Thinking Ahead About the Details Posted on December 4, 2007 Include protocol details in the human subjects and budget sections of your grant, suggests Victoria J. Grochocinski (bio).

If you just think ahead and do a lot of the things that you have already been instructed to do when you are writing, you will be in a much better place when you get your notice of grant award.

So one of the first things that you want to think about is being very specific in your writing and I know many people have mentioned that already. We have talked about a human subject section, which is a place where you can put in a lot of the detail that you are going to need when you go to submit your protocol to the IRB. The IRB, as you know, requires a lot of detail. Sometimes your IRB is even willing to review your grant prior to submission in a cursory way to identify any gross errors you may have made in your human subject section. Maybe there are some safety issues you did not address that they felt was required. Maybe you are doing some procedures that are a little bit different than they are used to dealing with, so that can head off a few things and get you one step ahead when your money comes in.

Another place where you can add a lot of specifics is in your budget justification and writing your budget justification and comparing it to your research plan will help you know what kind of staffing you are going to need when the money comes in. You do not have a lot of money in a K award, but you have enough to get by, and once you have submitted the grant you may be keeping your eyes open for people around you who may qualify for some of those positions, being careful of course not to steal anyone from your respected colleagues.

A third thing that you can do while you are writing your grant is that you will be required to prepare a budget, so you will have to meet some people in your budget office, and these are people that you are going to be very reliant upon when your money comes in. So it is good to know these people and know how they operate, and every university is different. Because when your budget comes in, if your budget has been cut, you are going to need to be in touch with them right away as to how you might redistribute your funds.

One of the areas that you may or may not run into as you are writing your grant is your human resources department. Every university, every medical center, has a human resources department who help you find good people and more importantly, they ensure that all the federal and state guidelines are being followed, and those guidelines usually begin when you are interviewing candidates. So you should educate yourself about what your human resources rules are. If you are in a large enough institution, your human resource department will have seminars that you can attend, which is also the case for the IRB. Sometimes your office of research or your office of sponsored programs who are your budget people will also offer classes. They may not occur when you need them and you should have a contact person in each of those departments.

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