Guide for writing Impetus applications [2023]
1. High risk high reward science
In the past, many people made a mistake of interpreting our mission statement – to fund more bold aging science – as a nice website logo and not a call to action. Most of those applications were rejected. Remember that Impetus expects a very different type of project than traditional grants. What worked for your applications to NIH funding, might not work here. We suggest focusing on the types of ideas in the style of Impetus – high risk for higher reward.
2. Be concise
Do not waste space on background information and explanation of basic terms. We advise spending the body of your application on implementation details and risks, rather than a longer-term vision, which has a separate section. In my experience, people from inside of the aging field make the mistake of focusing on vision too much, with little emphasis on implementation details; while scientists from outside the field, developing tools, make the mistake of not precisely connecting their work to aging.
3. Acknowledge the risks
A question we recently included in the process is “How well does the researcher acknowledge the uncertainties and risks associated with their proposal?”. If you know the technical challenges you anticipate, you get additional bonus points for pointing them out yourself. We funded a number of risky projects with a low probability of success. If you do not describe your risks, reviewers might think you aren’t aware of them and flag your proposal as unrealistic.
4. Balance of bold and feasible
One of the reviewer questions asks to classify the proposal as 0 to 1 (takes an absolutely novel concept and proposes a new experiment) and 1 to n (takes a well-developed concept and makes an iteration of it). This balance of bold, novel, and feasible can be quite challenging to maintain. For example, full brain replacement is ambitious and novel, but not feasible with a 500k grant and at 2-year timeline. At the same time, creating new methylation clocks is feasible but is an iteration of many existing works. Of course, “ambitious” and “feasible” are not binary metrics and sometimes we would trade one for another in our funding decisions.
5. Heuristic of impact
The scoring of impact is tricky in most cases, which is why we normally center it around heuristics. One of the heuristics we use for assessing impact is “How significantly this will change the behavior of aging researchers?”
6. Finally, embrace acceptable failure while avoiding unacceptable failure.
Some forms of acceptable failure are:
Failure to prove the hypothesis or zero finding.
Technology doesn’t work in a new context for reasons you couldn’t have predicted
Some forms of unacceptable failure
The experiment is designed in a way that doesn’t address and challenge the core hypothesis it is trying to prove.
This is reflected in one of our review questions “If the experiment succeeds, is the hypothesis unambiguously proven or disproven?”.
Example: profiling levels of expression of chaperones in aged neurodegeneration models can’t prove that reduced chaperone expression is the mechanism of neurodegenerative diseases.
2. Poorly chosen model
Example: using glomerular filtration rate as a biomarker for kidney aging in wildtype mice, even though WT mice don’t exhibit a measurable decline in GFR with age
3. Technology doesn’t work in a new context for reasons you could have predicted
Example: the viral vector you have chosen has a poor transduction efficiency in your organ of interest