New HSPH Office To Help Research Proposal Process

With the recent creation of a separate office for research strategy, the Harvard School of Public Health was well equipped to handle the January revisions to the National Institutes of Health grant application process.

School of Public Health Dean Julio Frenk had established a new Office of Research Strategy and Development to help faculty navigate the grant application process shortly after stepping into his position in Jan. 2009.

And after NIH announced the changes in its grant application procedure, Associate Dean of Research Karen M. Emmons, who heads the new office, began preparing informational sessions for faculty to clarify what the changes mean for their grant proposals.

The changes—which streamline the application process by cutting page limits in half and limiting the number of revision opportunities to one—may pose additional challenges for junior faculty, who have less space to lay out a convincing proposal, Emmons said. Applicants will be assigned an “impact score” based on the potential of the proposed research.

“I think it’s going to make it a lot harder for junior faculty,” Emmons said, adding that the School of Public Health has allocated resources to provide outside feedback for junior faculty before they submit their grants. “The idea is to try and make sure that we’re facilitating our faculty’s research in every way that we can.”

Several junior faculty members at the school expressed concern about the impact of the changes on their grant proposals.

“I think the review process is more superficial somehow because there is less space,” said Alessandro Doria, an associate professor of epidemiology who conducts research at the Harvard-affiliate Joslin Diabetes Center. “Perhaps the application will be more direct, but some of the reasoning might be lost.”

Despite his similar concerns, Yi Li, an associate professor of biostatistics, acknowledged that the NIH revisions may improve the efficiency of the application process.

“Now it will let reviewers see clearly the big picture of the grant without knowing too much [of the] details,” Li said.

But Emmons believes that her office will be able to help the school maintain their high success rate in NIH grant awards, with 30 to 40 percent of proposals receiving federal funding.

“Over the past few years, like most other academic research institutions, we have seen more competition for fewer federal grant dollars,” Emmons wrote in an e-mail. “The landscape is likely to get even more competitive over the coming years.”

—Staff writer Xi Yu can be reached at xyu@college.harvard.edu.