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Grant Central helps you write the grant and get back to the science

Posted September 10, 2009

For many researchers, finding and successfully applying for grant funding can be a tedious and challenging process. Junior investigators, who need to secure funding to develop independent research projects, can find this process particularly daunting as they try to balance the demands of teaching, clinic time, and laboratory work, as well as their on ongoing training.

Grant Central, a new application on the Harvard Catalyst website, eases the process of finding and securing funding by giving investigators collaborative, web-based tools for identifying opportunities, building project teams, and developing proposals.

Grant Central contains tools and information to simplify nearly every step of the grant writing process, addressing questions like:

• What funding opportunities are out there? Researchers can run keyword searches for funding opportunities from the Department of Health and Human Services (include the National Institutes of Health), the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense. From their search results, they can view full grant descriptions, save grants for later, create keyword-based grant alerts, and start grant writing projects.
• Who will I work with? Grant Central’s Find Collaborators tool ties in with Harvard Catalyst’s Profiles to help researchers identify and connect to new co-investigators. Using Grant Central’s Skill Finder tool, researchers can also let the research community know they are open to collaboration, or post “want ads” for particular areas of expertise. For instance, a biostatistician may post an ad offering his collaboration on cancer-related projects, while a clinical researcher may announce that she is looking for a geneticist to include on her project team.
• How do I coordinate my team’s efforts? Found an opportunity? Have your collaborators? Then start to write the grant! Grant Central offers researchers a secure online space to work collaborative to share documents, assign tasks, set key dates, and communicate within the team. Investigators can invite collaborators to join a project through Grant Central’s collaborator search or by email. The lead investigator also gets a private folder for budgets and other documents that don’t need to be shared widely.
• Where can I get advice about grant writing? Writing a grant is complicated, and junior investigators who may never have written a grant before can benefit greatly from the experience of their more senior colleagues, as well as that of their institution’s grant administrators. Under Get Advice, Grant Central offers forums and Frequent Asked Questions pages, providing a storehouse of grants-related advice and counsel for all investigators.

While the search features of Grant Central – including the Skill Finder, collaborator search, advice forums, and opportunity search – are open and available to all users, researchers must log in with an HMS eCommons account to save grants or collaborator lists, set up grant alerts, or start projects.

“We built Grant Central with the core mission of Harvard Catalyst in mind, to remove barriers to research. As much as we could, we wanted to help streamline the grant writing process and let people get back to doing science,” said William Crawford, MBA, leader of the Grant Central development team and director of the Informatics Solutions Group at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program. “Early in the development process, we reached out to the Harvard research community to find out what they wanted to see in a collaborative grant writing tool, and we’ve done our best to incorporate the features the community asked for.”

Grant Central is available in the People section of the Harvard Catalyst website.