Darby Saxbe (@darbysaxbe) / X

Darby Saxbe

2,240 posts

Darby Saxbe

@darbysaxbe

Professor @USC studying transition to parenthood as a window for neurobiological adaptation. My book Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood releases June 9

Los Angeles, CA

Joined February 2017

Pinned
Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
May 20, 2024
I'm VERY excited to announce that I'm writing a book for @Flatironbooks! It'll be about the neurobiology of fatherhood & how fatherhood transforms men's lives. Thanks to stellar @WMEBooks agents @alexanderjkane & @RossGail. Reach out if you have dad stories or research to share!
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
I need people to understand how difficult it is to get an NIH grant. You spend months writing a proposal, following strict guidelines that include a detailed multiyear budget, bios of everyone on your team, plans for participant safety & ethical conduct. Then you send it off -1/n
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Feb 4, 2025
🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 29, 2025
A personal story about how the potential grant funding freeze might affect science. Right now, I'm in my fourth year of a 5-year NIH grant and my last year of funding is supposed to start February 1st. I'm supporting a postdoc, two graduate students, and two lab managers
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
By suspending all grant funding overnight is a huge waste of taxpayer money and a completely inefficient use of federal resources. Science and research make us competitive and even a short pause can lead to unconscionable delays in paying staff and running time-sensitive studies.
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
And if you didn't make any mistakes, it goes on to peer review. Three outside researchers with deep expertise in your research area write critiques covering multiple facets of your research (whether your topic is important, your methods are sound, your team is qualified)
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
And score your proposal based on their critiques. If you are lucky and your proposal scores in the top half of all proposals received by the NIH in that cycle, then you get discussed in a study section meeting by a few dozen peer reviews who pick apart every possible limitation
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
well-justified. Despite the wacky grant titles that sometimes get cherry-picked and flung around the internet, there's no woke DEI mob running around doing fly-by-night studies that lack a solid basic in scientific rigor. Arbitrarily pulling the plug on scientific research
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
Of your project. I have been in study sections and it amazes me that anyone ever gets funded at all, because the critiques can be so harsh. After the discussion, everyone scores your proposal again, and then only a certain percentage of proposals are recommended for funding,
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
Typically NIH grants are for five years, so the scope of your project covers five years of work and your budget is written with specific expenses in each year. The administration's move to freeze all grant funding is devastating to science and research, because you have a bunch
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
Anyway, the point is there are a trillion tiny hoops you must jump through in order to get a federal grant, and NIH reviewers are quite conservative - not in a political sense, but in the sense that they are risk-averse and only want to fund projects that are highly feasible and
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
of these multi-year projects that have been designed specifically to run across a particular timeframe. Usually in your first few years of funding you hire staff and recruit graduate students or postdoctoral trainees to help with the research so there are actual JOBS at risk.
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
At which point they get another layer of review. Depending on the specific agency where you're submitting, your "payline" - the % of proposals recommended for funding - might be as low as 7%, which means that you have to do better than 93% of proposals submitted that cycle
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Darby Saxbe
@darbysaxbe
Jan 28, 2025
Replying to @darbysaxbe
It can take years to get funded, and the whole process involves not just you, the investigator, but also your collaborators, the grants office at your university that has to approve everything including your budget, the peer reviewers, and the whole staff at NIH.
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