I landed an NIH Training Program. Now how do I educate the trainees?

Congratulations! You just landed an NIH Training Program award (e.g., T32, COBRE, FIRST, CTSA). Now the hard work begins...

PIs and mentors on every NIH training grant are obligated to educate their trainees to become independent investigators. That training includes grantwriting.

Here are some things PIs and mentors need to keep top of mind as they consider how to offer their trainees critical NIH grantwriting skills:

• NIH training programs will be evaluated on grants the trainees ultimately land

In your competing renewal (and non-competing progress reports in the meantime), you will report what your trainees have gone on to do — papers are great, but NIH also wants to see F, K, and/or R-level awards coming out of your program. A training program that produces publications but no funding is harder to renew.

• “Mentoring” and “grantwriting training” are not the same thing

Many excellent scientists are outstanding mentors but may not be skilled at teaching someone else how to craft a Specific Aims page, respond to a Simplified Review Framework critique, or structure a Training Plan — or may not be fluent in recent NIH changes. Just because the mentor is funded doesn’t automatically mean they are equipped to teach grantwriting, especially across a cohort with different scientific areas, career stages, and Institutes. Mentors are great subject matter experts on grant applications, but up-to-date NIH grantsmanship skills are likely best taught by an expert in that field.

• Trainees need a shared, structured, quality curriculum, not multiple versions of “just write like I write”

If each mentor in your training grant is coaching grantwriting their own way, trainees get inconsistent (often outdated) guidance. A high-quality, common grantwriting curriculum that walks each trainee through preparing for and creating a polished draft standardizes the baseline and frees mentors to focus on the science when reviewing grant applications.

• F- and K-series applicants typically require more help than R-series applicants

In addition to a Research Strategy and Specific Aims page, F and K applicants need to master training plans, mentor letters, institutional commitment language, and career development activities. These often first-time NIH applicants deserve training built specifically around their needs.

• The PI and mentors have precious little time and bandwidth to develop quality, up-to-date NIH grantwriting training

While mentors and PIs may have the best of intentions, it takes time and energy to create a curriculum that teaches trainees across many disciplines to become outstanding grant applicants, reviewers, and mentors themselves. It also takes an enormous amount of time and energy to update such a curriculum given the rapid-fire changes on the federal funding landscape.

How Bouvier Grant Group can help

Many of you already have access to our outstanding curriculum, which offers the gold standard in NIH grantwriting training.

Our membership model includes synchronous and asynchronous components that accommodate different schedules and learning styles and meet applicants wherever they are in their grantwriting journey.

Dr. Bouvier brings nearly 4 decades of experience at NIH first as an applicant, then as an intramural researcher, as a staff writer for longtime NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, and for the past 20 years as a full-time grant editor, mentor, and trainer. She works with 13 of the 16 top-tier medical schools for research (US News & World Report 2026) and has helped clients land nearly $700 million in federal funding.

Our outstanding NIH grantwriting curriculum will produce confident, savvy applicants while easing the workload on your mentors and pre-award support office. This membership is ideal for trainees on an NIH Institutional Training Grant (T series, such as T32); Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE), Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST), K or T trainees on a Clinical and Translational Science Award Program, or similar.