Grant Writing Course helps two Radiology faculty secure research funding

Two Department of Radiology faculty received research funding after taking a 12-week Grant Writing Course offered by the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) at University of Washington.

Majid Chalian, MD, received the Radiological Society of North America R&E Foundation Grant, worth $150,000, for his research project titled “Predicting Treatment Response to Neoadjuvant Radioimmunotherapy (NRIT) in High Grade Soft Tissue Sarcoma (STS) with MRI-Based Radiomic Signature.”

Chengcheng Zhu, PhD, received an NHLBI R01 grant for a total of $2.5 million over the course of five years for his research project titled “Investigation of the quantitative intracranial aneurysm wall enhancement and geometric features associated with aneurysm volume growth.”

Dr. Chalian, the Interim Chief of Musculoskeletal Imaging and Intervention, Director of Musculoskeletal MRI and Assistant Professor of Radiology, told ITHS, “The UW Grant Writing course is different. You feel connected with the teachers, get ample opportunity to ask questions, your grant gets edited extensively, you will receive un-biased comments, and last but not the least, friendship and collaboration with other investigators at UW.”

The ITHS course, led by Professors Larry Kessler (Department of Health Services) and Annette Fitzpatrick, PhD (Departments of Family Medicine, Epidemiology and Global Health), is an interactive program for clinicians where projects start as ideas and become a fully submittable grant by the end of the course. Weekly sessions include lectures and repeated submissions and review of grant sections before culminating in a three to four-hour mock study section where class members’ grants are reviewed by peers and faculty mentors, according to ITHS.

Students learn about various grant mechanisms and how to submit a grant to the National Institute of Health.

“The detailed comments and suggestions I received from teachers and classmates made my proposal much more refined,” said Dr. Zhu, assistant professor in the Department of Radiology. “The two-month timeline is really great. It pushed me to finish a first draft piece by piece.”

Read more about the Grant Writing Course on the ITHS website.