The Business of Science

This episode focuses on the often-overlooked administrative side of scientific research, particularly in cancer research. We talk to Sandy Ormbrek and Dr Anna Green about the complex world of grant administration and funding.

Special thanks to Maleah O'Connor for all the work she does to support the grants we work on!

Also a special thanks to Allison Peters, Denise Albano, Maria Owens and Sana Hirata for all they do!

Transcript

0:07: You're listening to Cracking the cancer code, a podcast series about the researchers who use data to fight cancer. 
 0:15: I'm Doctor Carrie Wright, a senior staff scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. 
 0:19: I lead content development for the ITCR Training Network. 
 0:22: A collaborative effort funded by the National Cancer Institute of Researchers around the United States aimed at supporting cancer informatics and data science training. 
 0:32: And I'm Candace Savonen, I'm a data scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and I'm the tech lead of the ITCR Training Network. 
 0:38: Carrie and I work closely together with a variety of dedicated cancer researchers on the forefront of cancer informatics who are shaping the field's future. 
 0:46: In our previous episodes, we focused on a lot of data specific topics in cancer research such as data sharing, the big data revolution and how even computational research can be done in a reproducible way. 
 0:58: We've we talked a lot about how the NIH supports computational researchers in the US through the informatics training for cancer research. 
 1:06: ITCR program doing research takes money and a lot of it most of the time in academic research, these funds come from grants. 
 1:15: So let's talk about grants, grants, administration, and the business of doing science, in particular, the field of administration. 
 1:26: If you're really good administrator, no one has a clue what you do. 
 1:30: I'm Sandy Ormbrek. 
 1:31: I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. 
 1:33: I've been working at the Fred Hutchinson Katzer Research Center for nearly 40 years and I'm a little bit baffled by the passage of time because that just doesn't seem to make sense. 
 1:43: Candace. 
 1:44: And I know Sandy very well because we all work with Doctor Jeff Leek at the French Hutchinson Cancer Center. 
 1:49: Jeff is the chief data officer at Fred Hutch and he was hired in order to specifically develop a data science program at the center. 
 1:57: My official role right now is program operations director. 
 2:01: I was working in the biostatistics program for 20 some years and was planning on retiring from there. 
 2:07: Over the course of that time, there had been several efforts at having a data science program, none of which fully succeeded. 
 2:15: Then along comes Jeff, I hear Jeff is coming to the Hutch. 
 2:18: I had met him when he was applying for a position at Fred Hutch. 
 2:21: He took a position at Hopkins. 
 2:23: Then he came back to the Hutch and I knew he was coming here to start a data science program and I thought I'm tired of this not working. 
 2:30: This is really important. 
 2:31: So I gave Jeff a call and said, you know what you need, if you're going to start a program at the hutch. 
 2:36: If she needs someone who actually knows the institution knows how grants work, knows enough about the field, but not so much that they'll be driving it. 
 2:45: Just someone to help this thing get started, you know, lay the groundwork. 
 2:49: And he said, yeah, that'd be great. 
 2:50: Do you know if anyone and I'm like, huh, scientists aren't necessarily given funding for sure for their research before anybody does anything. 
 3:00: they are applying for these grants and they're trying to talk about their scientific ideas, how those ideas are gonna help society, how they are the right people to carry out those ideas because of their trading and the background and the resources that might be available to their team. 
 3:15: And they are just making their case for why their proposal for the research that they are going to do is going to help society in whatever particular area that they are in, they actually have to compete against each other essentially to get funding for the research that they want to do. 
 3:32: And a team of other scientists will review proposals that are submitted by scientists and determine which proposals have the best chance of being successful. 
 3:44: And then those proposals will get funded and they will get money to actually perform the research. 
 3:50: Usually only the very top percentile of the grants that are submitted that get funded and that fluctuates based on how much money is available. 
 3:59: We are supported by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center through the admin support we receive and that they call us employees and the benefits that come along with that. 
 4:09: However, the money to pay our salaries, we need to go out and get grants in order to pay for that stuff as well as the other research that we do, if we do not get grants, we are in trouble. 
 4:20: Back in the day, the funding line was around 28 to 32% of the grants that got reviewed to be funded. 
 4:28: And now it's like 6 to 8, a quick note, the current funding line for NIH is now 9%. 
 4:34: The tightest Sandy has ever seen is 6 to 8%. 
 4:37: So there's that there's a lot more restrictions on grants as it should be requiring more documented and responsible research that's important. 
 4:46: But just trying to get a grant can be so hard and the way the system works at, NIH, it absolutely supports scientists that have already been successful. 
 4:57: So you have a grant, you succeed, you have these wonderful results to show in your final report, you publish and www and then, and I just, just anxious to fund your next project because they know it's going to go further and you do that for a few grant cycles and you get in the groove and it's pretty easy to get funded when the funding line is so low. 
 5:16: Most of the people who are getting funded have already been successful as a person who works with a bunch of scientists and is a scientist and is married to scientists. 
 5:26: One scientist. 
 5:27: I don't know why. 
 5:27: I said scientists for that. 
 5:29: Let me say that sentence again. 
 5:30: As a scientist, as a person who works with scientists, as a person who's married to a scientist, I can totally agree that sometimes the most annoying thing about scientists is they're wanting to stick to nitpicking and principles and maybe in a after dinner conversation, this can be annoying where you exactly want this kind of personality trait to be applied is biomedical research. 
 5:56: You want the person who is going to say, are you sure that this research plan you propose is going to do this? 
 6:03: What about this? 
 6:04: What about this? 
 6:05: What about this? 
 6:05: You want all of the different aspects of all of the grant money that is going to this specific research plan to be scrutinized before it launches. 
 6:15: So the you need to one of the parts of science that works really, really well that I am proud to be a part of is the part of scientists but actually other scientists, scientists scrutinizing other scientists work and reviewing it from the beginning to the end of that research project trying to find holes in those grant proposals in order to verify which of these research plants are the most solid in order to move medicine forward. 
 6:43: Writing grant proposals can be a really large part of a researcher's job and it's frequently something that new researchers are challenged by when they first have gotten out of graduate school or their postdoc. 
 6:58: It's something that requires a lot of time to develop good skills for. 
 7:02: There are things that I wish researchers knew, especially junior research now, of about 10 years in their career, how to write a grant because a lot of them just don't, and it doesn't matter how wonderful the idea is how innovative it is. 
 7:15: If you can't tell the story, if you can't convince the reviewers that it passes what one faculty member I knew referred to as the. 
 7:23: So we test cause there's a lot of research that's more navel gazing, you know, it's like, well, that's interesting. 
 7:29: But how do you apply it? 
 7:30: How does it impact the population in a positive way? 
 7:32: So what and helping researchers to identify and tell the story of the project that they want to do for the most part, you've either gained someone or lost them by the time they're in the specific games and often the abstract, even the title, sometimes the specific games are the last thing that the faculty do when they're writing a grant, they dive into the details of the research plan first. 
 7:58: And the rest is an afterthought and that's, that's backwards. 
 8:02: So if, if you tell a compelling story, the odds of your grant getting funded are much, much higher and then, right, a grant proposal is really only the start once you actually get awarded a grant and the funds start to come in, they have to be managed. 
 8:18: So this includes keeping detailed records of how every single penny is spent. 
 8:24: Sandy especially, I feel like is really good at going the extra mile to make sure that any little penny that has gone through the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center through a grant is accounted for. 
 8:39: Another thing that Sandy does really well is that she helps us to optimize how we're spending our money. 
 8:45: So she helps us to make sure that we are really going to use the money in the best way to benefit the science itself. 
 8:52: This is all to say your tax dollars are going to these grants and Sandy is making sure that they are spent as wisely and efficiently as possible. 
 9:02: The important thing about grant manage judgment is, you know, everyone spent a long time trying to get to yes to get the grant in the first place. 
 9:10: So you don't want to have a grant and then not have it be administered well because you want to be able to get another one. 
 9:16: And, and I likes to know that their money is well invested, not just in the research, but that everything is handled responsibly ethically. 
 9:25: So there are a lot of rules depending on the funding agency, they vary dramatically. 
 9:32: And so it's important to understand what all the regulations are surrounding the scope of work and use of funds and ownership of ideas and all of that. 
 9:43: It's important to really understand those and make sure that everyone involved in the grant is well aware of them so that when you report results, they can be disseminated responsibly that when the final financial report is sent to NIH or whatever the funding agency is, they can do their audit and know that everything was handled responsibly. 
 10:05: My idea about managing grants is that I want to be able to feel comfortable being on vacation when we have a federal audit and not worry about it. 
 10:14: That is the degree of documentation that I keep now that things aren't on paper anymore. 
 10:18: There's no excuse not to document everything very well and just keep it permanently because you're not audited for things that happened in the previous month. 
 10:26: You're audited for things that happened three or four years ago. 
 10:28: And I cannot tell you why, if I didn't have notes at the time, I can't tell you four years later where that $25,000 went or why different individuals were listed on, were paid on the grants that weren't listed in the original application. 
 10:43: What their scope of work was all of that. 
 10:45: It's important to maintain. 
 10:47: It's important to keep, it's how you get a good reputation with funding agencies so that they know that even if the premise of grant, even if it doesn't work out, they know that it was, you know, no is still a result, right? 
 11:03: Negative results are still results and just as scientists get a reputation for their ideas and conducting the research administrators are also to my surprise, I found out 5, 10 years ago noted as well, it's profoundly important that everything be handled responsibly so that the only focus is on the science. 
 11:23: You don't ever want to have a situation where NIH won't award your institution more grants because the business end of it was handled irresponsibly, that's happened at other institutions way too frequently. 
 11:37: I mean, it's one thing when you get some unethical researcher who announces that they've done a study that proves that vaccines cause autism. 
 11:47: That's one thing that's a whole separate issue. 
 11:49: But when a compelling topic and really good research happening, but the administration of it is poor and doesn't follow policies that researcher may not get another chance to get funding. 
 12:02: And that would just be a shame if it isn't handled responsibly, no discussion about grants would be complete without talking about the other side of the grant administration. 
 12:15: That is the people who are giving out grant money to researchers. 
 12:18: Sometimes these are government agencies like with the NIH SI TCR program. 
 12:23: However, another source of research grant money are nonprofit foundations like Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation. 
 12:30: We talked with Dr Anna Green, their director of research about what it's like administering grants from the perspective of a funding organization So my name is Anna Green and I'm the Director of Research at the Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation. 
 12:46: And the mission of our organization is to fund cancer research specific to neuroendocrine cancers and support families as well with, with the diagnosis at the neuroendocrine tumor Research Foundation. 
 12:59: I am the only person overseeing the grants program. 
 13:02: And so I provide the strategy for the program. 
 13:04: I provide the daily administration of the program and try to manage the resource and data sharing policies of the foundation as well. 
 13:12: It's not always easy to interact with funding agencies. 
 13:16: When you're a researcher, this typically involves lots of back and forth, making sure that they're happy with what you're doing in terms of your research and how you're spending your money. 
 13:27: Right? 
 13:27: It's kind of a, I don't know what the word is beneficial, competing environment, their job is to make sure that they are on top of what we are doing and that they are asking us to fulfill the requirements of that grant the best that we can. 
 13:44: Whereas our job is we also want to do the best work we can, but sometimes how we come across those things might be slightly different and it's all about a little bit of a negotiation together to make sure an ultimate result is that society benefits from the work that we are doing. 
 14:00: So the amount of interaction between the funding agencies and the researchers varies depending on how large the grant is typically, or depending on the project. 
 14:11: Certainly for large grants, you do have to interact with the funding agencies regularly. 
 14:16: We're talking maybe every week or every two weeks. 
 14:20: Whereas other smaller grants, you might not interact, but maybe once every six months. 
 14:26: And they typically involve a bit of a negotiation process. 
 14:30: The funding agency is trying to maximize the goal of what the grant was supposed to fund. 
 14:38: The goal of the scientists is however to maintain their work life balance and also do the best work that's going to optimize their career. 
 14:48: And sometimes there's a bit of conflict there, but typically, that gets resolved through discussion and negotiation. 
 14:55: The reason those negotiations and discussions typically go quite smoothly is because ultimately, we're all aiming for the greater good. 
 15:03: I don't think researchers realize how difficult it is to administer grants from a funding agency perspective because yes, it is really hard to know that. 
 15:13: So researchers will submit progress reports. 
 15:16: And so the goal of the funding agency is then to look at those progress reports and benchmark it against what they proposed. 
 15:23: So are they doing what they proposed? 
 15:25: Are they need their milestones? 
 15:27: But that's really challenging when you know, you're dealing with tens or hundreds of these reports that are coming in on a frequent basis and especially in small nonprofits where there are that many grant staff to oversee the administration of the awards. 
 15:41: And so a lot of it's just faith based, like we're hoping that the researchers are doing what they say they will do. 
 15:46: We are monitoring them, we are, we are checking, but I don't have infinite time to explicitly confirm that what they're reporting on is in line with what they proposed, you know, and also we are understanding that research changes, right? 
 16:02: So they may be still trying to answer their original aims, some of the, the ways they answer them might have changed over time. 
 16:08: And we don't want to get in the business of trying to be bureaucratic or police their progress. 
 16:13: And so it is a challenging balance to try to steward donors' money, right? 
 16:19: Because we are fundraising for funds and paying researchers for their projects. 
 16:24: And so we owe it to donors to make sure these researchers are doing what they say they're doing. 
 16:29: But it is very challenging from an administrative standpoint, from a time perspective, there's just not enough time the day to do it incredibly well. 
 16:38: Luckily, Doctor Green has found most researchers are really good business partners. 
 16:43: I think that most researchers are great at complying with the policies and for the funding agency. 
 16:50: But it's like the 8020 rule where you spend 80% of your time on 20% of individuals who aren't complying and they're very busy. 
 16:59: Researchers are very busy, they know they're making progress on their research program. 
 17:04: But we as the funder to ensure that they are making progress, we're paying for the research. 
 17:09: And so there's often a disconnect between, you know, the researcher understanding that they need to, that they're making progress, but we need to see reports and we need to see reports in a timely manner so that we can pay their next payment and kind of that wrote administrative work, but it can be challenging Gary and I have partnered with a lot of researchers as a part of the ITCR Trading Network. 
 17:31: And the most like hopeful thing that I that I like about having worked on this project is that so many of them are very principled that they want, in fact, are very opinionated that the work gets done to the best quality it can and that it ultimately helps cancer patients. 
 17:51: Dr Green's nonprofit specializes in funding research on neuroendocrine tumors. 
 17:56: These tend to be rare cancers. 
 17:58: And so the foundation takes a keen interest in getting researchers to share data that was collected using foundation grants. 
 18:05: So funding institutions then because they kind of hold the purse strings can be critical drivers of research, culture, practice and behavior. 
 18:13: They for instance can demand that if they give you money for a particular research project, you need to do things in a certain way that includes good things like data sharing that we talked about in previous episodes. 
 18:25: And data sharing is especially important for rare cancers because there are so few individuals that may have these cancers. 
 18:33: So getting samples is really a challenge. 
 18:35: Yeah. 
 18:36: So it's really important that researchers share their data. 
 18:39: And I think we're seeing more and more funders require this. 
 18:42: But again, it, it's really hard from an administrative perspective to oversee compliance with these policies. 
 18:48: I've been part of different funder alliance groups and this is always a topic of conversation is once we have this policy, how do we ensure they're sharing their data and everyone is scratching their heads because it's such a complicated problem because people share differently. 
 19:05: People share on different timelines and the timeline of the grant doesn't necessarily overlap with the timeline of sharing. 
 19:12: And once the grant is over, there's very little offender can do to ensure that certain parts of the data are shared. 
 19:19: And so it it's just generally a really complicated problem and it also comes back to grant administrative bandwidth. 
 19:26: One thing we have heard over and over from researchers is desire for incentives for sharing data. 
 19:32: Several people have told us that they think funding mandates for data sharing are a vital part of creating a culture of data sharing. 
 19:39: We asked Dr Green, her thoughts on how funding organizations can impact a researcher's willingness to make their data available to everyone this has been studied. 
 19:48: So I went and pulled this figure for you. 
 19:50: Someone did a study where they looked at funder mandated data sharing. 
 19:54: So they looked at publications from funders where data sharing is mandated and they found that only 26% data could be recovered even when it was required to be shared by thunder mandate. 
 20:07: So that's pretty low. 
 20:09: You know, I think it would be even lower if the funder did not require sharing. 
 20:14: So I think it's really important that the mandate be there. 
 20:17: But I think that the data have shown that even with a funder mandate, data sharing, it's still pretty low priority for a lot of pis and and there are many reasons for that. 
 20:29: But yeah, it's 26%. 
 20:32: So yeah, we have a long way to go. 
 20:34: Ultimately, though Doctor Green sees data sharing as one of the best ways to honor the patients who participate in cancer research projects. 
 20:41: Overwhelmingly, patients want their data shared. 
 20:44: And I think that sometimes that's overlooked in an attempt to protect the patient from themselves when they themselves want the data to be shared. 
 20:52: I think it's not often thought about. 
 20:53: And I think it's really important. 
 20:55: I think a lot of patients consent to these studies because they want to make a difference. 
 20:59: They're joining a clinical trial or a study, not because they themselves expect benefit, but they believe they're contributing to future research that will help other people. 
 21:09: And I think that a lot of them assume that their data will be shared. 
 21:12: I've heard this a lot when talking to donors that they just assume that everything is shared with any of the funded research. 
 21:20: So whether it's ph I or whether it's just cell lines or whether it's data gathered from a research project, I think that the default is that most of the community outside of the research community, they think stuff is being shared. 
 21:32: And so it's quite a surprise when they learn. 
 21:35: Oh, there's not a culture of sharing that can be really difficult to reconcile. 
 21:39: And as a funder when you're communicating, impact to the donor community because they're like, what are you talking about? 
 21:46: You have a resource sharing policy. 
 21:47: Why aren't people just sharing? 
 21:49: It's mind blowing. 
 21:50: I think to a lot of the donor community and I think it would be beneficial for the research community to have a better sense of their patient populations when studying them. 
 22:04: I find it very fascinating, right? 
 22:07: Like when you are a kid and you learn about science or you also learn about that firefighters are an occupation or you know, medical doctors, right? 
 22:17: You don't necessarily and Sandy had mentioned this to us as well. 
 22:21: Grow up being like I'm gonna be an administrator for NIH funded grant projects, right? 
 22:26: There are some things that you don't necessarily even know about because those things happen been uplifted by society even though they are holding up a very crucial part of society. 
 22:36: And that's what I find most interesting about conversations with folks like Dr Anna Greene and Sandy is that they are holding up the whole ecosystem. 
 22:48: But so often the rest of society is like, oh but the scientists did the stuff, right? 
 22:53: But yes, but like it's a whole team effort. 
 22:56: And so I always just think it's such a crime that folks who are doing all this work that allow science to happen are not also being spotlighted, spotlighted. 
 23:06: No kind of the, I don't know the word it is like they're not being given credit where credit is due in this episode. 
 23:12: We've tried to highlight some of the unsung heroes of biomedical research, which includes people in administration that work for institutes like the Fred Hutch and also those that work at funding agencies and nonprofits that help to figure out how we should spend money from a big picture way of thinking in terms of what research should really be done. 
 23:34: Can we just shout out some admin folks who have really helped us a lot because I think that would be great and I think it would be a great way to end this. 
 23:41: So obviously, we talked to Sandy and I just mentioned Maleah O'Connor who's literally submitting grants for us today and yesterday. 
 23:49: But I also wanted to shout out Alison Peters started working with us recently and literally the amount of stress she's lifted from our team is like very, very palpable. 
 24:00: And we also work a lot with LaChaun Kendall from U IC and she keeps some of our citizen science events going. 
 24:08: We also have admin like Noel Noble who have helped us with our IRB and that's been extremely helpful. 
 24:15: So admin can help in a lot of variety of ways. 
 24:17: So Alison helps us to track our project. 
 24:21: So if we have a really, really large multimillion dollar grant and we need to keep track of all the various pieces of the project. 
 24:28: She helps us do that, which is also again, a skill that I didn't necessarily have specialized training in a special thanks to me o'connor. 
 24:37: She is our research administration manager and she handles all things related to our grants, applications, reports, compliance, etcetera. 
 24:45: We'd also, I like to give a shout out to Maria Owen who's helped us with figuring out how to get travel reimbursements. 
 24:52: We have to do a lot of travel for some of our projects and she also helps coordinate people's schedules. 
 24:58: I'm very thankful to the administrators who make sure that the wheel stays on the tracks. 
 25:03: You know what I mean? 
 25:04: They are trying to make sure that the scattered of some of these scientists is still harnessed in a forward momentum direction and so that I am very grateful. 
 25:13: Thank you to our admin in our next episode, we're going to explore how patients lived experiences are translated into data points and what the data can't capture. 
 25:23: Thank you for listening to cracking the cancer code. 
 25:25: This podcast is sponsored by the National Cancer Institute through the Informatics Technology for cancer research program grant number UE five C A 254170. 
 25:36: The views expressed in this podcast do not reflect those of our funders or employers.