COMMUNICATION IN THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Department of Biology

If a scientist at a university, government agency, or hospital wishes to perform experiments, they usually must seek some kind of funding for their work. This is often true in industry as well, where scientists will write internal proposals, essentially competing with other members of the same company for research funds. While writing a grant can be challenging and time consuming, it also helps the researcher to focus and clarify her/his ideas, identify necessary resources, and design appropriate controls.

In writing a successful grant proposal you must convince the reviewer of the grant that the research experiments that you propose to perform are important, interesting, novel, and the next logical step in your field of research. This is one of the most important aspects of publicly funded research, probably second only to peer review of published literature.

As a student, you may be writing a grant to fund research with a professor at UWL, or as part of a course assignment. The basic steps are the same for both.
 

Before writing the Grant Proposal there are two things that require some thought:

1. Choose a Hypothesis.

This is often difficult even for experienced researchers. New experiments that have not already been performed by another research lab are not always obvious.

If you are planning to write a grant to fund actual research you should spend significant time in the library or with your faculty mentor examining and discussing the current research in your field. The surest way for a grant proposal to be rejected is to propose an experiment that has already been done.

In the classroom we will not require that your experiment be novel, although direct plagiarism will not be tolerated. You should try to think of a focused hypothesis that you would like to test that could be answered using techniques that you have learned about in your current course. Your instructor will help you either narrow down or expand your topic as needed.

2. Outline Experimental Design.

After choosing a hypothesis you will need to design an experiment to test the hypothesis. You won’t be doing the experiment prior to writing the grant; that is the whole purpose of the grant. However, you should have a well reasoned plan of how you will proceed. You need to convince the reviewers that your plan has a good chance of succeeding.

When outlining the design you should try to predict the results you would get if your hypothesis is correct, and also predict alternative results. This is important because it shows the reviewers that you have carefully thought through the experiment. You should also identify important controls.

After you have completed the outline you should identify any equipment or reagents that you will need to purchase to perform this experiment – this will be valuable when you prepare a budget.
 Writing the Grant Proposal (Examples of student grants)

Questions Asked When Grant Proposals Are Reviewed.

• Is the background information sufficient to understand the proposal?
• Are there enough references?
• Are the specific aims clearly stated?
• Do the proposed experiments properly address the specific aims?
• Are there simpler methods that could have been used?
• Are any controls omitted?
• Are the expected results logical given the proposed experiments?
• Do the results address the specific aims?
• Are there alternative results that were not identified?

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