How To Write The Specific Aims and Outcomes of Your NIH Grant
The final pieces of your Specific Aims page puzzle are arguably the most important.
Writing the actual aims of your research. And then describing the outcomes of the project.
The goal of your aims section is to grant your reviewers a full picture of what you’ll do to achieve your overall project objective. Then, in a few short sentences at the end, you describe the impact you expect to have.
In other words, your aims are meant to help fill in that gap you revealed using the problem-gap-hook-solution framework.
Let’s walk through the process of developing your aims.
How To Title Your Aims
You need to create a clear and distinct title that summarizes the purpose of the aim. Using a verb is critical because it describes the action you’re taking.
The trick to these high-level verbs is to help your title be stated in a way where you can’t fail.
How To Develop The Content Of Your Aim
In a hypothesis-driven proposal, each aim should have its own sub-hypothesis. This means that in addition to your overarching hypothesis, each aim should have its own hypothesis too.
Using this structure, even if your aims hypothesis does fail you’ll have an alternative strategy that you can draw on to still achieve the overall purpose of your aim.
You don’t need to describe the alternative strategies on your Specific Aims page - focus on your sub-hypothesis and instead maintain a high-level overview of how you’ll achieve the purpose of your aim.
Maintain The Independence Of Your Aims
As you determine the best approach for your aims, it’s important to consider the independence and interdependence of your aims.
While your aims should be related to each other via your general hypothesis, they should be able to stand on their own. If the success of one aim depends on the results of another aim, you’ve got a problem. As you finalize your hypotheses, yes, they should be thematically linked, but experimentally they must remain independent.
This is a feasibility issue…and it also applies to proposals that aren’t hypothesis-driven. Although there may be fewer issues with dependent aims, you absolutely still need to justify the feasibility of your aims.
Your Outcomes & Impact
The goal for this section is to give your reviewer an indication of the outcomes they can expect and the potential impact those outcomes will have.
In other words, this informs the funding IC of what they can expect in return for their investment in your research.
When establishing your outcomes in your NIH grant, help your reader get excited about the tangible product you will present when you successfully complete your aims. Let them experience what it looks like when that gap is actually filled.
The description of filling that gap leads to the impact of filling those gaps. Here you want to focus on the short and long-term impacts.
Highlight your short-term impacts by describing the next step in the research trajectory. Then shift the conversation to your long-term impact, and how this outcome contributes to solving the big scientific problem you discussed in your first section.
This step is vital because it speaks to the entire purpose of your grant writing. Convincing reviewers that your research idea is worth investing in.
If you can generate excitement with the potential results of your research, you are one step closer to becoming a fully funded researcher.
The Purpose Of Your Specific Aims Page
Remember that in this one-pager, you’re giving a 30,000-foot view of your entire research project, and the goal is to only give your reviewers a taste of what’s to come.
Your aims page is all about the why and the what. And when you do it right, you can trust that you will generate enough enthusiasm for reviewers to go deeper into your proposal to learn the how, who, where, and all of the other details of your research project.
So don’t get bogged down in the details. Save that for later in the proposal. Keep a high-level view of your research and create aims that have a significant impact and will boost reviewers’ desire to see your research funded.
Are You Ready To Get Funded This Year?
If all this talk about outcomes and impacts has you motivated to put your all into your Specific Aims page and your R01 overall, I invite you to check out The Grant Funding Formula, my online NIH R01 grant writing course that walks you through how to write an NIH R01 grant, step-by-step.