Building an ARC to Grant Success: The Aims Review Committee

Grant writing is an acquired skill. There is nothing intrinsically obvious about how to put together a proposal that will convince a panel of reviewers that one particular project, among all those submitted by a host of bright and talented investigators, should rise to the top of the stack. Yet that is what academics have to do, over and over again, to build a career in research. The difficulty of accomplishing this task is reflected in the fact that funding represents the single greatest hurdle to the pursuit of an academic career in rheumatology (1,2). Teaching grant writing is therefore one of the key missions of any training program seeking to develop successful physician-scientists. Over the last 5 years, our group at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital has tried a new approach toward this goal, something we term the Aims Review Committee (ARC). Here we explain the rationale underlying ARC, outline the approach, and share some lessons learned along the way.