Tag Archives: NRMN

Dr. Ana Quiñones gets NIA score on R01

“I think this program is the most valuable for early stage investigators and people of color,” Dr. Ana Quiñones says about the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN).

Quiñones is an Assistant Professor at the Oregon Health and Science University School of Public Health. She saw an announcement about NRMN online and then decided to apply. Having already started writing a grant, she took part in a NRMN-P³ (or NRMN Proposal Preparation Program) coaching group based at the University of Minnesota. When she started the program, however, she had some reservations that it wouldn’t suit her needs. “I don’t think I really had a lot of mentors or peers who had expertise in my work,” she says. Without that expertise Quiñones was afraid that the NRMN cohort wouldn’t be able to help her write a successful grant application. She studies health disparities between Latinx, blacks, and whites among U.S. populations, and comparative analyses of international health care systems, especially among the aged. That work involves complex mathematical modeling.

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Gaining Skills and a Growing Professional Network through NRMN STAR

“I’m not scared to apply any more,” Dr. Brandy Piña-Watson says, after having completed a coaching group session with the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN). Piña-Watson is an assistant professor of counseling in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Texas Tech University. There she studies how the psychological and sociological factors that impact depression among Latinx adolescents and emerging adults, with an emphasis among Mexican Americans.

Until entering the NRMN STAR (NRMN Steps Towards Academic Research Fellowship Program) coaching group, she had minimal exposure on writing an NIH grant. She hadn’t received training on how to write an NIH grant application at Texas A&M University, where she received her Ph.D. in counseling psychology. The focus there was on how to obtain tenure, not how to write a grant, Piña-Watson says. And at Texas Tech there was a dearth of researchers winning NIH grants, leaving no one to mentor her on the process.

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Dr. Tanecia Mitchell on Earning her First NIH Grant

“I don’t feel like I have as many challenges now,” Dr. Tanecia Mitchell says, after securing her first National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant and having laid the foundation for many more to come. Mitchell credits earning the K01 grant, an award from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, to her experience gained from participating in the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN). The grant is to study mitochondrial function, oxidative stress, and inflammation in clinical patients with kidney disorders.

The five-year, $768,776 award marked not only the first NIH grant for Mitchell, but the first K01 grant awarded to the Department of Urology faculty at her institution. Prior to winning the grant, Mitchell worked as an instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. One month later after receiving the NIH award, Mitchell assumed the position of Assistant Professor at UAB’s School of Medicine.

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NRMN/Kat Milligan-Myhre

“I’m hoping that [NRMN] continues for a while,” says Dr. Kat Milligan-Myhre, believing it will increase the amount of tenured professors from under-represented groups in STEM.

Milligan-Myhre is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and was excited when the NIH scored the R15 grant application she submitted in February to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. That enthusiasm paled in comparison to the feeling she had when she was informed in early December that the grant she had resubmitted in October had been awarded.

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Grant Writing Coaches Discuss their Experience Teaching NRMN Rising Scientists

As a psychologist, Denise Dillard has made a career of providing mental health care to the Alaskan community she comes from. She teaches the subject as an adjunct at Alaska Pacific University and heads the research department at Southcentral Foundation, a health and wellness provider for Alaska Native and American Indian people living in Anchorage, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, and nearby villages. But she has seen too few fellow Alaskan Native STEM professionals — she is of Inupiaq heritage — so she jumped at the chance to be a coach for the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) when her long-time mentors and GUMSHOE directors Dedra Buchwald and Spero Manson asked. The GUMSHOE program (or Grantwriting Uncovered: Maximizing Strategies, Help, Opportunities, Experiences) is one of four NRMN models that teach groups of postdocs and early career researchers how to write competitive grants.

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