A Winning Strategy For Grant Applications: Focus On Impact - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences
Abstract
Sidebar: The Dos and Don'ts of Winning Dollars Sidebar: Grant Writing - For More Information A NEW STRATEGY: UC-Irvine’s Keith Woerpel, who revised his rejected grant applications to focus on impact, now has several grants. To Keith Woerpel, 1994 will forever be the year he learned to write grants-the hard way. An assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, Woerpel wrote five grant applications that year. All were rejected. "I was getting burned really badly," Woerpel remembers. Obviously, something was wrong. When Woerpel shared research ideas with colleagues, he sounded animated. But that animation didn't come through when he was writing up his work for grant reviewers. Reading his grant applications was like perusing term papers. "If I'd been writing a 10-page paper for college, I would have been very proud," he says. Painful as it was, Woerpel forced himself to go over his rejected grants, paragraph by paragraph. Then he did some reorganizing. His goal: to sound less like a student, and more like a researcher brainstorming with friends. Instead of rambling into a grant application with a long research history, he started with a quick bit of context-and then explained how his work