It’s no secret, least of all to faculty at a research-intensive institution like UVM, that federal funding of university-sponsored research is down. Since the stimulus-fueled high of 2009, federal research dollars have eroded steadily while grant applications have increased, leading to an environment unprecedented in its competitiveness.

Thank goodness for Jeralyn Haraldsen. Since April, Haraldsen has served as grant proposal manager in the Office of the Vice President for Research, a newly created position designed to help faculty researchers up their odds in this sharp elbowed new normal. 

Haraldsen brings double-barreled expertise to the job. She has a doctoral degree in microbiology and completed a post-doc in the lab of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics professor Gary Ward. But she also possesses a knack for clear writing that earned her rave reviews throughout her academic career.

Seven years ago, she decided to combine her research know-how with her writing ability and explore a career as a grant-writing consultant. A mentorship at Tufts lasted exactly one grant proposal; her mentor, director of the university’s research development office, was so impressed with her work, she all but made her a member of the staff. Word of mouth led to consulting jobs at the University of New Hampshire and UVM, and eventually, a position at the university.

At UVM she has several proposals on the cusp and several major wins under her belt. Psychiatry professor Steve Higgins, principal investigator on two of those awards, calls her “a gem; socially skilled, organized, collaborative, scientifically knowledgeable; a skilled grant writer.”

UVM Today recently sat down with Haraldsen to ask how she likes to work with faculty and what she hopes to contribute.

UVM Today: What would you say is the major benefit you can bring to a faculty member tackling a grant?

Haraldsen: Feedback on the writing, on the communication of the ideas. I’m not a subject matter expert, but I can serve an as objective, educated reviewer. If the faculty member can communicate clearly to someone like me, then it’s likely that they’re also communicating clearly to someone who’s closer to their field.

You'll be especially focused on faculty who are involved in large and complex grants. Tell us about that.

One of my primary roles is to work on larger, more complicated applications. More complicated could mean a multidisciplinary collaboration, folks who are trying to use two different vocabularies to describe their work. It could be a multi-institutional collaboration, where we’re required to include information from a lot of different groups at different institutions. And some are just larger in scope, like center-level grant proposals or infrastructure-building proposals.

What are some of the specific contributions you can make for that kind of large, complex proposal?

A key one is organizing the effort to make sure all of the text is written on time and the contributions from different writers hold together once you bring everything into one document. I also create timelines and coordinate between the collaborating departments or institutions so everyone has their documentation to us on time.

You’ll also be working with new faculty. Tell us about that area of your responsibility.

I’m also available to faculty who are less experienced grant writers, especially those who are writing career development proposals for new or early-stage investigator grants that are common in a lot of the funding agencies.

For these faculty, I’m here as a resource if they have questions, but I’m also happy to work with them one-on-one. For someone just beginning to write a proposal, they could contact me, and we can set up a date where, for example, they can send me a first draft of the executive summary of the proposal. I like to set a date where we can pass that back and forth a couple times, and then they can send me a draft of the full proposal.

You’re also planning a series of informal seminars on grant-writing.

Yes, beginning at the end of October, I’ll also be offering a monthly brown bag lunch series geared to new faculty on best practices in grant writing, a kind of grant writing 101. A few of the sessions will be about the nuts and bolts: How do you submit a grant at UVM, what are the policies, who are the folks on campus that you need to be interacting with, what are the required bits of compliance? But in the majority of the sessions we’ll talk about the different narrative components that go into a strong application. I’d love it to be a back-and-forth dialogue rather than a lecture.

Let's preview one of these sessions. What are the attributes of a winning grant application? 

A good grant application is engaging, it’s clear. It’s clear enough that anyone on the review panel could read it, not just the one person who’s in your niche area. Certainly there are good uses of jargon, but reviewers are not always that person who’s the subject matter expert in your field. They are the best person on the review panel to review your work, but sometimes they’re just enough outside your field that too much jargon will throw them off.

Appearances count, too, right?   

Yes. It’s the proposal that looks appealing when you glance at it, not the one that’s wall-to-wall text, that will stand out. It’s a given that the science has to be strong. But when there’s a pile of 10 or 15 grant applications that someone is reading at 11 o'clock at night in their easy chair, you want yours to be the one they pick up first. Not the one that goes to the bottom of the pile because it’s tough to read.

You’re also willing to explore one-off training sessions, right?

Yes, if folks see a need in their particular department or if there’s a particular grant mechanism they think people in their division are interested in, they should contact me. For instance, we could organize a special session just to talk about the National Institutes of Health’s K awards in basic and clinical science.

Your potential faculty partners will be curious. What was the focus of your postdoctoral work in Gary Ward’s lab?

I was studying Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that causes disease in pregnant women, infants and immune-suppressed individuals. My goal was to identify previously uncharacterized parasite proteins involved in the process of parasite invasion into human cells.

What should people do if they want to explore working with you?

A phone call or email would be perfect so we can start a conversation.

More information, including a schedule of upcoming "brown bag" seminars, is available on the Grant Proposal Manager Services website.

PUBLISHED

10-09-2015
Jeffrey R. Wakefield