AAS/SUS Surgical Investigators’ Course – Registrant Page

Please let us know if you will be submitting a grant proposal for review (Sunday, February 5th) through the form below.

We look forward to having you attend the upcoming course.  The AAS/SUS Surgical Investigators’ Course/Grant Writing Workshop is divided into three components:

1) Didactic sessions describing the process of grant writing and review;
2) A grant writing session to aid participants in developing their own ideas; and
3) A mock study section to allow participants to see how grants are evaluated.

For the final two components, active preparation on the part of the participants will be required.

Grant Writing Session – Sunday, February 5, 2017
Sunday afternoon the final session will be on grant writing.  Participants are requested to submit a grant proposal to be reviewed and discussed.  This can be a d raft of a grant proposal, or a fully written and submitted grant proposal.  The focus of the discussion will be the construction and presentation of the central hypothesis and specific aims.  Similar to how the mock study section functions, participants will be assigned the preliminary grants of their fellow participants to provide constructive comments. The grants will also be reviewed by the faculty facilitators.  Your proposal does not need to be thoroughly developed.  In many instances, it is better to get early feedback about the essential elements prior to writing the full grant.  The most important initial steps are to develop a sound central hypothesis and then describe a set of specific aims to test that hypothesis. The session will focus on how well your proposal conveys these critical elements.

If you are participate in the Grant Writing session, please email the grant proposal that you would like reviewed in PDF format (other formats will not be accepted).  We will upload it to a page for the faculty and other participants to review in advance. Email it to Christine Sass (christines@academicsurgicalcongress.org) no later than Tuesday, January 17^th.

 Mock Study Section – Monday, February 6, 2017
The goal of the mock study section session is to teach participants how grants are evaluated. A number of K and R grants have been submitted, some of which have been funded and others that have not been. These will be provided to all course attendees for the mock study section, along with the templates for scoring and scoring guidelines. Course participants will be assigned as primary, secondary and tertiary discussants of these grants. The course faculty will act as the chair of the study section and facilitate the review process.

 It is expected that the course participants carefully read and evaluate the grants assigned to them according to the template and scoring guidelines given to them. The sample grants will be distributed to the course participants ~3 weeks before the actual course, via the internet.

During the study section, the chair will lead the discussion using a format similar to what is used in actual study sections:

1. The chair will ask for preliminary overall impact scores from the primary, secondary and tertiary reviewers.
2. The primary reviewer will a give concise summary of the proposal and highlight its major strengths and weaknesses.
3. The secondary reviewer will then briefly point out areas of agreement and disagreement with the primary reviewer, and discuss additional strengths and weaknesses.
4. The tertiary reviewer(s) will briefly point out additional strengths and weaknesses not covered by the first two reviewers.
5. The chair will ask the primary reviewer whether appropriate protections are in place for animals and human subjects as indicated.
6. The chair will then open the floor for discussion by other group members.
7. The primary, secondary, and tertiary reviewers will then state their final overall impact scores.

For any questions, please contact christines@academicsurgicalcongress.org.