Beginning in 2011, Dr. Nigrovic and his colleagues began to meet approximately once every six weeks for an hour to go over two, or sometimes three, specific aims pages submitted by investigators the day before. They bring lunch along and discuss the written presentation, including the science, as well as how the ideas and plans are presented, typically in the presence of the researcher who wrote the proposal.
Says Dr. Nigrovic, “This process involves just 10 minutes of reading time per aims page before the meeting, and then a one-hour meeting. Compare that to someone dropping a 20-page proposal on your desk and asking for detailed comments.”
In the Review Room
“The ARC members are reading these pages cold, which is exactly what the real reviewers will be doing. In the few minutes it takes a reviewer to read an aims page, he or she will have a solid idea of whether it will be a decent grant proposal.”
You don’t need seasoned experts on the ARC, states Dr. Nigrovic. “It was surprising to find that you don’t need someone who knows about the topic at hand. You actually need smart people who don’t know about the topic. It turns out that a good grant is easy to recognize, even if the reader is working in a different field. After all, reviewers are also unlikely to have specific expertise. In particular, clinical and basic researchers can provide helpful feedback on each others’ grants.”
Dr. Nigrovic and his colleagues found the collective aspect of ARC was important. “We often find that it’s not the individual reviewer who squelches the project. It is a consensus that builds around a certain point. One reviewer will say, ‘I am a bit concerned about XYZ,’ and someone else chimes in, ‘Oh, me too.’ You then have the snowball effect. This effect mimics that seen in real grant review committees and is helpful for young investigators who have never participated in such a committee to see first hand.”
Asked what most young rheumatology researchers don’t understand about compiling a winning aims page, Dr. Nigrovic notes, “The most important lesson is that this part of the proposal has to sell the entire project—not just the science. Why is this the right investigator? What makes the timing appropriate? It’s not just a summary of the science. Young investigators learn a lesson when one of our reviewers asks, ‘What about such and such?’ and the researcher says, ‘Oh, that is addressed in the grant.’ That won’t work.”
Results?
The ARC has received support from the NIH as part of Dr. Nigrovic’s P30-funded Joint Biology Consortium. “We did this without external funding until 2016, when the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases stepped in and began to support us.”