USC Dornsife’s grant strategist explains how she can help junior faculty secure funding

Key takeaways:

• Grant strategist Heidi Smith Parker works with junior faculty to obtain grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health and other governmental agencies
• Drawing on her background as a scientist, Parker helps scholars frame their work in a way that clearly illustrates its importance and improves success rates
• In 2020, Parker helped five faculty members apply for NSF CAREER Awards — and all five received the grants

Before she attended graduate school, Heidi Smith Parker worked in the lab of a famous scientist while he was writing his autobiography. In her spare time, she edited the manuscript, and though she didn’t know it yet, that one-off experience was decisive in shaping her future career.

“With that job I found I liked the idea of scientific storytelling. There are a lot of bright people who are excellent scientists, but they’re often less focused on how critical it is to also be able to tell a compelling story,” Parker says.

Now, years later, Parker has made a career out of explaining science — specifically scientific projects — to others. As a grant strategist at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, she helps USC Dornsife faculty members polish their proposals and secure funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.

For Parker, 2020 was an exceptionally good year. Of the 34 grants she worked on, 21 were funded, a success rate of 62% — well above her personal goal of 35% and USC Dornsife’s overall estimated success rate of about 15%. And, all five people she worked with on applying for NSF CAREER awards — grants allocated to faculty members in the earlier stages of their professional career — received them.

Helping junior faculty

Being a grant strategist wasn’t Parker’s initial career goal: She obtained a Ph.D. in biological sciences from Columbia University with the idea of eventually running her own lab. But on completing a postdoc at the University of Texas, Austin, she began to examine other options after one of her advisors pointed out that she had a special talent for communicating science and working with people.

Parker decided to find a job that drew on both her specialized scientific knowledge and her communications skills. Grant consulting seemed a natural fit. Her first position was at Michigan State University, where she spent two years learning and perfecting her craft before moving to USC Dornsife.

Dion Dickman, associate professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife, notes that Parker’s background in neuroscience is an invaluable asset.

“She’ll do line editing, but she’ll also give some comments about the aims of the project, such as, ‘Why is this line of experimentation really important? And in the end, what are you going to learn about it?’” he says. “And that’s where the real value is — her being able to understand the scientific background of a project and being able to unlock how to position it.”

Parker says grant strategy is especially important for younger faculty, whose future career trajectories depend on securing funding and getting published. Many — if not most — new faculty have no training in grant writing. As she edits and consults on a grant, Parker does her best to impart what she has learned in her six years spent working on federal grants, setting up the faculty member for long-term funding success.

It’s uncommon for a university to have a full-time grant strategist, and faculty members are sometimes unaware her services are free.

“I speak at a lot of the junior faculty events, and I do my best to reach out to all the new hires within Dornsife,” she says. “I spend about 10 to 20 hours on each grant, so I explain how this is a really a gift card USC has given you, and you need to be sure to use it!”

To junior faculty, Parker has a few bits of advice: Don’t be afraid to ask her for help with grant proposals, and don’t allow “imposter syndrome” to take root.

“I think that a common mistake is that people feel too shy to ask for help in the beginning,” she says. “Don’t feel embarrassed to ask other faculty to see their successful grant proposals, and don’t feel shy about asking for help from me. Often when I reach out to people, they say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know about you. I wish I did.’”