Thursday, October 10, 2019, 8am – 4pm EDT

This day-long session is based on a combined lecture, reading and discussion approach, focusing on the key organizational principles for writing competitive grant proposals. How does the planning process impact the final proposal? What key information must be on the first page? How do you organize the discussion of the approach so that your plan is crystal clear to your reviewer? Many of the answers to these questions are common across funders, and the program provides both conceptual approaches and concrete methods for constructing competitive proposals.

The approach is based on 19 years of grant writing and training experience across multiple agencies and disciplines. The presenter, M. S. (Peg) AtKisson founded the proposal and research development office at Tufts University starting as a contract grant writer in 2001. In 8 years she and her team contributed to $140,000,000 in funded proposals from NSF, NIH, USDA, USAID, Keck Foundation, and others. After working as a trainer for a grant writing consulting firm, Dr. AtKisson founded AtKisson Training Group (ATG) to expand training beyond the proposal document and into the overall planning for funding and academic success. Dr. AtKisson is a highly acclaimed public speaker with a track record of helping faculty improve their competitiveness for funding.

For a $50 registration fee, participants receive the presentation handouts and the Handbook for Planning and Writing Successful Proposals. The Handbook is used during the day and serves as a resource for proposal writing.

The morning session covers aspects such as assessing readiness, identifying funder priorities, and setting time lines for crafting the submission. The second part of the morning covers the all-important first page—the NIH Specific Aims page, or the opening page of any proposal to any funder. In the afternoon we cover clear and compelling ways to present the preliminary data, the foundational literature and the research plan using concrete writing strategies. The rest of the afternoon covers the additional pieces of a proposal, including title and abstract, writing style, and re-submission.