Saturday, October 4, 2014

CAREER grant post mortem

I received the grant rejection email last week...and waited until today to look at the reviews. For a couple of reviewers I hit everything just right, and for a couple of other reviewers it was the opposite.

I'm not going to go through these line by line, but I think overall I got a fair shot. I could have gone into a lot more detail about what reviewer 2 wanted to see, and I actually have in previous iterations of this grant, but decided to not go to heavy on lots of work on gene duplications. Suffice it to say I grew up as a scientist in the EvoDevo program at Oregon, and my first paper is actually on gene duplications. Will admit to being a bit stung by the "overgeneralization" part, because anyone that knows me knows I am well aware of every nuance...but  in science these days, you win some you lose a lot more than some. The reviewers made good points, I just tried to go heavy on the outreach part of the grant and had to sacrifice some science to make the page limit. I would have also liked to have had some more preliminary data under my belt (KOs of some of the genes and phenotyping), but right now I've got two very capable undergrads working on that for next year. C'est la vie.

So, as a resource for everyone out there:

There were a total of 36 grants in my panel, MCB Genetic Mechanisms. 1 was ranked High priority, 21 (including this one) were ranked Medium priority, 10 were Low priority, and 4 were Non-competitive.

My grant can be found here
Reviews of the grant can be found here

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