So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Dr. Jim O'Halloran. As many of you, I see some of you guys

are repeat offenders here that been with us a few times already. But for those that haven't. Dr.

O'Halloran has more than 17 years of experience with the SBIR program and has received funding from

the NIA, National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute on Neurological Diseases and

Stroke. He has served as principal investigator on more than 20 grants, totalling more than $10 million.

He has also served as a selective reviewer for these same agencies for over a decade and is intimately

familiar with the 5-axis proposal scoring processes and dynamics upon which funding depends on. As a

deeply experienced reviewer, he is highly skilled on how to best to emphasize a proposal's strengths,

avoid common pitfalls, and tune proposals for review. So thank you so much, Jim, for being with us this

entire month, and I'm going to turn the presentation over to you now.

Well, thank you, Karin, and today's topic is understanding the review process. It's not common that this

is discussed among a lot of presentations because it's difficult to understand, and it's not always

included because a lot of presenters don't think it's that important compared to writing an application

or understanding the nuances of preparation. But in reality, you want to know where your score came

from and what it means. So that's really what this presentation is all about, and I'll start with just a brief

background of my experience as a reviewer over the years for different institutes. That covers a fairly

wide range, wide enough to keep me busy over that period of time.

Things to remember. You are writing for reviewers. The Center for Scientific Review, which initially

processes your application, tries to match your expertise with your application, but as noted here, this is

often tenuous. The reviewers that you get for your application, and there are three reviewers that are

assigned initially: primary, secondary, and a third one, may not well match up with your application's

topic area because, again, there's limited number of reviewers available for a given round of review. But

they do their best and occasionally bringing out some reviewers depending on how exotic an application

might be. But again, you have to keep that in mind that sometimes you'll get reviews back that don't

seem to be quite on point, and this can be one of the reasons.

This is the grant application process where after you write an application, it's submitted to the CSR,

Center for Scientific Review. At CSR, it's assigned to a specific, what they call, study section. A study

section is a… I showed them in the first slide, the different agencies and agency-specific study sections

or review groups. Then, after review, your application is transferred to NIH for funding consideration. So

depending on the score and in particular, the impact score, NIH makes a decision about whether your

application gets funded.

After that, there's a decision to fund or not fund, and we'll talk about paylines and probabilities in a little

while. You have the option, of course, if you don't get funded, to revise and resubmit. Years ago, that

process was limited to two tries. You submit an application once, get a review. If it was not favorable,

revise and resubmit, and then you would have the… You have basically no options outside of completely

changing your application. Today, you can keep submitting, resubmitting an application indefinitely.

Hopefully, with all kinds of changes, that you don't run into the same criticisms and problems that you

did in the first two. So you can keep cycling to this process as long as you have the stamina and

perseverance to keep resubmitting and hanging in there.

Here's what happens with grants that are submitted to CSR. So on the left, I show the number of

applications initially submitted to CSR for off-site review. So your grant would be assigned to three

reviewers who would review it at home, and they will assign basically a tentative initial score. Based on

the stratification of those initial scores, grants will be divided into those that are discussed and not

discussed. Roughly speaking, that cuts the number of applications by about 30%. So about 30% of

This transcript was exported on Dec 07, 2020 – view latest version here.

20 – OHalloran – SBIR Series Part 4-4 (Completed 12/06/20)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 2 of

applications that are sent out to reviewers for initial review are not discussed in the room on the two

days that the active review process goes on.

After the first day, there's a second score stratification in which approximately the other 20% are

dismissed for active discussion. So over the two days of discussion in the room, so to speak,

approximately 50% of all the applications submitted are actually discussed in a room actively between

the three assigned reviewers and other reviewers in the room who are free to ask questions. So that. I'm

trying to give you some idea of the odds of getting discussed. I'll talk a little bit more about this process

in upcoming slides.

15 minutes. For most applications, the discussion process averages about 15 minutes of discussion,

which seems like a very short period of time. However, the three reviewers are supposed to be up to

speed and have already made their… written up their critiques, made their critical points, and the other

reviewers in the room, and this is very much exactly what it looks like, can read those same reviews, and

listen to the presentations of the first three reviewers, and again, ask questions if they have them. So

there's 15 minutes in which a decision is pretty much made by all the people in the room of how they're

going to score your application. It doesn't seem like a lot of time. It seems to go fast, except when you're

doing it for nine hours a day. In which case, it's like it never stops.

The process of review to repeat some of these initial scores, and this is in the room. Initial scores are

requested by the chair, chair of the study section. So the first three reviewers give their initial scores,

and then the primary reviewer presents his or her comments, critique for the rest of the room to hear.

Then, the second and third reviewers follow up, largely emphasizing any differences with the primary

reviewer to save time. They don't go over the points that have already been made by the primary. Then,

there's an open discussion. Again, this is a time when other reviewers in the room can ask questions of

the first three reviewers or make observations, cover points they think weren't covered that are

important them that stood out as they listened.

The chair summarizes the discussion. So actively and incredibly short period of time, the assigned chair

for the study section writes down, summarizes, notarizes all the comments that were made during that

15 minutes, and they're remarkably good at it. They have short-term memories that are just

phenomenal, and I'll touch more on that later. So the reviewers state their final scores, setting the

range, and then the other reviewers assign their final scores as well. This is basically the end of the

scoring process.

Importantly, there are five principle scoring axes beginning with significance, the investigators, the

innovation, the approach taken, and the environment. The significance of an innovation typically

informs what we'll get to in a minute, which is the impact score. The investigators, the quality of the

investigators, their experience, how likely they are to succeed in implementing the project. Innovation.

How innovative is this especially compared to existing technologies? The approach is the methodology.

Exactly, what are you going to do? What statistics might you apply? If it's a patient study, how will

patients be selected and entered into a study? The environment in which the study will be conducted.

Typically, there are some office spaces small businesses has control of. Often, people outsource patient

testing to clinics or hospitals that have the kind of resources to do that.

The impact score. This is the main criteria used by NIH to decide on funding. It takes into account the

sub-scores of those five axes, but it's not a numerical average. So a lot of applicants are confused when

they read the summary statement or critique of their application and see scores, individual score axes

that don't seem to align with the impact score. The reasons for this are that the impact is a gestalt made

by reviewers. It's quite subjective. It's their… some might say their best guess on how impactful the

project will be if it's carried through. So it can be a little mysterious in that sense and difficult to

understand.

This transcript was exported on Dec 07, 2020 – view latest version here.

20 – OHalloran – SBIR Series Part 4-4 (Completed 12/06/20)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 3 of

I wanted to present the often referred to as the original 9-Point Scoring Scale. NIH has an inverse scoring

system where a one is truly exceptional and nine is poor or extremely poor. I've never… don't think I've

ever seen a nine assigned to an application. I've rarely seen a one. I've only assigned a couple of ones

myself over many years. So the scores tend to fall in a more limited range, and I'll also touch on that in

an upcoming slide, but these are some of that, and the Guidance – Comment column here give you some

idea of what contributes to these numerical scores and whether something is exceptional, excellent,

good, very good, or to be satisfactory or fair. There's a lot to absorb here, and I won't spend too much

time on this, except to give you some impression of what a particular score means. I'll go a little further

with this.

Interpreting your score. Again, a one-to-nine inverse scale. Today, a one is certainly funded as is a two,

and I would say up to… but 2.7 to 2.8, your chances of getting funded are extremely high with no

guarantees, and there's other factors in this equation. Today, a three in most divisions is a fundable

score. I've seen 3.5s funded, depending on which division you're applying to, how well-funded they are,

and again, we talked in a previous section of this webinar series about priorities within divisions. So

there's a lot that goes into that.

Anything above a 3.5 to a 5.5 generally means resubmit. Respond to the summary statement. Take into

account all the questions or concerns that reviewers had, and so you're in pretty good shape if you get

between a 3.5 and a 5.5. As a proposal, that's a, for lack of a better word, fixable. A six and above, you

really have to reconsider your application. Consider reformulating it. Those are very poor scores, and

I've often assigned sevens and eights to applications that I thought were very poor. Typically, that

doesn't really happen because reviewers, in general, regard those as punitive, and whether they match

the scoring criteria assigned by NIH or not, a six generally means, in my experience as a reviewer, that

the score according to the NIH criteria probably falls between a six to eight somewhere. So you really

need to think carefully about score in this kind of a context, and I'll comment there.

Interpreting your score. A three versus a five. These are numbers that… where scores tend to cluster,

and they'll also come in the next slide, but scores tend to cluster around three and five. There's a lot of

speculation about why that is. Again, a five means generally resubmit. You have a good proposal that's

fixable. A three is right on the payline. Reviewers are repeatedly reminded not to assign scores that in

their mind constitute fundable or not fundable. Nonetheless, even though that's true, you see a lot of

threes, and that makes it very difficult for program officers and division directors, and very difficult

when you have a lot of threes, for example, to sort these out or a 3.0 versus a 3.2 versus agency division

priorities, but you see a lot of clustering around three and five.

So here's what… and get into the payline here and understanding scores a little more deeply. In a

perfect world, as far as the division will be concerned and the division director who signs checks, scores

will be distributed somewhat equally across all of these impact numbers. In the real world, again, you'll

see clustering around threes and fives in general, and this again makes it very difficult for them to sort

out which application to fund. So you might see a program manager, division director score a 3.2 rather

than a 2.8 because it more closely aligns with their priorities and things that are, for lack of a better way

to put it, near and dear to their agency's heart so to speak.

Again, clustering at five, which again makes it… It makes it difficult for applicants too because when

those fives come down, and they usually do in a revised application, you'd fall back into this conundrum

of being in a cluster. So paylines across divisions today are generally… and I've got this fuzzy bar for a

reason, and that is that there's no one line you could draw. This whole concept of a payline has been

around NIH for a long time, and you can ask different people what a payline is, and they will give you a

slightly different definition depending on their experience.

This transcript was exported on Dec 07, 2020 – view latest version here.

20 – OHalloran – SBIR Series Part 4-4 (Completed 12/06/20)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 4 of

Years ago, I asked a division director, actually, the National Institute on Aging. We have a project that

scored a 3.2. At that time, NIA was very well-funded, and the project was of high relevance to their

division requirements and interest. I called up the… went right through to the division director's desk,

and I asked him. I had a couple of programmers who I wanted to keep on board and who I wouldn't be

able to keep on board if we weren't going to get funded. I asked him if we were likely to be funded, and I

asked him where the payline was for this particular round that we were in. There was a pause on the

other end of the phone, and the voice said, "I don't know where the payline is. Where do you think it

is?"

I found that I wasn't… I had no idea how to react, except when I heard him chuckling on the other end of

the phone, I also started laughing. Jimmy was taking time out of his busy day to prank an SBIR applicant,

and what could you do, but laugh. So there is no particular line you can draw of where a payline is.

Nonetheless, the concept is still in play, and you'll hear people use this word or descriptor all the time in

the game of getting funded.

What is an ND? An ND or a ++ sign, which will appear on your summary statement, and I'll get into that

in a minute. Some people have said this stands for not good, but it actually stands for not discussed. We

touched on earlier what a not-discussed application is. It's one that did not make the cut, a numerical

cut at a certain point in terms of the tentative impact score. So if you receive an ND, it's disheartening. It

means your application is not discussed, and you have to make a decision whether to resubmit based on

the comments in the summary statement critique that you received back, and I'm going to talk about

that in some of the upcoming slides here.

Here's some comments on the summary statement structure. It consists of an overall resume and

summary. Again, these are the comments that came out of the actual verbal exchange in the room, and

they're very, very valuable. Pay attention to this. You'll often see, in my case being in the room, hear

things that reviewers say that were not specifically in their critique. They're things that came out

spontaneously in the discussion, but are captured in the first section of the summary statement that

you'll receive after you submit an application. Again, a record of what was discussed in the room, and

they include the critiques assigned by the reviewers.

You get a priority score in your summary statement structure on the first page. You get budget

recommendations. Sometimes a budget can be outsize, and in general, reviewers are very accepting of

budgets, unless they're way out of the range of reasonable. Importantly, budgets don't contribute to the

impact score. They're discussed separately at a scientific content of the rest of the application. The

summary statement also includes administrative notes particularly on… If you're studying human

subjects, there will be comments about the acceptability of the plan to include human subjects, and how

they're recruited, and what the procedures are for a study, and whether they're appropriate or not.

This is an actual example from a summary statement I received in 2018, and this was for a project I

mentioned previously developed for cerebral palsy risk identification. This received an impact score of

30, which is, as I mentioned, pretty much right on the payline. Without going into the budget area,

which is redacted, this is what your summary statement will look like, and the person responsible, and

the study section, and all that.

This is an actual screen capture of the, as I mentioned, the resume and summary of discussion. Without

going through all of this, this is what was discussed in the room, which is often independent from and

differs from what was in the written critiques. Again, very important. Citing all kinds of potential

problems with the application, but ending up with, "Towards the end of the discussion, it was clear that

despite a few limitations, the application was found to be strong with the potential to have a

considerable impact in the treatment of cerebral palsy."

This transcript was exported on Dec 07, 2020 – view latest version here.

20 – OHalloran – SBIR Series Part 4-4 (Completed 12/06/20)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 5 of

Note the last sentence, "This sentiment is reflected in the overall impact score." I like that word

"sentiment," which is very applicable again to the impact score. It's a sentiment, not particularly… Again,

not a numerical average. Not a strictly objective criteria. There are too many factors that go into an SBIR

for a reviewer to base an impact score solely on quantitative measures or metrics. So this is what you

would see. Something very, very similar on the second page of your summary statement.

This is, again, a screen capture from my summary statement. This is the first reviewer's five scoring axes,

and I was assigned a three, significance. Again, significance typically informs the impact score. In my

experience, those are usually identical, unless there is some other kind of concern that comes up during

the discussion if someone raises some concern that one of the reviewers had not thought of. The

investigators were assigned a two. It's a very good score. You rarely see investigators assigned as a one,

unless you have just an extraordinary team. I thought the team for this project I thought actually

deserved a one, but for this first reviewer, and this is just one reviewer's set of scores, it came at a two.

The innovation was judged as three. The approach was a three, and the environment was a one.

Meaning, outstanding.

When you read through some of these critique statements and the bullet points, this is just one part of a

much longer section. You wonder how someone came up with a pretty good score when you read all the

different criticisms they had, but a lot of times, reviewers will make criticisms that… How can I put it?

They're filling some blanks on the form that they're asked to complete, and I'm not suggesting that

reviewers would rush to make a judgment or a comment when they have limited time, which they do, to

review an application. However, I've seen examples of that that lead me to believe it.

So you receive a score that's not fundable, let's say, and this happens at least half the time. You have

two things you can do. You can look at a reviewer's comment, a specific issue they had, and you can

rebut that and say in essentially this many words in this way, "Reviewer, I think you're wrong," in so

many words, however politely or indirectly you want to put it. You can rebut the criticism, or what

typically works better is to make some change in the application section that the reviewer will likely to

see your application in the next round, your revised application would be pleased and more predisposed

to… predisposed in a favorable way to regard your response to his or her comments to make some

change rather than, again, to say, "Reviewer, you didn't understand me. You're wrong," or, "Please read

my proposal more carefully than you did the first time," just to give you some examples of things I've

seen over the years.

So there are different ways to respond to reviewers' comments, and these are the primary two with all

kinds of variations in between. Often, applicants will disguise a rebuttal as a change and seem to make a

change or respond in their first page in response to the review. You get one page in the revised

application to comment on the review and respond to the seven or eight most salient criticisms, the

most important ones. Often, applications and I would say experienced applicants will sometimes give a

reviewer a clear indication they made a change in an application. They have made a very, very small

change. In essence, more of a rebuttal than a change, and this is a nuance that I see a lot of.

Prioritizing responses to review. Which comes first? A question can be asked. Which reviewer concerns

should you respond to first in a revised application? A simple answer is select those most prominent in

the resume and discussion as I mentioned before, the ones that happen in the room. Also, select those

criticisms or concerns that were in common between the three reviewers. If all three reviewers make

the same or identical criticism of a particular aspect of your application, you want to take those very

seriously. If they're all in agreement, you need to do something about it.

Often, I see reviewers… One reviewer make a comment that's very difficult to respond to that the other

two reviewers did not make. Because of the limited time and space you have to revise an application, a

lot of applicants simply ignore points that are made by individual reviewers for those kinds of reasons.

This transcript was exported on Dec 07, 2020 – view latest version here.

20 – OHalloran – SBIR Series Part 4-4 (Completed 12/06/20)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 6 of

Again, limited space, limited time, and it could be a criticism that's simply not addressable. It may be

even inappropriate. Reviewers are imperfect, and they may find fault with something that doesn't really

have a real-world impact or real-world substance. So again, this is the skill of sometimes reading

between the lines of a summary statement, a critique to understand what a reviewer is really saying.

Some people would say that a review is a great opportunity because reviewers are telling you what

things you need to work on. If you work on those things, respond to those things, in a sense, they are

giving you a roadmap to improve your application. In other cases, it's not as I've mentioned some

exceptions here.

So I wanted to conclude this fourth part of this webinar series with some points from the first three

presentations, what I call points worth remembering about the SBIR program, and writing grants, and

getting funded. Again, touching on something from earlier, requirements for success. An excellent

writing skill set. Excellent grant writing skill set. Grants are a different… an entirely different process

than other kinds of writing. It's a combination of persuasion, science, and being convincing. It is a unique

kind of writing that few other kinds of writing would prepare you for outside of having experience with

this.

I cannot stress enough. You need to have a clear value proposition. What is your innovation? How

valuable is it? How clear is it to a reviewer? This is also something that can't be overemphasized,

expressing yourself really well. I've seen strong value propositions not be clearly presented, and to touch

on something we discussed in a previous section of this series, don't expect reviewers to dig for

information. You have to make it very clear, the reading style has to flow, and the critical points have to

be right in front of the reviewer. I'm tending to use the word "unavoidable" here, this context.

You need a qualified principal investigator, a PI. A PI is the team leader. The PI is the one responsible for

writing the proposal and implementing the project. So the PI needs to have experience, which can be

very difficult. There's a circularity here of, when you're doing your first SBIR, not having experience in

doing that. However, your experience in developing your innovation, your initial experiences,

preliminary data, and these kinds of things are things you put in your NIH biosketch that we discussed in

a previous part of this series. The principal investigator needs to be qualified or that will come up as an

issue in review.

You need a qualified team. Your team is all important. Who are the people around you who are going to

help implement your project? Consultants and contractors. You need consultants and contractors when

your team may not be as qualified as other applicants. So that's something to keep in mind, especially

computer programmers, electronic engineers. You need guidance. You need help preparing an

application if you've never done one before. So that, we also talked about in a previous version of this,

and you need persistence. As I've touched on before in other sections, this is a long-term kind of a

process, and you have to have the ability to persevere even when you get a poor review, an ND, for

example, as a follow-up score, and be able to overcome that, and bounce back from it, so to speak.

University-based collaborators. I've mentioned previously Bolsters is the application profile. They can

implement subcontract-supported patient/subject access clinical trials and research studies. They can

also perform independent/Arms-length analysis and interpretation of your study results. Again, coming

back to the team. It takes a team to implement a project like this, and so you need to spend some time if

you haven't given this much thought before of who are the team players? What are their qualifications,

and do they align with the goals of the SBIR program?

Final comment. This is not a game for beginners. I think you've gotten that impression over the course of

this series. You need experience and/or assistance, guidance to be competitive. You will need assistance,

and you're writing for reviewers, not for program officers at NIH. Program officers at NIH are entirely

dependent on the impact score that comes out of the review process. So that concludes the four-part

This transcript was exported on Dec 07, 2020 – view latest version here.

20 – OHalloran – SBIR Series Part 4-4 (Completed 12/06/20)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 7 of

series on this topic area, and I'm happy to take any questions that anyone may have submitted. So,

Karen?

Yes, we have lots of questions.

Good.

So just real quick. Can you go back on the university-based collaborators slide just so… I think Mitchell

wanted to catch some of the points.

Sure. Is that visible now?

Yes. I think Mitchell have that. Mitchell, did you have a specific question? If so, please, you can put it in

the chat box. All right. Now, some of the questions that we're getting. Can you tell a little bit about the

differences between the review process for the NIH, NSF, DOD? I know you were talking about the NIH,

but can we… Do you have any experience in the other review processes, Jim?

No, I don't. I have not done NSF or DOD type applications, but the process is very similar in general.

We're talking specifically about university-based collaborators, and it is typically the case that a small

business starting up does not have… Can we say credibility, or presence, or industry weight, if you will?

University-based collaborators can bring a lot of gravitas to an application whatever agency you're

submitting this to. So it's something to think about, and it can be very difficult to obtain because the

people you may want as consultants, advisory committee, review committee members for your own

application may be very difficult to contact, and you may need to really reach for that or find people

who know them. Again, we mentioned in the last series the chain of trust of talking to some faculty

members who's your advisor about providing, let's say, connections either through email introduction or

other ways to put together your own advisory board or committee so that it looks like it's not just two or

three people with very limited experience.

Right. Now, can you speak a little bit about the resubmission process? So tips for resubmitting ND

applications. A peer had a question in regards to, "What is the best way to highlight changes in your

resubmission?"

Well, you'll have a full page called The Introduction to Revised Application. In that one page, you're

allowed to pretty much say whatever you want to highlight comments from the summary statement,

and then respond to them. So you would pick the 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever you can fit into that page given

the margin limits and font limits. That is the one page that reviewers will spend the most time looking

at. Again, taking those 7, 8, 9, 10 most important points and addressing them as well as you can. That's

the place to deflect the most intense, damaging criticisms, but you're also allowed to make changes

within the application as long as you highlight those. Some people, including myself, use these blue

brackets. The guidelines for submission will outline how you emphasize changes that are made within an

application beyond the introduction to the revised application page so that reviewers can hone in on

what changes you've made.

Right. Now, Shelba had a question. If a resubmission gets mainly ones and twos, a couple of threes, and

no criticisms from the three main reviewers, but the impact score is 35, what does that mean? Does that

mean the rest of the reviewers just didn't agree with the three main reviewers?

That's tricky to answer because the impact score of individual reviewers are not given in the summary

statement. So the five scoring axes that I showed are not the impact score. The impact score again is

that amalgamation or a gestalt that an individual reviewer make that they will enter on to an electronic

form that's not seen by anyone, except people at CSR. If the three main reviewers give really good

individual axes scores and you saw a poor overall impact score or even an ND, it means that some issue

was raised by someone else in the room that may have been very deleterious to your application. That

This transcript was exported on Dec 07, 2020 – view latest version here.

20 – OHalloran – SBIR Series Part 4-4 (Completed 12/06/20)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 8 of

will show up again in that resume in discussion session, coming back to how important it is to read that

and often read between the lines of that, but it should be right there.

Okay. Now, what is the… John had a question in regards to commitments from industry partners. Are

they valued the same as university personnel?

Letters of support are extremely valuable. They're required in a phase two commercialization session,

but they're… You cannot over-value letters from people in industry, and they can be a very effective

surrogate for university-based collaborators who are more in the science realm, clinical science realm,

depending on the focus of the application. But people from industry who say, "This is a great idea. We

would love to work with you on it, and we are anxiously awaiting the outcome of your phase one study,"

are very powerful. Yes. By all means, if you can get those, you're half the way there to deflecting a lot of

criticisms that otherwise come up.

Now, can you give a quick overview of the process following the review like when it goes to program?

Well, it's pretty simple actually. They look at that number. So they look at the number first, and if I could

give you just my perspective on what happens of talking to division directors over the years. Something

like this happens. They will have stacks of proposals on their desks, so to speak, and they will be sorted

out according to some priority impact score. They have to make a decision, coming back to this question

of alignment with the divisions of key interests, which are given in the omnibus solicitation of that

critical document I mentioned at our first webinar portion.

So it's important to understand their priorities and to do the best job you can either citing things that

come right out of the omnibus solicitation and/or whitepapers that a particular division would post

online as priorities for their division because at the end of the day, if there are two, or three, or four

proposals that are really good and that all have 3.0 impact scores, that division director is very likely to

fund the one that most closely aligns with the latest and greatest priorities that they have.

You can also look this up online. There's all kinds of funding opportunity announcements, FOAs, and

also, mentioned in one of the previous webinars what some of these other sources of current hot topics

are. Most of them are for academia, by the way. They're not specific to the SBIR program. I'm not sure

why they don't break that down with the… You want to know what the highest priority areas are. So

then, you can cite that in your application. It will make it a lot easier for a program director to fund your

application when there's this overlap or clustering.

Right. Now, do you have any idea, Jim, about the NSF score templates at all? It was similar?

I'm not familiar with them, so I would be out of my element commenting.

All right. I don't see any more questions at this time, so in… Now, Jim, I know you're seeing some scores

come back right now. Can you share some of the biggest two don'ts?

Boy, I'm not sure. I've gotten… With this, I've gotten a lot of phone calls. I've got a phone call at 7:00

yesterday morning from a group that I was advising on, and they couldn't contain themselves. They

were very well-placed academician who was involved in a large… They're called a direct-to-phase-two.

Very odd-sized proposal, and his collaborator who were… Beside themselves, they were so happy they

got a 2.5 on an application, which means their… In all likelihood, their project will be funded, and it's a

very, very large budget. I've gotten the opposite. I've gotten people who have contacted me and

received an ND for the second time.

Again, coming back to some of the comments I had in the scoring system. If you receive one of these… a

very poor score or an ND, you really have to consider reformulating or conceivably finding another

project, which is very emotionally difficult I think for people to accept that something they've worked on

or believe is very valuable is not regarded the same by the powers that be. The scores are coming in,

This transcript was exported on Dec 07, 2020 – view latest version here.

20 – OHalloran – SBIR Series Part 4-4 (Completed 12/06/20)

Transcript by Rev.com

Page 9 of

and some people are overjoyed, and others are not. Typically, mostly not because they… People who

are scoring under threes are very short of getting funded, and then there's people who are right in the

low 3.1, 3.2 plus range that are on the edge of their chair for probably three more months until the

funding council meets, which is the final determinant of whether a project is funded. So they have a

waiting period that's… In fact, everybody actually does until you get a Notice of Award or NOA. The

check is not in the mail, so to speak.

All right. Well, thank you so much, Jim, for being here today. On behalf of ScienceDocs and ULP, I want

to thank everybody for joining us today. We do have an upcoming event, Monday, December 7th,

Business Model Canvas – Developing Specific Aims and Research Grants with Dr. Olga Lubman. So it's at

1:00 as well. Thank you, Shelba. In the meantime, if there's any questions, we can assist in any way.

Please don't hesitate to reach out. We're here to help see more SBIR grant funding in this region. Take

care, and happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Bye-bye.