The National Science Foundation (NSF) uses two primary criteria to evaluate proposals: intellectual merit (how your work enhances your field) and broader impacts (how your work benefits society).

Since the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, there have been seven areas emphasized for broader impacts:

NIH recently announced a plan to limit PIs to submitting no more than 6 grant applications per calendar year, including new, renewal, resubmission or revision applications. What does that mean for UC Davis investigators?

We all need a break from staring at our screens from time to time, and a great way to use those breaks to help your grant writing and fund your research is to listen to a podcast! Below are some of our team’s favorites: 

In grant writing, the One-pager is your proposal pitch. It’s what you would send to a program officer, colleague, and/or potential collaborator to get feedback and check scope, and it is a critical step in the proposal development process. Crafting a One-pager requires you to crystallize the framework and rationale of your proposed idea, outline the objectives and activities of your project, and match your goals to the funding opportunity and sponsor. All of which needs to be done in a clear, concise, jargon-free way.

As researchers, we all have our specialist subjects. Whether yours is the result of a lifelong passion, a driving motivation to solve a problem, or a happy accident that you fell into, the importance of your research is something that seems obvious…to you. It is often more challenging to convince others about the benefits of your work and, in the case of grant writing, why they should fund your research. This is where being able to describe the impacts of your work becomes critical. 

You are likely reading this because you had a proposal rejected. If so, welcome to the club! The good news is that proposal rejection is just part of the process and provides you with an opportunity to improve your grantsmanship, and write a stronger proposal with a clearer vision.

As our team prepares to support University of California, Davis faculty apply for the 2025 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER, it's a good time to share what we have planned for our researchers this season!

Amazingly, it has already been about a year since we started sharing these bi-weekly grant writing tips, and so it seems like a good time to share how the UC Davis Proposal Development Services (PDS) team helps University of California, Davis researchers apply for extramural funding! 

Our last tip focused on strategies for finding and vetting funding. Most often, we think of federal funders for research, but there are several other sources to support your work that you may not have considered yet!  

One of the most common questions that we get is, “Where do I find funding opportunities?”. For some, the volume of funding agencies and opportunities makes finding a specific call too overwhelming. For others, it may feel like many RFPs don’t quite fit with what you’re looking for. Either way, our team has some tips and tools to help you develop better (and hopefully easier!) strategies for finding funding.