calories they burn during an activity and can help those in need of a motivational tool to keep them going. However, one study found that using a pedometer did not significantly increase step count among overweight and obese adults [1]. Another study with overweight people showed that after 18 months, those who had used a device that tracked steps and calorie expenditure lost on average five pounds less than people without self-tracking [2]. Thus, devices that monitor and provide feedback on physical activity may not offer an advantage over standard behavioral weight-loss approaches after all.

A FITNESS TRACKER INITIALLY INCREASES MOTIVATION

 

From personal observations and a (non-representative) survey among colleagues, it became apparent that a fitness tracker motivated us to be more active initially . For nearly all it was fun to log and track our own health data and progress with colorful charts and badges for achievements. However, the excitement – as with all new toys – had died away at some point and most of us were back to our previous activity levels after a while. Until now, not a single long-term study has analyzed the effect of constantly wearing a fitness tracker on the average consumer.

The Author's Personal Records

What Else Do They Do?
However, many users also observed that they developed a guilty conscience if they had not moved enough. In some cases this led to abandoning the device altogether. Thus, wearing the device alone is not enough to lead a healthier life. Many devices and apps offer an online platform where users can compare themselves with others or even challenge a friend. This additionally increases the motivation, but also the pressure to perform and reach your goals as the wearer is held accountable by the device, app and group members. The motivation to be at the top of a ranking can also be amplified by the ability to broadcast your exercise statistics via social media.

USING A FITNESS TRACKER CAN WORSEN EATING DISORDERS

This can, for obvious reasons, also have negative consequences for some people. One study examined the relationship between use of calorie counting and fitness tracking devices with eating disorder-related behaviour in college students [3]. Participants using calorie and fitness trackers manifested higher levels of eating concern and dietary restraint. Interestingly, fitness tracking, but not calorie counting, emerged as a unique indicator of eating disorder symptomatology. These findings suggest that for some individuals, these devices do more harm than good.

Should I Track?
It is nice to know your daily step count, heart rate, caloric intake, and the like, but wouldn’t you also have an approximate idea about these parameters if you simply reflected on your daily routine? Depending on how important it is for you to know the exact parameters, it makes sense to wear such a device... or not. Many devices have a built-in alarm that goes off if you have not move for a certain time. This might come in handy, but can also be annoying if you are at work and just can’t go for a walk right now. In the end, it always depends on the individual who wears the device.
If you are not prone to being overly critical about your weight, tracking your workouts and food intake can be motivating. But tracking everything might become obsessive for some, as the numerical focus of the trackers is akin to the obsessive fixation characteristic for eating disorders and exercise addiction.
It's true that these devices make you be more aware of your health. However, this can also be achieved without fitness trackers but instead with good education about lifestyle and health.

[1] Takahashi et al, Clin Interv Aging. 2016
[2] Jakicic et al, JAMA. 2016 
[3] Simpson et al, Eat Behav. 2017

by Claudia Willmes, PhD Alumni AG Eickholt/Schmitz

this article originally appeared June 2017 in CNS Volume 10, Issue 2, Digital Health and Big Data  

DeepMind - Will Transparency Make Us Healthier?

You might have heard of DeepMind last year, when they invented a program that could beat human players in the game Go. The British artificial intelligence company, now owned by Google, has been pushing the boundaries of algorithmic learning research for some time now. I was interested to learn that currently their main field of application is healthcare. An entire division of the company is working on a range of challenges with medical data, from interpreting medical images to integrating patient data, all under the banner of DeepMind Health [1].

This work has been taking place in collaboration with a number of UK NHS foundation trusts. For example, a project aimed at detecting and predicting ocular degeneration from digital eye scans is the outcome of a collaboration with Moorfields Eye Hospital London, who have granted access to their database of anonymized digital images of the eye. Similarly, patient CT and MRI scans from University College London Hospital are being used in a machine learning approach to improve treatment planning for head and neck cancers.

How Big Data Helps Medical Professionals
Their largest project has been a collaboration with the Royal Free London NHS foundation trust and Imperial College Healthcare NHS trust in developing a mobile app to provide real-time patient information to nurses and clinicians. Called Streams, this app intends to speed up communication and decision making in hospital environments by replacing a number of older solutions relying on papers, fax, or pagers. The intention is to consolidate a patient’s medical results within a single interface where data-driven alerts can be sent out as soon as there is any indication of a problem, and actions can be decided upon by relevant health workers. The current focus is on a specific disorder, acute kidney injury, where such an approach is presumed to be particularly promising, but obviously the vision extends far more broadly.

Image via pixabay

From this technology, it is not difficult to imagine a future where data from multiple continuous bio-monitoring sources could be integrated so that patients, or any individuals, could be diagnosed and monitored in real-time. Glimpses of this path can already be seen with existing technology like continuous glucose monitoring devices, which provide continuous real-time blood-glucose measurements to diabetics, the data from which can then be accessed (and sometimes shared) via mobile apps [2]. Perhaps even more seemingly mundane biological data could be insightful from a medical perspective - think what information a Fitbit might reveal if state-of-the-art machine learning were applied to its data. Integrating all of these varied sources of information together to generate a comprehensive and detailed medical picture of an individual is surely something DeepMind Health have thought about as well.

DEEPMIND HAVE TAKEN A TRANSPARENCY APPROACH

This whole idea rests upon the ability for a private company to access potentially sensitive patient medical data, and DeepMind were doing just this, often without patient consent. Predictably, this drew some criticism. DeepMind responded earlier this year in an interesting way. Rather than attempting to seek patient consent, they instead took an approach of transparency by announcing their development of a data-logging process - the verifiable data audit.

Transparency vs. Data Privacy
The idea is that a record of all interactions with patient data will be generated and saved, with a log of who was accessing an element of data, when, and for what reason. This record will be automatically updated and stored in a semi-decentralized manner that has been likened to blockchain, with records in a distributed network of healthcare institutions such as hospitals. The data is structured so that any time it is accessed or changed this will be immediately recorded. As such, guidelines can be put in place to ensure that the data isn’t used in unauthorized ways. It also means that all access of data will be traceable forever in a way that should be tamper-proof.
At the epicenter of all this technological innovation is data - as the 21st century is starting to teach us, data is powerful and data is valuable. So where there is a question of data, there is always a question of privacy trailing close behind. If we can imagine these technologies, we must also be able to imagine a future where our most intimate biological details are shared widely and accessible to many. The price of a detailed understanding of our own body is perhaps our privacy in that matter.
In this discussion, DeepMind are not strictly advocating privacy - rather, they are advocating transparency. Yes, your data will be accessed by many people, but with a strict record of who and for what purpose, which will ideally necessitate adherence to data sharing guidelines. Before patients themselves have access to their own records, this will likely still sit uncomfortably for many people. Until then, the success or failure of initiatives like DeepMind Health will determine how willing we are as a society to invest our data in our health, and to whom.


[1] http://bit.ly/2nfaDQ2
[2] http://bit.ly/1QM9PKF

by James Kerr, PhD Student AG Sterzer
this article originally appeared June 2017 in CNS Volume 10, Issue 2, Digital Health and Big Data