Getting Grant Ready
The first step to securing ongoing support for your research is to understand the funding landscape and to develop a plan that will help you to understand the types of funding available to you and to build towards more competitive opportunities. The Office of Research Development offers the following services to ensure that you begin your research career with a solid foundation:
- Planning: As faculty begin their careers, Research Development can helpto identity grants that align with their career stage and build up to increasing more competitive and prestigious awards. There are a number of external awards available to early career researchers, such as the CAREER award from NSF, that will help faculty and the R16 from the NIH.
- Strategic intelligence: Research Development is aware of the many ongoing policy developments at federal, state, and private grant-making agencies. Staff from the Office of Research Development will use this information to help faculty navigate these changes and to build a resilient portfolio of prospective grant funders.
- Alignment with funders: Each funding agency has its own mission and has developed its own approach to funding to advance that particular mission. To be successful, research projects need to be evaluated and, where appropriate, adjusted. Assessing alignment can include considering the scope of the project, the methods, the level of community involvement, and more.
Grant Forward Access and Training
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- GrantForward is able to cover more than 37,000 sponsor sources to provide a
comprehensive database of more than 173,000 funding opportunities that continues to grow
with the most up to date information. - GrantForward’s powerful search system helps to lessen the hassle of searching for grants
with adaptable search filters and robust AI search features. - GrantForward researcher profiles allow researchers to highlight their research achievements
and interests to receive personalized grant recommendations for grant opportunities that
match their research needs and find potential collaborators across institutions. - If you would like to benefit from receiving grant recommendations, then you will also need to
make sure to create your researcher profile.
Create a profile
- Open https://www.grantforward.com/profile/my_profile
- Claim an existing profile (if available) and make further modifications if needed. You can
also either create your profile manually or request an auto-generated profile that you can
review and edit. - Visit https://www.grantforward.com/recommendation/view, update keywords from your
researcher profile, add customized filters, and change email frequency to receive
opportunities aligned to your interests.
Team Building Support
- In most cases, but not all, grant-funded research will require a team. Research teams will help with the completion of an application, and they will also help conduct research should the application be successful. Teams can also help investigators to round out their areas of expertise. They can add depth of knowledge or bring useful skill sets to the project, which will usually make your application stronger.
- To support team building, the Research Development Office can help individual faculty members connect with like-minded researchers, community-based organizations, or industry partners. To support this, Research Development professionals at ISU can help organize speed networking events, workshops, panel discussions, collaborative grant planning events, and more.
- Faculty who are interested in building their professional networks to support research are encouraged to apply to ASSERT.
Red Team Review Facilitation
Increasingly, red team reviews are an essential part of the grant development process. A red team review is a strategic assessment of a grant proposal completed by academics or other professionals who have experience with the funding body and can give PIs critical but constructive feedback to avoid unforeseen pitfalls. Red team reviews help to make proposals more competitive by giving PIs more insight into how they can better align their proposal with the funding opportunity, avoid confusing language, and answer important questions.
Advanced Support for Complex Proposals
As researchers grow their research portfolio, they are likely to work on complex proposals that involve multiple labs, institutions, community-based organizations, corporate partners, and more. These proposals sometimes require additional support, including partnership building, team science support, navigating institutional bureaucracies, project management, graphic design, and writing/editing support. When working on a large, complex proposal, it is critical to begin early and to meet with Research Development as soon as possible.