As anyone who has experienced the very best of the British policing profession could attest, high quality policing can contribute to the transformation of a community, laying the foundations for flourishing neighbourhoods and the lives of those who live there. It is Police Now’s overarching aim to contribute to the creation and development of safe, confident communities in which people can thrive. Our Theory of Change is that by attracting Britain’s best graduates to a policing career, training them intensively as community leaders, and then deploying them as police officers in those communities who need us most, we can have a disproportionate impact.
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Philip A. Schwartzkroin has been a research scientist for over 35 years. Through his many years in the laboratory, he has trained and mentored numerous postdoctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students many of whom have gone on to establish successful leadership roles in their chosen areas of research. Dr. Schwartzkroin currently is Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California-Davis, an affiliate of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, and holds the Bronte Endowed Chair in Epilepsy Research in the UC Davis School of Medicine. His book, So You want To Be A Scientist?, provides a glimpse into the job of being a research scientist, addressing explicitly many issues that are rarely addressed directly in training programs. In the original post below we learn how to react to the rejection of a research grant application.
Are you interested in a career as a research scientist? Do you have any idea what is involved in such a career? Graduate training programs do a good job in preparing students with facts and in teaching technical laboratory skills. But there is a lot more to the job of being a researcher than simply doing experiments. And many of the needed skills are not explicitly taught.
For example: How do you get grants to support your research?
Let’s say you’ve submitted a grant application and the reviewers don’t like it – and so recommend that the granting agency not provide funding. You try again, addressing the concerns and critiques of the reviewers – but the review scores for this second application are only marginally better than in the first round. What do
you do then? This conundrum is not uncommon, and the appropriate response requires perseverance, confidence, and guidance. Here are some suggestions (certainly not exhaustive) about how one might proceed:
1) Do additional experiments that provide more compelling preliminary data.
2) Ask a senior mentor to help you “read between the lines.” While you may have, in your revised application, addressed the explicit criticisms expressed in the first review, you may have missed an important implicit message. For example, reviewers often try to let you know that they simply don’t find your questions or topic very interesting - without actually saying that. It would be important to know if that were the case.
3) Get input – hopefully honest and objective - from your colleagues who do not work directly in the area of the grant application. One of the difficult tricks in getting grant support is convincing the reviewers - who are likely not to be working in your area of interest - that your ideas are important and that your experimental approach will yield significant new insights. Sometimes it’s hard for a researcher to gain sufficient distance from his/her own work to get a good sense of whether the grant application succeeds on this level.
4) Request that your application be reviewed (in the next round) by a different review panel. This alternative might be effective if you suspect there is a member of the initial review group who is “sabotaging” your application, or if you think that the group simply doesn’t have the expertise/interests to review your application appropriately.
5) Try sending the application to another granting agency that has a more direct interest in your area of study. For example, a private foundation with a particular area of concern may be more sympathetic to work on “their” topic than a large government agency that deals with applications that cover a broad range of topics.
6) Alter the focus of your proposal if you think that will provide a more effective “hook.” Such an alteration does not necessarily mean changing your proposed experiments. Rather, it may involve a change in emphasis, using different key words, reorienting the background and rationale sections of the application.
7) Forget about the experiments proposed in your application, and develop another set of studies that you think are more likely to be funded. It is important to learn when to “cut bait” and go on to something more productive. This decision is very difficult. Indeed, we scientists usually resist pressures to change our research directions. But this alternative is always important to consider.
Frederick Grinnell is Professor of Cell Biology and founder of the Program in Ethics in Science and Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. His newest book, Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic offers an insider’s view of real-life scientific practice. Grinnell demystifies the textbook model of a linear “scientific method,” suggesting instead a contextual understanding of science. Scientists do not work in objective isolation, he argues, but are motivated by interest and passions. In the article below he looks at how graduate scientific education should be changed. Read previous posts by Grinnell here.
In the 31 July issue of Science, Jeffrey Mervis’ News Focus discusses funding of graduate education in the sciences. Currently, the overwhelming majority of U.S. graduate students are supported by research grants to faculty members who hire the students to work in their laboratories. Some research leaders argue that the U.S. would benefit if more graduate students were supported by independent fellowships instead of research grants. For instance, independent funding would empower 
young investigators to follow their passions, be more creative, and function less as technical assistants – “a pair of hands.” However, others are less enthusiastic about the wisdom of removing from individual investigators the responsibility for selection of students.
Primarily, Mervis’ report concerns the economics of graduate education and the roles of the graduate student workforce in advancing university teaching and research interests. The article fails to address an ethical dilemma of the current system – the inherent conflict that occurs regarding mentorship. When graduate students are supported by research grants rather than by training programs, they become laboratory employees as well as trainees. Laboratory directors have a fiduciary responsibility to their grants to ensure that employees carry out the proposed research and maximize productivity. At the same time, investigators have a mentorship responsibility to ensure that trainees receive the education and experience necessary for future success.
What is in the best interests of laboratory productivity might not be in the best interests of a trainee. It is not enough that graduate students learn the technical skills – “a pair of hands” — to do experiments. Just as important is that they learn how to design experiments. Good mentoring may mean allowing students to design experiments even if doing so increases the likelihood of failure, an outcome that certainly does not advance laboratory productivity. Similarly, allowing students to write the first draft of papers may slow down the total time it takes to publish the research. Nevertheless, learning how to write papers is a key skill for students to acquire. Finally, imagine the situation of an advanced graduate student who comes up with a novel idea that she would like to explore. From the point of view of training, perhaps this development should be encouraged. But if the laboratory director is trying to finish up a paper for an upcoming grant submission, then the student’s tangential efforts likely will be discouraged. It is not the right time.
In addition to teaching stipends, three types of mechanisms commonly are used to support graduate students in the sciences: research grants to individual investigators, department/program research training grants and independent student fellowships. Amongst these three mechanisms, perhaps the time has come to transition to training grants as the primary mechanism of support. Training grants retain local institutional control over graduate education and empower local programs (vs. individual laboratories) to define more clearly what education should entail and how long it should take. More robust consideration becomes possible about how graduate science education can advance career goals beyond the traditional path towards academic scientist. Students gain flexibility. Nationally, strategic planning for graduate education will be facilitated. Deciding how much money to allocate for research training grants can influence the size of the graduate student workforce. Deciding which institutions receive training grants can nuance multiple outcomes such as best scientific opportunities vs. other important factors, e.g., the marginal impact of training grants on traditionally underfunded institutions and the communities in which they are located.
Thirty years ago, one and two author research papers were common; papers with many authors were rare. Now, research groups have become larger and collaborations more frequent. Papers with five to ten authors are common. Increased size and complexity challenge implementation of the traditional dual roles of mentor and laboratory director. Funding graduate students in the sciences through training programs rather than research grants will help focus attention on the importance of both these roles.
