Proposal Narrative
Revised Applications
Applicants who are resubmitting their application may include a one-page response to the reviewers comments. This is in addition to the pages indicated below. Please be sure to clearly mark in your revised application by underlining, italics, bold, or other formatting where you have made revisions.
Please write a 5-year plan for items a through d.
- Candidate's Background and Career Goals and Objectives (not to exceed 1 page): Describe your past scientific history, indicating how the award fits into past and future research career development. If there are consistent themes or issues that have guided previous work, these should be made clear. If your work has changed direction, the reasons for the change should be indicated. It is important to justify the award and how it will enable you to develop or expand your research career. Indicate a timeline, including plans to apply for subsequent grant support. Use this section to provide any additional information not described in the Biographical Sketch, such as research or clinical training experience.
- Career Development and Training Activities during the Award Period (not to exceed 2 pages): Stress the new enhanced research skills and knowledge you will acquire as a result of the proposed award. If you have considerable research experience in the same areas as the proposed research, reviewers may determine that the application lacks potential to enhance your research career. Describe structured activities, such as coursework or technique workshops that are part of the developmental plan. If coursework is included, provide course numbers and descriptive titles. Briefly discuss each of the activities, except research, in which you expect to participate. Include a percentage of time involvement for each activity by year, and explain how the activity is related to the proposed research and the career development plan. Describe a plan for team mentoring, including frequency of meetings with mentors and other pertinent information.
- Specific Aims (not to exceed 1 page): State precisely the goals of the proposed research and summarize the expected outcome or outcomes, including the impact that the results of the proposed research will exert on the research field or fields involved. List succinctly the specific objectives of the research proposed, e.g., to test a stated hypothesis, create a novel design, solve a specific problem, challenge an existing paradigm or clinical practice, address a critical barrier to progress in the field, or develop new technology.
- Research Strategy (not to exceed 5 pages):
- Significance
- Explain the importance of the problem or critical barrier to progress in the field that the proposed project addresses.
- Explain how the proposed project will improve scientific knowledge, technical capability, or clinical practice in one or more broad fields.
- Describe how the concepts, methods, technologies, treatments, services, or preventive interventions that drive this field will be changed if the proposed aims are achieved.
- Innovation
- Explain how the application challenges and seeks to shift current research or clinical practice paradigms.
- Describe any novel theoretical concepts, approaches, methodologies, instrumentation, or interventions to be developed or used, and describe any advantage over existing methodologies, instrumentation, or interventions.
- Explain any refinements, improvements, or new applications of theoretical concepts, approaches, methodologies, instrumentation, or interventions.
- Approach
- Describe the overall strategy, methodology, and analyses to be used to accomplish the specific aims of the project. Include how the data will be collected, analyzed, and interpreted as well as any resource sharing plans as appropriate. Be sure to include a timeline that reflects your proposed accomplishments, particularly in the first 2 years.
- Discuss potential problems, alternative strategies, and benchmarks for success in achieving the aims.
- If the project is in the early stages of development, describe any strategy to establish feasibility, and address the management of any high-risk aspects of the proposed work.
- References: Provide a bibliography of any references cited in the Research Strategy. The references should be limited to relevant and current literature. While there is not a page limitation, it is important to be concise and to select only the literature references that are pertinent to the proposed research. Each reference must include names of all authors (in the same sequence in which they appear in the publication), the article and journal title, book title, volume number, page numbers, and year of publication. Include only bibliographic citations. Follow scholarly practices in providing citations for source materials relied upon in preparing any section of the application.
- Human Subjects (not to exceed 2 pages): Include the following sections:
- Human Subjects Involvement, Characteristics, and Design: Describe the proposed involvement of human subjects in the work outlined in the Research Strategy.
- Sources of Materials: Describe the research material obtained from living individuals in the form of specimens, records, or data.
- Potential Risks: Describe the potential risks to subjects (physical, psychological, financial, legal, or other), and assess their likelihood and seriousness to the human subjects.
- Adequacy of Protection against Risks:
- Describe plans for the recruitment of subjects (where appropriate) and the process for obtaining informed consent. If the proposed studies will include children, describe the process for meeting requirements for parental permission and child assent.
- Describe planned procedures for protecting against or minimizing potential risks, including risks to privacy of individuals or confidentiality of data, and assess their likely effectiveness.
- Describe protections for pregnant women, human fetuses, and neonates, if applicable.
- Describe protections for prisoners, if applicable.
- Describe protections for children, if applicable.
- Potential Benefits of the Proposed Research to Human Subjects and Others:
- Discuss the potential benefits of the research to research participants and others.
- Discuss why the risks to research participants are reasonable in relation to the anticipated benefits to the participants and others.
- Importance of the Knowledge to Be Gained: Discuss the importance of the knowledge gained or to be gained as a result of the proposed research.
- Data and Safety Monitoring Plan: Provide a general description of a monitoring plan that you will establish as the overall framework for data and safety monitoring. Describe the frequency of monitoring and who will perform the monitoring.
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