Surrounded by the Best Minds Posted on June 22, 2008 Serving on NIH review committees is a tremendous educational experience, asserts Luis H. Zayas (bio).

I've been an NIH reviewer for well over 12 years now, and it's been a remarkable change over those dozen years in what's required of grant writers, what the National Institutes of Health is funding, what priorities. Just when you think you understand it, they send out a new program announcement, and that's fine. That's part of the challenge of the job.

As a reviewer the most fascinating experience has been to be on a committee as a permanent member, at least a term usually of three years, and be surrounded by some of the best minds in the field that you happen to be representing in that study section. So it's like an advanced seminar and you're constantly learning.

Reading the grants themselves is an enormous educational experience. You're also learning something new, but the thing is, you see the pipeline. You see the young investigators coming through, how they are doing: sometimes well, sometimes not so well. So you see what is coming down the pike as you will. Those are probably the most rewarding experiences of being a reviewer.

And of course from that you don't necessarily get new ideas so much as you get ideas about how to refine your own grants and how to strike a balance or use a term or follow a line of logic that appeals to the reviewer, to the reader, and so you learn a lot about that.

If they don't understand it, then you're in trouble. That means writing. It has to be written unjargonized, simple, simple sentences, some compound sentences, never assuming that they know the definition of a particular concept in your field. You want to define it without insulting them that they don't understand it, so you want to say that, "This concept, we will use this concept, which we refer to as. . . ."

Never make your reviewer work harder than you did on that grant. That's deadly.

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