The document provides guidance on writing the Specific Aims section of a grant application. It recommends structuring the Specific Aims section in 3 paragraphs that: 1) establish the significance of the research area and overall goal, 2) describe the team's preliminary work leading to the project, and 3) state the specific aims of the project and expected impact. Each specific aim should be a single sentence stating an experimentally feasible and time-bound goal. The section should convince reviewers of the project's importance and addressance of funding criteria in 1 page without detail.

1. How to write the "Specific Aims"
section of a grant application
Karol Watson, MD, PhD
UCLA CTSI K to R Workshop
October 29, 2015

2. Specific Aims
• Length: 1 page
• Style: Non-technical. Write this section for all
study section members, since they’ll all read it.
• This section must include everything that is
important and exciting about your project –
but without a lot of detail.
• This is arguably the most important section of
your application

3. 3 paragraph format
1. Significance/why this area is important – your overall
big-picture goal
2. Your team’s path towards this project
• can mention prelim studies (not too much detail)
• Describe general methods but not too much detail
• What critical gap will your project fill?
3. What you will do specifically . . .
– Leads into numbered specific aims
– Consider concluding with a final sentence summarizing
impact

4. 1st paragraph
• A short paragraph looking at the forest, not the trees
• Develop a compelling argument for funding
• Describe the scope of the problem (such as number of
people affected, morbidity/mortality, costs to society).
• Describe the gap in knowledge that your project will
address (that is, from a research perspective, what we
don’t know that we need to know in order to move
forward; provides rationale for specific aims).
• It must be realistic (i.e., something that is clearly
achievable over a finite period of time)

5. The 1st paragraph from my grant
• Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) remain the leading
cause of death in the United States (1). Incidence
rates of MI, CVA, or other symptomatic CVD remain
high, and the burden of heart failure is increasing
(1).The decrease in CVD mortality observed may
relate to improvement in the control of some CVD
risk factors, (smoking, hypertension, dyslipidemia),
however there are adverse trends in obesity,
diabetes, and the population is aging…

6. 1. Your team’s path towards this project
• can mention prelim studies (not too much detail)
• Describe general methods but not too much detail
• What critical gap will your project fill?
2nd paragraph

7. • The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis was initiated
in July 2000 to investigate the prevalence, correlates,
and progressionof subclinical CVD in a population-
basedsample. MESA recruited 6814 white, Chinese,
African-American and Hispanic men and women aged
45-84 who were free of clinical CVD from six
communities (2)…
• …The degree to which biological and behavioral risk
factors, genetics, or socio-economic factors contribute
to the expression of subclinical CVD and the
subsequent incidence of clinical events remains an
active area of investigation.
The 2nd paragraph from my grant

8. 1. What you will do specifically . . .
– Leads into numbered specific aims
– Emphasize the “product” of the research, not the
“process” that produced it.
– For example, “to study” something would not be an
appropriate goal; what you want is what the study will
produce.
– Consider concluding with a final sentence summarizing impact
– Each aim should
• Be experimentally feasible
• Have a realistic time frame
• Have a definitive outcome
• Not be absolutely dependent on the success of another aim
3rd paragraph (Specific Aims)

9. Specific Aims
• Each aim should consist of one sentence: be
concise and concrete; clarity is the goal.
• Keep the number of aims to a reasonable (3-5).
• Aims should be able to “stand alone”: they can be
related but must be independent (i.e., they do not
depend on a particular outcome of a previous
aim).

10. Specific Aims
• Aim 1: XXX
• Aim 2: XXX
• Aim 3: XXX
• “The MESA II effort will build on the successful
components of MESA in an effort to provide
further insights into strategies to reduce the
burden of CVD and eliminate/reduce CVD
disparities. “

11. Make it Easy for the Reviewer
• Use exact language from program
announcement
– “the stated aim of this program announcement is
XXX and our project addresses this by . . . . “
• Remind reviewer of specific review criteria and
state specifically how your project addresses.
– Consider bulletted section at the end
– 1 bullet for each criteria

12. Good Luck!