Where Your Experience Lives Now

For most of my career on study section, I could feel the weight of an investigator’s track record before I finished reading the first aim. The biosketch sat in the back of my mind — thirty publications in the field, two previously funded R01s, letters from collaborators who had worked with this PI for a decade. I had not made a conscious decision to let that information shape my reading. I did not need to. The system was designed so that it would.

Under the old five-criterion review framework, Investigator was scored on a 1–9 scale. A senior PI with a deep track record and strong institutional support could earn a 1 or a 2 on that criterion. That score entered the reviewer’s overall impact calculus alongside Significance, Innovation, Approach, and Environment — all individually scored, all contributing to the final number. Reputation had a quantitative path into the score. It was built into the architecture of the evaluation.

That architecture changed.

Under the Simplified Review Framework, the five criteria reorganized into three factors. Factor 1 — Importance of the Research — is scored 1–9. Factor 2 — Rigor and Feasibility — is scored 1–9. Factor 3 — Expertise and Resources — is binary. Appropriate, or additional expertise and/or resources needed. There is no 1. There is no 9. There is no spectrum.

I wrote about team composition and Factor 3 earlier in this series, in the context of building teams that demonstrate feasibility. What I did not address then — because the implications had not yet stacked — is what the binary shift actually takes away. And what it means for where, in the application, your experience has to show up now.

What the binary shift eliminated

Under the old system, a distinguished investigator carried a scoring advantage. Their Investigator criterion score could pull the overall impact in a favorable direction. A reviewer who gave the Investigator section a 1 was, in effect, adding positive weight to the application that offset moderate scores elsewhere. The track record did quantifiable work.

Under Factor 3, that mechanism is gone. A sufficiency assessment cannot improve your score. It can confirm that the team and environment are adequate. Or it can flag that they are not — and that flag, as I described earlier in the series, shapes the overall impact discussion in ways that reach well beyond a single factor. But the best possible outcome on Factor 3 is neutral. It removes a potential obstacle. It does not add lift.

This means something specific and consequential: the decades of work that an established investigator has put into building a reputation, a publication record, and a funding history no longer translate into a scoring advantage on the criterion that was designed to capture exactly those things.

The biosketch still matters. The track record still matters. The letters of support (or now collaboration), the institutional resources, the collaborative history — all of it still factors into the sufficiency determination. If any of it is missing, Factor 3 flags the gap and the application suffers. So the floor is real. The penalty for insufficiency is real.

The ceiling is what changed. There is no longer a way to score above adequate on the dimension that measures who you are and what you have done. Adequate is the best you can get.

Where the scoring advantage moved

If experience no longer earns points on Factor 3, where does it earn points?

Factor 1 and Factor 2. The only two scored dimensions. Importance of the Research, and Rigor and Feasibility. These are the factors where your overall impact score is built — and where NIH’s scoring guidance says Factor 1 sets the ceiling for the best possible overall impact.

Your experience has to show up inside those two scores. And the only way it shows up there is through the writing.

This is why the last several newsletters have been building where they have been building.

Your Aims page — writing aims as testable positions rather than activity descriptions — is a Factor 1 move. A position aim signals both significance and innovation because it asserts a mechanistic framing the field has not tested. That is Factor 1 work. And the depth of thinking behind a position aim comes from experience — from years of studying a question closely enough to know what the field has missed.

Your Significance section — writing for two audiences, the reviewer and the IC director — is a Factor 1 move with a secondary audience under the Unified Funding Strategy. The capacity to frame significance in terms of population impact, public health urgency, and mission alignment comes from operational knowledge of the field. That knowledge is experience. And under the UFS, it reaches a decision-maker who weighs it independently of the score.

Your Approach section — the tells I described last week — is a Factor 2 move. Rigor and Feasibility is where the reviewer evaluates whether the design is sound and the team can execute. The tells — how you handle anticipated problems, how you project enrollment, how you describe team roles, how you write about data — are the mechanism through which operational experience enters the Factor 2 score. A reviewer reading an Approach section filled with specific, grounded, pilot-informed protocols is reading experience translated into writing. That translation is what earns the 1 or the 2 on Factor 2 that the Investigator criterion used to earn on its own.

Your experience did not become less valuable. It became less visible in the place the old system made it visible. And more important in the places the new system actually scores.

What this means for established investigators

If you are a mid-career or senior investigator, the strategic recalculation is this: the part of the application that used to work hardest for you — the part that converted your CV into scoring advantage — now works the same for you as it does for someone ten years earlier in their career. Factor 3 is pass or fail for everyone.

Which means the applications you write going forward have to carry your experience in the writing, paragraph by paragraph, in the sections that are scored. The biosketch alone will get you through the sufficiency check. It will not get you a better score.

This lands in a fiscal year where the total number of grants NIH awarded dropped to 56,600 — down from 64,000 in FY2024. The pool is contracting. And the mechanism that gave established investigators a built-in advantage within that pool has been structurally flattened.

The response is not to write longer biosketches. It is to write better Aims pages, sharper Significance sections, and Approach sections that carry the texture of someone who has done the work. The scoring advantage your reputation used to provide now has to be earned on the page, in the sections the framework actually scores.

What this means for early-stage investigators

If you are early in your career, the recalculation is the mirror image — and it is in your favor.

Under the old system, the scored Investigator criterion was a structural headwind. A thinner track record meant a weaker Investigator score, which pulled the overall impact in the wrong direction regardless of how strong the science was. Experienced investigators had a built-in advantage that early-stage investigators could not match, no matter how compelling their ideas.

That headwind is gone. Factor 3 is a sufficiency check. If your team has the right expertise, your mentors are actively engaged, your institutional resources are appropriate, and your preliminary data — even from a small pilot — demonstrates that you can do this work, you pass. And once you pass, you are competing on Factor 1 and Factor 2 on the same terms as everyone else.

NIH announced that 1,648 early-stage investigators received R01-equivalent grants in FY2026 — the highest number in the agency’s history, a 25% increase over the ten-year average of 1,323. The Unified Funding Strategy explicitly names career stage diversity as a factor in funding decisions. The structural changes are producing exactly the outcomes they were designed to produce.

But the opportunity does not materialize on its own. An early-stage investigator who passes Factor 3 still has to compete on Factor 1 and Factor 2. The Aims page still has to assert a testable position. The Significance section still has to create urgency. And the Approach section still has to show operational confidence — which is where last week’s comment from Milica becomes important. You do not need to have run a five-site R01. You need to show that you have learned from the work you have done, that you have built a team whose experience supplements yours, and that the design reflects real knowledge of the population and the problems you will face. That is sufficient. And sufficient is what gets you onto the scored playing field.

The convergence

I did not plan this series as a single argument. It began as a walk through the process — what happens after you submit, how reviewers read, how the room works. But somewhere around the modified review procedures piece, the installments started building toward something I could see only in retrospect.

The entire scoring architecture has shifted toward the writing. Factor 3 flattened the Investigator advantage. The Unified Funding Strategy moved funding decisions beyond the score. The modified review procedures simplified the summary statements and reduced discussion to a third of applications. At every level — the score, the funding decision, the written record — the system has moved away from mechanisms that did interpretive or evaluative work on your behalf and toward mechanisms that require your writing to do that work itself.

Your score used to reflect your reputation, your methods, and your significance in a blended number that the system then sorted by payline. Now your reputation passes a binary check, your methods and significance are the only scored dimensions, the payline is no longer the organizing principle, and the written critique — not the numerical score — is becoming the primary communication channel between the review and the funding decision.

Everything points in the same direction. Your writing carries more of the weight than it ever has. And your experience — the thing that makes your writing specific, grounded, and credible — has to live inside the writing, because the other mechanisms that used to carry it have been structurally removed or reduced.

This is where the series has been heading. I did not know it when I started. I see it now.

What is one way your experience has shaped how you write a grant — something you do on the page that you could only do because you have been in the work?

~Lisa Carter-Bawa, PhD, MPH, APRN, ANP-C, FAAN, FSBM

More insights at lisacarterbawa.com/insights

Lost In Translation (LIT) grantsmanship curriculum is available as a self-paced online course and as an intensive institutional cohort for cancer centers, training programs, and research-intensive departments. Module 1 is free.

I also run small cohorts timed to the NIH grant submission cycle — five live Monday sessions, full access to the LIT course (14 modules + 13 workbooks), and a post-cohort Translation Feedback Brief: a one-on-one review of your revised Aims page and/or full grant returned in time for your submission.

If you are interested in an upcoming cohort, indicate interest here: https://forms.gle/Eysi8qEjBXNY1w388 Our next cohort will run in February/March timeframe.

Contact lisa@soultosoulleadership.com with any questions or visit lisacarterbawa.com/losttranslation to learn more.