Training Grants

🧠 How to Develop a Strong Research Question & Hypothesis for an NIH Fellowship Grant

🔍 1. Start With the Big Question — NOT the Methods

• 🚫 Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole.
• ❌ Do not build a question or hypothesis around the experiments you already planned or the techniques you have available.
• 🎯 Instead:
  • Identify the important, unresolved problem in your field.
  • Develop a true hypothesis that directly addresses that problem.
  • Only then design the experiments that best test that hypothesis.

🧪 2. Don’t Invent Workarounds for Infeasible Methods

• ⚠️ Don’t come up with a big, exciting question…

  → realize the best way to test this hypothesis is not feasible (at least in your lab)…

  → and then replace those methods with “less good” experiments that don’t really address the question.

• 🧭 If the core experiment is not feasible in your lab:

  • Find collaborators with the required expertise OR
  • Refine the question so that you can still meaningfully answer an important scientific problem.

💡 3. Never Lose Sight of the Grant’s Purpose

• 🎯 The purpose of writing a grant is to get the money.

• 💸 Your job is not to propose the most complex, esoteric, or cutting-edge project, or to create an outline of your proposed PhD or postdoc project—

  Your job is to propose the project that is most likely to get funded.

🛡️ 4. Avoid the Types of Projects That Get Fellowship Applications Killed