LI Course
CE Hours: 3 contact hours

Partnership: We are all APHA members and members of multiple sections but we are not officially representing our sections.

Statement of Purpose and Institute Overview: The purpose of the course is to provide learners with the knowledge and skills to develop compelling public health research proposals. We will describe funding opportunities and how to evaluate funding opportunities for relevance, describe proposal planning and identify how to use planning strategies to best prepare a proposal, and provide an overview of NIH funding structures. Finally, we will provide individualized feedback on learners’ specific aims that they bring to the session; the feedback will be in a group format that will allow many learners to benefit from each discussion. In the funding opportunity section, the presenter will emphasize the importance of identifying the right funding opportunity on ensuring high competitiveness. This part of the session will include: (a) how to search for funding opportunities and relevant search engines, (b) different types of opportunities, including federal and non-federal/foundation, and (c) how to evaluate funding opportunities to determine whether they are appropriate for one’s research. In the proposal planning section, the presenter will discuss organizational and conceptual strategies for increasing the competitiveness of proposals. Our final presenter will use NIH as an example to describe the process of ensuring the proposal is a match to the institute’s funding priorities and managing relationships with funding program staff to develop a competitive research program. Learners will be asked to email their research proposal’s specific aims and target funding source ahead of time to the presenters; the last section of the session will be small group discussion providing critiques and feedback regarding how to incorporate the strategies discussed to strengthen the aims. The presenters, all with leadership positions in public health research leadership, have had significant public health funding and have successfully mentored others to successful research careers. They will use an engaging style that invites audience participation and discussion as well as interactive exercises and case studies.

Session Objectives: Describe public health funding sources and differences between sources. Identify factors unique to NIH funding and analyze how their research projects could be structured to fit within an NIH format. Compare current draft specific aims to specified techniques for creating compelling proposals and assist learners in strengthening their specific aims to become the basis for compelling proposals.