Writing your Specific Aims
GHS workshop
February 24, 2014
Martie Thompson, Ph.D.
Research Professor, Clemson University
mpthomp@Clemson.edu
• Will need to do more planning than writing
• Always consider review criteria:
– NSF: Intellectual merit, broader impacts
– NIH: Significance, innovation, approach, team, and
environment
– IES: Significance, Research Plan, Personnel, and
Resources
• Topic must be significant and have potential impact
• Critical first step-understand agency’s mission - be able to
articulate how your proposed research will advance the
agency’s mission
• Familiarize yourself with review process and gear
proposal accordingly
• Must be feasible: Limit scope so aims will be realistically
achievable within requested time frame
2
Overview Section
• Most important section of application
• Every funding agency has one: NIH calls it the
“Specific Aims”; NSF calls it “Overview and
Objectives”
• Serves as template for rest of your proposal
• May be only thing that all but 3 reviewers read
• Write it first
3
Overview section
• Four paragraphs:
o 1st - Identify need: convince reviewers that there is
a problem relevant to their mission
o 2nd - Outline solution from long-range goal, to this
proposal’s objective, to your central hypothesis
and rationale
o 3rd - Approach
o 4th - Payoff to funding agency
4
Writing Specific Aims
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1 page
Focus on two-four aims
Don’t be overly ambitious – objectives must be feasible
Aims should be hypothesis-driven: Most proposals set
out to test a hypothesis rather than simply collect
information on a problem; Choose a hypothesis that is
well-focused and testable
• Each aim should be approximately equal with respect to
the amount of work it will entail and the importance it
has to the project.
• The aims must flow logically, BUT none can be absolutely
dependent on an expected outcome of an earlier aim.
Specific Aims: Paragraph One
• Opening Sentence(s) – Highlight significance
• Important Knowns – Explain the current situation and set
the scene for presenting the gap.
• Addressing the Gap- A sentence that clearly articulates
how your research is going to advance the field.
• Framing the Gap As A Problem – Show how this gap
prevents the field from advancing. Make sure goal is to
know something specific
Sexual violence (SV) is a prevalent public health problem, resulting in both
psychological and physical harm. Prevalence and risk factor studies have
yielded important information about SV. However, knowledge gaps exist
regarding (1) if distinct longitudinal trajectories of SV behaviors for youth
transitioning into young adulthood can be identified and (2) what factors
differentiate youth who follow these different paths. In order to intervene
effectively to prevent SV, research is first needed to determine what factors
predict the onset, maintenance, escalation, or desistance of SV behaviors
during the transition to young adulthood.
Specific Aims: Paragraph One
Interferon gamma (IFN-γ) is central to the maintenance of
homeostasis, as well as to host defense against a variety of
pathogenic microorganisms and tumor cells. In addition, it
can have an active role in the pathogenesis of a number of
diseases. IFN-γ mediates all of these effects through a single
binding protein (the α subunit of the IFN-γ-receptor
complex), which is present on the surfaces of all normal
nucleated cell types (Granger & Coe, 1994). While it is known
that the binding protein initiates signal transduction (Yu,
2000), and it is understood mechanistically how it does so
(Griffin et al., 2004; Campbell, 2008), what is not clear is how
this critically important protein is produced. Lack of such
knowledge is an important problem, because, without it,
acquiring the ability to modulate the number of receptors on
cells pharmacologically is highly unlikely.
Specific Aims: Paragraph Two
• Long-Term Goal – Define continuum of your research and a
clear linkage between this project and the gap you are
trying to fill.
• Objective – Explain what you hope to accomplish with this
application and how it relates to your long-term goal.
o Example of a poorly stated objective: “Our objective in this
application is to study the effects of sexual violence on women’s
psychological health.”
o Don’t use terms like: study, explore, better understand… as they
convey indeterminate endpoints
o Use terms such as determine, develop..
Specific Aims: Paragraph Two
• Central hypothesis: must be testable.
• Rationale –Explain how this research advance the field
o This is the underlying reason you choose to pursue this project.
o Must relate to the critical need and mission of funding agency
• Research Team & Environment – Explain how your team
uniquely qualified to conduct this research
Our long-term goal is to glean information that will guide the development of preventive
interventions for college males at risk for engaging in chronic SV behaviors. The objectives of this
prospective investigation are to use latent growth mixture modeling to determine the longitudinal
trajectories of SV behaviors during college and to use the Theory of Triadic Influence to guide the
assessment of intrapersonal, social/situational, and cultural/environmental influences on the
different trajectories. The proposed research is based on the need to identify these distinct
trajectories of SV behaviors and to determine what risk factors affect SV trajectories. Our research
team is particularly poised to undertake this investigation. This research would extend a currentlyfunded NIH study on SV among male college students during their first two years in college for
two additional years, as well as enhance our efforts to involve students in health-related research.
Specific Aims: Paragraph Two
Our long-term goal is to understand how the receptor IFN-γ can be
manipulated for preventive and therapeutic purposes. The objective
here, which is our next step in pursuit of that goal, is to determine
how production of the receptor’s α subunit is regulated
transcriptionally. Our central hypothesis is that both constitutive and
stimulated regulation are required through different sets of cis-acting
response elements in the gene’s promoter. Our hypothesis has been
formulated on the basis of our own preliminary data produced using
the promoter that we recently cloned (Galaway et al., 2008; see
Justification and Feasibility sub-subsection under Research StrategyApproach). In addition, the work of Adams & Seagram (2008) is
supportive of the hypothesis. The rationale for the proposed research
is that, once it is known how transcription of the α chain’s gene is
regulated, production of the subunit can likely be manipulated either
up or down pharmacologically, resulting in new and innovative
approaches to the prevention and treatment of a variety of diseases.
Specific Aims: Paragraph Three
• List your Aims here.
• There should be a hypothesis for each aim.
• Describe how hypothesis will be tested (avoid technical
detail).
• Convince the reviewer that the aim will be accomplished.
The overall objectives of this proposal will be accomplished by pursuing the following
specific aims:
(1) To identify classes of growth trajectories of males’ SV behavior over the course
of their four years in college. To address this aim, we will determine whether SV
trajectories reflect if many different men on rare occasions are engaging in SV behaviors,
or rather, if the majority of unwanted sexual encounters are perpetrated by a small subset
of individuals. It is hypothesized that at least three latent classes of SV exist – a high SV
class characterized by consistent SV behaviors, a no/low SV class characterized by
consistently low or no SV behaviors, and a mixed SV class characterized by intermittent
SV.
(2) To determine the relative importance of intrapersonal, social/situational, and
cultural/environmental correlates in predicting the different SV trajectories. To
address this aim, we will….It is hypothesized that………
Specific Aims: Paragraph Three
We plan to test our central hypothesis and, thereby, accomplish the
objective of this application by pursuing the following two specific
aims:
1. Identify the DNA response elements that regulate constitutive
transcription of the subunit’s gene.
Based on the preliminary data referred to above, our working
hypothesis is that one or more Sp1 sites are critical to the
regulation of constitutive transcription.
2. Determine how stimulated transcription is up-regulated by
different stimuli.
We postulate, again on the basis of our preliminary data, that
cyclic AMP response elements (e.g., CRE and AP-2) regulate
stimulated transcription of the subunit’s gene, regardless of
how stimulated transcription is activate.
Specific Aims: Paragraph 4
• Innovation –Make case for why research is innovative.
• Expected Outcomes – What are expected outcomes of
your study?
• Impact – How are expected outcomes are going to have
a positive impact once the acquired knowledge from
your research is applied
This study is innovative in that we will identify a subset of males who follow
a trajectory of high SV behaviors and the risk factors that are prevalent
among this class of individuals. The findings will advance the field by
increasing understanding of how SV behavior changes over time and what
predicts trajectory class membership, which will ultimately inform the design
of preventive interventions for SV.
Specific Aims: Paragraph 4
With respect to expected outcomes, the work proposed in
aims 1 and 2 is expected to identify the full complement of
response elements and the cognate transcription factors
that are responsible for constitutive and stimulated
transcription of the subunit’s gene. Such results are
expected to have an important positive impact, because the
identified components are highly likely to provide new
targets for preventive and therapeutic interventions in
addition to fundamentally advancing the fields of receptor
biology and immunotherapy, as will now be detailed in the
next section.