How to Write a Grant Proposal

How to Write a Grant Proposal

The grant proposal is a chance for you to explore in greater depth anything you have discovered or always thought was interesting about animal behavior. The purpose of this assignment is for you to write a research plan for a grant proposal to be submitted to a funding agency with the goal of financially supporting your original research. You are encouraged to be creative and try to come up with a problem that either has not been treated in sufficient depth, which has been ignored, or appears to be involved in some kind of controversy. Be problem-oriented, not organism-oriented.

The specific aims of the assignment are:

1. to develop a research plan surrounding a clearly defined study question,
2. to develop specific hypotheses that can be tested to answer aspects of your

study question,

3. to clearly communicate the methods by which you will conduct experiments that

directly test your hypotheses,

4. to provide a concise review of relevant literature related to your study question so

that your proposed experiments are placed in a larger context, and

5. to practice the communication of science in a well-written, clear and concise

If you are unable to pick a suitable organism for testing your ideas, come see me. I will be glad to discuss this assignment with you.

PROCEDURE:

1. The first step to writing a grant proposal is to find a good question to study. You

should pick out a system, question or concept that you are sincerely interested

1. The textbooks for the course present numerous animal systems you could

study and may be a good starting point for you.

NOTE a: This step is, without a doubt, the most difficult part of this assignment.

NOTE b: Be problem-oriented, not animal-oriented. Good research in animal behavior provides answers to general questions that apply to many animal species. At least three different styles of presentation can be successful. One particularly effective method is to focus on an area of controversy. Examples of such areas are honest vs deceptive advertisement, good genes vs nonadaptive models of sexual selection, evolution of eusociality through parental manipulation of sibling cooperation, etc. Frequently, controversy exists because conflicting theories have been proposed in the absence of supporting data.

2. Next, you should search the scientific literature and familiarize yourself with

published studies in your chosen topic. Your research, like everyone’s, will be

based on experiments conducted by other scientists in the past. You should

become somewhat of an expert in your chosen area.

Note a: The library is a very good place to start. Browse through all the latest issues of the behavior journals such as Animal Behavior, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series B, Behaviour, Ethology, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, American Naturalist, Evolution, and Journal of Animal Ecology or review journals such as Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Quarterly Review of Biology, or Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology. Then, if you find an article that sounds interesting, read it, and read some of the references that are cited in it. You should be able to trace an idea back to its origin by just reading a handful of articles and quickly decide if the topic is suitable for a grant proposal.

The library also has a variety of useful databases such as Web of Knowledge.  These databases, and several others, can be also be accessed through the library web site (library.cudenver.edu).

3. Clearly articulate your study question in writing.
4. Develop a few hypotheses that can be tested by experimental methods. Keep

this aspect of your proposal simple; a grant is not necessarily made better by a

large number of hypotheses to test. You should have a small number of

hypotheses in mind.

Typically, one of these will be a null hypothesis which often states that the observed pattern is due to chance, rather than as a consequence of past selection. You should present these hypotheses without bias, i.e. do not state that you believe one over the others unless you have direct evidence for making such a conclusion. The purpose of your research should be to test between these hypotheses.

5. Write the “specific aims” section of the grant using your hypotheses.
6. Create an outline of the experimental methods you would use to test your

hypothesis. You do not have to re-create the wheel here. You should borrow the

methods that other scientists have used in your study area and simply cite the

papers you borrow from. Also, statistical tests can be borrowed from these

papers as well. A good strategy may be to ask similar research questions, and

use similar research methods, as published work but perform the work on

another animal system.

7. Write a draft of your methods section. In this section, you need to provide

sufficient detail on your experimental design and research techniques so that a

reviewer who is not necessarily an expert in your field can evaluate the proposed

work. Common techniques can be mentioned and referenced from the scientific

literature.

8. Write the introduction section after you have read several relevant articles. It is

often easiest to write the introduction section last, after you have had time to mull

over your research ideas and methods. Notice how authors the articles you are

citing phrase the introductions to those papers. You might use their format to

start an outline for your own introduction. Those other papers will help you piece

together the relevant concepts needed to place your proposed work into context.

You will also write a paragraph, or two, detailing how your work will add to the

scientific knowledge in your field; i.e., you will explicitly tell the reviewers why

your work is significant (i.e., justify why hard-earned tax dollars should be used to

fund your research proposal).

9. Prepare a bibliography of the research articles you cited in the text. Within the

text, cite articles as “(Author, Year)” if one author; “(Author1 and Author2, Year)”

if two authors; and “(First Author, et al., Year) if more than two authors. Only

state the authors’ last names in the text.

10. Fill out the grant cover sheet. You will be the principal investigator. Do not add

your name to this form, but instead add your student identification number so that

the peer-review process will be anonymous.

11. Write a summary of your research plan and add it to the cover page. The

summary is simply an abstract of the entire research plan. The first few

sentences should state your research questions and provide a very brief

introductory background to the study. Next, you will state the specific hypotheses

you plan to test. You could then outline the methods you will use to study the

hypotheses. Lastly, it might be helpful to mention why your work is significant.

Organization

RESEARCH PLAN EXPLANATION:

The research plan is the guts of a grant proposal, if you will. In the research plan, you

detail what your research problem is, the specific research aims of your proposed work,

your proposed methods, and the overall significance of your research. Other parts of

the grant, which will not include for this assignment, are mostly administrative cover

sheets, biographic sketches and a budget.

 

The specific areas of the research plan you must include are: 1) specific aims, 2) background on research area, 3) significance of research and 4) methods. You will also be required to fill-in a cover page that includes a concise summary of your grant proposal.

 

1. Specific Aims

The first part of writing a grant is to define what your overall study question will be. Your grant should propose to study a larger question (for example, how is honeybee foraging affected by gene expression?). You should state this question in the most obvious of fashions. You could make this the very first sentence of the grant. You want to write a proposal from which a reviewer can easily state something like, “This scientist proposed to study [your research question here],” even if they do not closely read the rest of the proposal. In the specific aims section, you concisely list the questions or hypotheses you propose to test. The specific aims you list should all be related to each other and test specific areas of the larger question you wish to answer. This section of the research plan allows reviewers to easily understand the intellectual concepts you wish to study. You must be very specific in this section and not very verbose; background information will be provided in the next section of the research plan.

 

1. Background and Significance

 

Background

In this section, you will pick and choose relevant information from the literature you have

found on your study question in order to educate reviewers on the relevant theoretical

and experimental information they will need to understand your proposed hypotheses

and methods. The majority of papers you cite will be added to the background section

of the introduction.

 

Significance of Research

In this section, you will write a paragraph or two to answer the following question: Why

should National Science Foundation fund your research? In other words, what

information will your proposed work add to your field of study?

 

1. Research Design and Methods

You should organize this section according to the specific aims you outlined. General

techniques that are applicable to all of the specific aims can be presented first and then

the specific techniques and design used for the specific aims can be presented in order

after that. You must provide enough detail so that a reviewer who is not so familiar with

you field of study can understand what you plan to do. Pay close attention to

experimental design, including clearly presenting controls used in the experiment.

Again, do not reinvent the wheel here; borrow relevant methods from published papers

in the literature. The library also has books that outline research methods in ecology

and behavior.

 

1. Bibliography

You will need to use no fewer than 5 primary literature sources (peer-reviewed science papers). You may use sources from the secondary literature (web, newpapers, popular science) if necessary but they will not count toward your citation count.

 

Use the following formats for your bibliography:

 

1. For books:

Bailey, N. J.1981. Statistical Methods in Biology. 2nd edn. London: Unibooks.

 

2. For book chapters:

Emlen, S. T. 1978. The evolution of cooperative behaviour in birds. In:

Behavioural Ecology (Ed. by J. R. Krebs & N. B. Davies), pp. 245-281.

Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.

 

3. For research articles:

Robinson, M. H. & Robinson, B. 1970. The stabilimentum of the orb web

spider, Argiope argentata: an improbable defense against predators.

Canadian Entomologist, 102, 641-645.

 

 

POINTS BREAKDOWN:

Turn-in research ideas: 10 points

Turn-in draft of specific aims: 10 points

Turn-in draft of methods: 20 points

Turn-in draft of introduction: 20 points

Turn in complete draft: 20 points

Turn-in two completed reviews of peer grants: 20 points

Final draft of completed grant proposal: 100 points

TOTAL: 200 POINTS