NIH Grant and Dissertation Proposals

As a research scientist,

you will have to produce written proposals for you research. In some programs at Northwestern, you will need to write a formal dissertation proposal. And when you become an independent researcher, you will need to write grant proposals to various funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The videos linked below will give you guidance about how you should approach writing key sections of such proposals. Arguably the most important part of any proposal is an aims page – a single page that summarizes your research goals and aims. To help you with writing an aims page, we have produced two videos.

The first The Pattern of Introductions in Aims Pages works through the overall structure of an aims page using two actual examples from grants that won NIH funding.

The second video Specific Aims and Conclusions in Aims Pages focuses on the writing of the aims themselves.

The third video Undersanding NIH Criteria focuses on how to organize and write about your research using these key concepts, taking as a template the requirements promulgated by the NIH.

The fourth video Analyzing Overall Strucure examines the "big structure" of two funded NIH applications.