For the past month, I've been consumed in writing and submitting a grant for the NHGRI Human Genome Reference Center funding opportunity. This is a planned $12.5m / 5 year effort to coordinate the new Human Genome Reference Program (also see the Frequently Asked Questions).

We submitted this grant proposal a week ago Tuesday! I joined with three collaborators on this grant proposal: Curii, Genome in a Bottle, and the Church Lab. We also partnered with the Personal Genome Project and the Open Humans platform.

Since we're all open-science-y people, we agreed to make the grant public after submission. I was thinking about how best to present it in a blog post, but then I remembered that grants are supposed to stand on their own with respect to the RFA. So ...here it is, with only a little bit of organization to make it more approachable!

The HGRC call asked for what was in effect one R01 and two R21 grants, along with another R01-sized grant on top. The first R01 was Component 1, a 12 page section discussing how the center would maintain, improve, and provide the Human Genome reference. The first R21 was a 6 page Component 2, describing the community outreach plans of the center, to do training and gather feedback. The second R21 was the 6 page Component 3, describing the logistical coordination of the rest of the Human Genome Reference Program (running meetings, providing materials, etc.) And the last R01 was an overarching summary of the three components, 12 pages in length.

The end PDF submission was over 300 pages in length. Good fun...

One last comment before I provide the links: just like reading someone else's submitted dissertation, your sole responsibility in reading someone else's ALREADY SUBMITTED GRANT is to make nice noises, like "Hey, that's great congrats on submitting it!" and "There are some great ideas in there!" You don't say "ooh, look, a typo on p3! (How unprofessional! Sucks that you can't fix it now!)" or "Gosh I would have written that completely differently." Basically, you should just be nice - we're going to go through a NIH review panel experience, and I'm sure they'll be properly critical :)

The Actual Grant

Research Strategy - OVERALL - a high level overview of the thing.

Research Strategy - Component 1: Maintain, Improve, Provide the Human Reference Genome - check out our cool validation strategy with Genome-in-a-Bottle-like data sets!

Research Strategy - Component 2: Do Community Outreach and Needs - here we proposed not just doing outreach but also building a community of practice!

Research Strategy - Component 3: Provide Logistical Coordination for Human Genome Reference Program - here we added a standardization effort!

Enjoy!

--titus