Its NIH Study Section season and my #AcademicTwitter feed is starting to fill with tweets of elation and disappointment

As a senior investigator who is committed to mentoring junior academics, I am struck by the notion that our CVs and biosketchs, as outward facing indicators of successes, provides very little context re: “the roads traveled”

Our successes are evident but not our so-called “failures,” which are pre-cursors to growth and success.

Indeed, as noted in this must read article “failures in the first phases of your career may mean you can come back stronger than those who never stumbled” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/smarter-living/career-advice-overcome-setback.html

I decided to take a trip down memory lane and went thru my eRA commons account -which unlike my CV, has documented it all....

I’ve been fortunate to be awarded 4 R01s, 3 R21s, 2 R03 (A1s) and a U54 – some of these are solo endeavors and some are MPI partnerships. But this hardly tells the whole story.

2007-I applied for a DP2 Award and said “improvements in tobacco surveillance are necessary given highly-adaptive nature of industry & continual variability in policy arena (eg, FDA reg)” highlighting poor data on rapidly changing cigar market

Reviewers said.. the “proposed project will produce results that will be incremental and will not have the level of impact expected for a New Innovator Award”

I often wonder if we had better data on flavored cigar use among young people earlier if Congress would have included cigars in the 2009 TCA and banned flavors like they did with cigarettes.. but I digress…

I submitted my first R21 in 2006- we wrote it in 2 weeks – it was funded on the first submission with a 2nd percentile score

My second R21 was funded on resubmission – after THREE previous attempts as failed R01s

My most recent R01 was funded on the first submission with a once in a lifetime 1st percentile score

The R01 before that took FIVE attempts – I believed in this project with persistence, hard work and multiple attempts we moved the needle. I learned the most about grantsmanship from this R01. Had I not persisted with this one - that “1st percentile” may have never happened.

Starting in 2014 – in a MPI partnership – we tried SIX times – 5 R01s and 1R21 – to get funding to study the evolving tobacco marketplace – we got a few NDs and our best score was 24th percentile – which didn’t cut it for funding

We didn’t give up here – we moved on - today, me and that MPI *each* lead a Tobacco Center for Regulatory Science – two U54s seem like a nice consultation prize

Are you keeping count?10 successful awards fueled by 16 failures

Learn. Evolve. Adapt. Embrace the learning experience.