Successful Grant Writing: Strategies for Health and Human Service Professionals

Here's a book that I wish I had read several years ago...there are many details of the grant process that experienced grantwriters don't share-either they don't know or they forgot that others don't know. This book covers basic principles of grantwriting in a clear and direct style. The target audience is new or novice grantwriters (such as graduate students, postdocs, or junior faculty) in the fields of health and human services. Thus, the examples in the book are in those areas, however, there is plenty of information that is relevant to grantwriting in the biomedical sciences. The authors usually point out relevant differences. I learned things I didn't know about how RFPs are developed, when and how to contact a program director, how to interpret the pink sheets, and strategies for resubmissions (including how to decide whether or not to resubmit). The book covers three areas that most grantwriting books omit: 1) strategies on how each individual grant should be part of an overall career strategy; 2) discussion and outline of a research career trajectory as one progresses from novice to intermediate to advanced and expert; and 3) information on assembling an effective grantwriting team for program project grants and multidisciplinary proposals. This third area is becoming increasingly important as the trend toward translational and group science grows. (I will re-read this section the next time I am asked to work on a training or program grant.) This would be a great book for the bookshelf in a lab or in a grad student or postdoc resource center.