The Leap from a K to an R01 Posted on October 19, 2007 Martica Hall (bio) talks about the challenges of running a K and a multi-site study at the same time.

To do a K award, it’s very much like doing a dissertation, but you have more money. And I was incredibly naive as well, so, for example, I didn’t write an RA into my K award, so I’m gonna go out and run all these subjects, recruit them, do everything myself.

And I got into it a couple months and thought, “Oh, I can’t do this,” so then I hired somebody part-time, and then that wasn’t enough, so then she came on fulltime, and, honestly, for my K award, my budget was almost entirely an RA, but it was definitely worth it, and that, having her onboard, doing the recruitment, being out on the front, so to speak, enabled me to step back and write my R, so I actually had an R01 the beginning of the third year of my K. It was already funded.

It was just one of those right-time kind of things. It was a phenomenon that I couldn’t have planned better, and I didn’t plan. It was an accident, but it was a happy accident, so we wrote that, and as I was telling you earlier; it’s a multi-site R01, so to go from a K award to a multi-site study, it was a larger leap than I would suggest other people make because you’re not just managing your team anymore, meaning well, that’s one person on a K award, so you have one RA working for you.

Now, you’ve got people all over the world, some of whom you may not actually even know or have ever met, and then you’re trying to deal with their research staff and are they really doing what you agreed you would do, so is everybody really administering the questionnaires the same way? The level of complexity in a multi-site study is something that is best reserved for later in your career because the amount of time, the investment that I’ve had to make to pull this study off is much greater than I could afford in terms of time, and it’s cost me.

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