1. Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Funding
5/2/2019
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Funding
Ideas/Suggestions
From My Experiences as a Competitor and Reviewer

2. Overview of Suggestions
5/2/2019
Overview of Suggestions
1. Build an interdisciplinary team & speak to a broad interdisciplinary audience
2. Couch your study/program in a rich historical-theoretical context
3. Take a balanced, rather than fundamentalist, approach to methods
4. Emphasize practical (clinical or policy), rather than mere statistical significance
5. Persist (be responsive to comments)

3. 5/2/2019
CIHR Context
1. Interdisciplinary in philosophy, mandate, mission and practices
2. Highly competitive (20% success norm)
3. Very demanding committee workload
4. Health and health care research are necessarily applied
5. Scholarly quality 5-10 fold more valued than mere quantity (e.g., track record)

4. How CIHR Contextual Factors Play Out in the Review Process
5/2/2019
How CIHR Contextual Factors Play Out in the Review Process
Ideas/Suggestions on
How to Use Them to Your Advantage

5. Challenge 1: Diverse Committees With Large Workloads
5/2/2019
Challenge 1: Diverse Committees With Large Workloads
- Diverse disciplinary, philosophical, & methodological perspectives
- Not unusual for A & B internal or external reviewers to be discordant
- Not unusual:
proposals to review
- Each member A or B reviewer on 20 to 25 proposals
- 60 to 80 hours of prep before Ottawa

6. Solution 1: Attract An Advocate (Best If Not in Your ‘Choir’)
5/2/2019
Solution 1: Attract An Advocate (Best If Not in Your ‘Choir’)
- 3rd person in debate is often critical
- Interesting ideas up front (jargon-free)
- Connect to practical significance
- Underscore preventive potential
- Provide theoretical context (political, clinical or biological plausibility)
- Balanced presentation of detailed methods (don’t pick a fight here)

7. Challenge 2: Very Competitive
5/2/2019
Challenge 2: Very Competitive
- Regrettably, it seems that many quit
It is probably true that:
- CIHR has a unique culture
- Committees are sometimes philosophically, methodologically, even politically unbalanced
- Extreme views are represented
- Fundamentalist perspectives typically don’t win (in or out of committee)

8. Solution 2: Focus on What You Can Control or Change
5/2/2019
Solution 2: Focus on What You Can Control or Change
- Stay in the game and in so doing learn to play the game better, and ultimately, win
- Be responsive to reviewer comments
- Build an empowering team
- Interdisciplinary researchers
- Competent methodological expertise
- Practitioners, decision makers
- Senior experienced scholars
- Junior scholars (faculty & graduate students): value added training

9. Challenge 3: Assessment of Track Record Quality
5/2/2019
Challenge 3: Assessment of Track Record Quality
- Many committee members try to level the disciplinary playing field by ‘standardizing’ this assessment
- Research published in the most competitive scholarly forums
- Prestigious, high impact, peer- reviewed journal articles emphasized
- Uptake maters: SSCI/SCI citations
- Other, less competitive, nonpeer- reviewed works pretty much ignored: chapters, abstracts, even books, etc.

10. Solution 3: Plan Ahead to Play the Game Most Powerfully
5/2/2019
Solution 3: Plan Ahead to Play the Game Most Powerfully
- In this game, quality trumps quantity
- A junior scholar could thus plan a strategy to win a New Investigator award (1st 5 years post-Ph.D.)
- One can always be renewed
- The last 5 years are emphasized in track record assessment