Tips:
- Contact us with your questions (jgi-jira+pmosupport@lbl.gov)
- Carefully read our proposal call description and ensure your idea is aligned
- Discuss your proposal idea with JGI staff to clarify key points about JGI’s capabilities, technical feasibility, and relevance to the DOE’s mission.
- Have someone proofread your proposal to make sure the goals, experimental design, and plan for data utilization are clear.
- Contact JGI staff for feedback before submitting a proposal.
- Describe in detail what you will do with the data! Ideally, you or someone on your team will have expertise in this area, or can demonstrate how competencies can be built.
- We recommend exploring how KBase (www.kbase.us) can support biological data analysis. It is a free, open source analytics platform provided to the research community by DOE. Email engage@kbase.us if you have questions about how KBase can support your CSP data.
On September 1, JGI held a JGI Engagement: Pro Tips for Successful Community Science Program (CSP) Applications Webinar inviting researchers to submit white papers to the CSP New Investigator call for proposals. The proposal call is open year-round, but proposals submitted by September 21, 2020, will be included in the next review.
Q&A from the Webinar:
Q(uestion): Can people can mix and match options in their proposal as long as they’re staying under the sequence cap?
A(nswer): Proposals that are looking at multiple areas or multiple ways to answer questions are definitely encouraged. There’s multiple ways to can mix and match synthesis, metabolomics, sequencing. The only requirements are that you stay under the 500-gigabase cap and that you don’t request outside of the sample range that’s listed.
Q: What are the pros and cons of proposing a truly exploratory small proposal that might not max out the whole 500 gigabases? Is it better to try to reach that maximum with broader questions and broader project scope?
A: Focus on strong science and well-thought-out questions. We are looking for projects that can’t easily be done at a core facility, but you don’t need to necessarily just add samples in order to max out the gigabase allocation.
Q: Can PhD candidates be considered for the CSP New Investigative Proposal?
A: At most institutions, a PhD student can be considered a principal investigator (PI). There is no restriction from JGI’s side, but do check with your institution, as there are some that won’t allow this. It’s really important to show that your team has the necessary experience to handle the data, either by adding team members as co-PIs or collaborators on the proposal, or at the very least providing letters of support saying that they will support this work.
Q: Someone submitted a proposal that received good reviews but faced questions about their ability to analyze the data. How can they better demonstrate their capability for being able to carry out the work and utilize the data they were requesting?
A: The reviewers do look at the PI’s track record to make sure that they have already worked with this type of data set. Having a co-PI with complementary skills can show reviewers the team is really able to take advantage of the data and work with the data.
Q: How would you include a reference or citation in a proposal?
A: If you’re presenting preliminary data that’s been published, or if you want to give some background of the field, references would be encouraged. And you can either put those in the individual text section if you have space, or you can upload everything as a supplementary file.