Project Grant Advice to Applicants

NF Project Grant advice to applicants December 2017 Page 1

Project Grants - advice to applicants

Part A: Formal requirements - rules relating to grants

1.Electronic application forms can be obtained from the Foundationwebsite An Excel budget template (NF Project and Small Project budget spreadsheet) is also provided and the completed template should be inserted (using copy/paste) into the Word document in Section 5.

2.In addition to the signed original,15double sidedstapledcopies of the application are required. Only the original need contain the Referee Nominations, Confidentiality, Ethical and Administrative Agreements (Sections 8 through 12). In addition, please submit an electronic copy of the formin MS Word (not a PDF), with the Excel budget sheet included in the document, to . This is essential, as applications will be converted and sent to reviewers as secured PDF files. Please do not send PDF files.

3.The closing dates for applications are April 1st and September 1st each year.

4.The Neurological Foundation endeavours to undertake robust, fair and transparent peer review of applications for research funding. At the end of each biannual grant round detailed constructive feedback is provided to all applicants, particularly to those who have not been approved for funding. After reading the reviews and feedback, unsuccessful applicants may decide to resubmit a Project or Small Project application, and it is not uncommon for a project to gain funding at the second attempt. However, the Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Committee believe that a third submission of an unsuccessful project is not appropriate and have therefore adopted the resolution that only one resubmission of either a Project or Small Project grant application will be accepted. This does not mean that a researcher who has been unsuccessful twice cannot submit a further proposal in their chosen field of research, but this will need to be based on a new or substantially revised hypothesis.

4.If a grant is made, the administrative requirements will be stated in the form of notification. Some of these should be borne in mind when writing the application. They are:

1. Salaries: The Foundation will only be responsible for salaries within the range stated in the notification. The point on the range should be determined by the appropriate authority of the Host Institution. Appointees must be made aware of the conditions of the grant, that their salary depends on the continuation of the project, that it is limited to its duration, and that it will cease if for any reason the project is terminated. The Foundation must be notified, through the Host Institution, of the date at which each salary commences. The salary will end after the period of the grant, and leave must be taken within this period; the Foundation will not fund leave unclaimed when the grant ends.
2. Equipment: Major items of equipment should be ordered within three months of the date of the Grant Notification unless otherwise negotiated. Quotations must be confirmed before placing the order, and if there is more than 5% variation, the Foundation must be consulted before proceeding.
3. Working expenses: Funds for working expenses will be available from the date of notification of the grant for the duration of the grant as specified above. The Grantee may delay the start of the project for up to six months from notification, but must notify the Foundation of this intention and of the date of formal commencement of the project. Claims for working expenses should conform as far as possible to the timetable set out in the application, but flexibility is allowed; claims for expenses incurred after the termination of the grant will not be met.

5.Mental health Research. The Neurological Foundation will accept applications designed to further the knowledge and treatment of primary neuropsychiatric or neuropsychological disorders, if the research takes a mechanistic approach to discovering or treating a component of the disorder that might be due to an underlying neurological problem. Applications which deal only with the clinical management of mental health disorders will not be considered.

Part B: Guidance for Applicants

1.Assessment of applications by the Foundation. Applications are examined by the Foundation's Scientific Advisory Committee. It will assess the scientific validity of the proposal and the experimental methods, judge whether the funding requested is appropriate, and rank it in order of preference for funding in competition with other applications made. In doing this, the Committee will seek written opinions on the quality of the proposal from expert national and international referees. The final decision however is that of the National Council of the Foundation, and need not correspond with the opinions of its advisors.

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2.General considerations. Two groups of assessors will read your application - external referees who are specialists in your field, and members of the Scientific Advisory Committee who will have a general knowledge of the subject. The referee will obviously be concerned with the justification of your research proposal, and will be asked to comment on specific aspects of the project, including your familiarity with the literature. Members of the SAC, on the other hand, need to have a clearly written proposal before them that does not require specialized knowledge and/or vocabulary to carry out an assessment of the project. Such a balance is a common requirement of applications for funding of biomedical and clinical research.

Please restrict the main part of the application (Section 3) to 7 pages plus references, and use a serif font of point size 12 (for example, Times New Roman). Reviewerswarm to a succinct application, but will also be irritated by an incomplete one, especially if there is unused space in the application. Applications in excess of the limit will be returned to the applicant.

Single spacing should be used for text, and applicants should pay attention to the layout of their applications. The qualities which the Committee values in the exposition are explicitness and clarity.

All applications will contain technical terms, but applicants should make certain that those likely to be unfamiliar are explained for the non-specialist. The boundary between these and jargon should be respected.

3.Most project grant applications are submitted by experienced investigators who do not need guidance. Nonetheless reviewers have sometimes commented on the poor quality of individual applications and the following suggestions are therefore offered.

(a)The Aims and Research Design: The aim of the project should be briefly and clearly defined. The classical protocol sets out a hypothesis and describes how it is to be tested. In medical research it may not be possible to do exactly this, but this format should be observed as closely as possible. The way in which the question arose and its position in the current thinking on the subject should then be given. This will require a review of the literature.The general design of the research should be described in a way which will allow non-expert reviewers, as well as specialist referees, to judge whether the design is sound. You should be particularly explicit about matters such as the adequacy of controls and whether the plan includesenoughexperiments to produce a significant result. The sources of error and the means to counter them should be described. It should also be plain exactly what is to be measured and how the results will be analysed statistically.

(b)Methods: In general an abridged form of the method will suffice if supported by reference to readily available literature. A description in detail may be necessary if the methods are new, not easily available or constitute an important part of the proposal. This section will be addressed particularly to the expert referee, who will need to know that the applicant has considered the risks and advantages of their techniques and why they have chosen them.

(c)Significance: The proposal and its wider implications need to be discussed. The Committee will place considerable weight on the significance of the work to medical science in general and to clinical neurology.

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(d)Collaboration: Research projects often impinge on fields outside the immediate area of the investigator, and collaboration with a laboratory or clinical colleague may be necessary. If this is the case, the application should include a letter from the collaborator to say that they have considered the proposal and are willing and able to contribute to it as described.

(e)Ethical Considerations: Before any grant is made, formal approval of the project is required by the Ethics Committee of the applicant's institution. If appropriate, more than one Ethics Committee approval may be necessary, for example, if the research geographically covers an area serviced by more than one Committee, or if human and animal studies will be undertaken. All Committees applied to for approval should be listed in Section 11. A copy of the approval(s), with any comments made by the Committee, should be sent to the Foundation as soon as possible. No grant monies will be released until all ethical and administrative requirements are fully met.

Ethical issues should be commented on in the body of the application, in the section on research design. If human subjects are involved, the extent of inconvenience and risk should be noted. A copy of the form of consent should be attached. If animal experiments are proposed, it should be established that they are necessary, and the choice of species should be justified. The means to avoid distress should be mentioned. In all experiments it should not only be evident that the numbers will be sufficient to establish significance, but that they are not needlessly large.In making its assessment, the Scientific Advisory Committee will also consider the ethical status of the proposal, and may ask the applicant to modify some of the conditions on this account.Once applications have been received by the Foundation, major procedural changes to your research protocol resulting from decisions of an ethics committee will require withdrawal of the application and resubmission at a later funding round. It is therefore suggested that you apply for ethical approval before submitting your application to the Neurological Foundation to avoid any unnecessary delays in grant commencement.

(f)Previous research supported by grant(s) from the Neurological Foundation: The Scientific Advisory Committee will want to have available details of previous projects, level of financial support and the outcome of the research. If the project encountered problems these also need to be discussed. Relevance to the present project should be explained if appropriate.

(g)References: Publications should be numbered in the text and listed using the Vancouver convention,including the titles.

(h)Curriculum Vitae: In listing publications, distinction should be made between (1) original papers, (2) abstracts, and (3) other publications such as reviews, comments and chapters in books.

(i)Reprints: It has been customary to ask for reprints to accompany the application. Some may have been uncertain of their purpose, and you are asked to note these requirements:

* You may send with the application two reprints and a PDF of publications directly relevant to the present application, if you feel that it will make it easier for the assessors in the Scientific Advisory Committee to understand your proposals as explained in the 'summary'

* You may send single copies of other reprints and a PDF to establish status or productiveness in the current or other areas of research.

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* You should send PDFs of reprints of any material which you think is essential for the specialist reviewers to have to assess your application, and which either has not yet been published or which is unlikely to be available in centres overseas (it is a comment often made by referees that they have not been able to review an application as they wished because some publication or the details of a technique have not been available).

(j)Referees: You are asked to nominate at least three people in the field whom the Foundation can ask for a report. As the objective of the assessment process is to procure unbiased, informed reports, overly enthusiastic but unsubstantial reports do not advance the cause of the applicant. Identifying appropriate referees may require time and effort on the applicant's part but is likely to contribute to a fairer assessment of the application. The comments of all referees will be given to applicants, edited only to preserve confidentiality, when the assessment is completed. Note that when application for funding has been made for the same or a similar project to another agency, it is the Foundation's practice to share reports with the other agency, unless you make your objection known.

4.Details of grants requested.

(a)Staff: The Committee will need to satisfy itself that the number and grades of staff requested are appropriate to the needs of the project. Reasons should be given in the sections on justification of staff and expenses. Universities and Crown Health Institutes hold schedules describing the qualifications and salaries of various grades of staff and applicants should check that the grading they recommend is appropriate and that the salary is up to date. If the project is funded, appointments can only be made within the grades specified, the level within the grade being determined by the grading procedure of the host institution. The Foundation does not fund institutional overheads or buy out salaries of tenured staff.

(b)Equipment: Applicants should remember that equipment may require services from the host institution, maintenance or repair. If this is likely to be a major item, a statement from the host institution that it will accept liability must be included.

(c)Working Expenses: Travelling expenses will usually only be allowed for purposes essential to the project - e.g. for surveys. Investigators and salaried staff are however eligible to apply for a travel grant to attend relevant conferences in the field of the project. Applications close at the same time as those for research grants, and there is a third round which closes on March 1st.

(d)The Neurological Foundation discourages gifts and inducements to participate in research. These must be clearly justified if included in a research budget.

(e)Doubt: Applicants are encouraged to consult the Research Manager if there are any uncertainties or doubts about procedure

5.Application budgets should consider the funding available for distribution. As a guide, approximately $1.3 million has been awarded in recent grant rounds. Twenty to thirty applications for the support of research projects are assessed each round. Budgets that are incompatible with the funding available may have to be rewritten.

Dr Douglas Ormrod

Research Manager

Neurological Foundation of New Zealand

PO Box 110022, Auckland Hospital, Auckland 1148

(66 Grafton Road, Auckland 1011 – for courier)
Ph: [64 9] 309 7749
E-mail:

web: