Disclaimer: Obviously, this is all based on my experience. Results may vary.

To cut to the chase, you can:
  • Access my institutional Letter of Intent here.
  • Access my completed application here.

What is an F99/K00 Fellowship?
What RFA I used: RFA-CA-19-057

From the RFA I used for my application:

The purpose of the NCI Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition Award (F99/K00) is to encourage and retain outstanding graduate students recognized by their institutions for their high potential and strong interest in pursuing careers as independent cancer researchers. The award will facilitate the transition of talented graduate students into successful cancer research postdoctoral appointments, and provide opportunities for career development activities relevant to their long-term career goals of becoming independent cancer researchers.

Essentially, the point is to provide funding that keeps graduate students in the academic pipeline. The natural (or at least, encouraged) next step/assumption is that you will apply for the K99/R00 funding mechanism. At least, that is my understanding. But this also gives you a lot of opportunities for your next stage as a postdoc since you will be coming into your lab already paid for for the first 4 years. Since you must first be nominated by your institute, the amount of work needed to give this opportunity a shot is definitely worth it. You write a letter of intent, if you are selected, you have a reasonable shot and you put in a lot more effort. If you are not selected, you only spent time writing a 1-2 page letter of intent.

To bring up the stereotypical quote for something like this, ...


My Previous Experience Applying for Fellowships

Before I applied for the NCI’s F99/K00 fellowship, I had previously applied for the NSF GRFP and an NIH NIDDK F31, both during my 2nd year of grad school. Both applications were unsuccessful. I think a few of consistent pieces of feedback I got for both applications were:

  1. The research ideas were good but not thoroughly thought out.
  2. The reviewers were not impressed with my training and career development plans.
  3. The reviewers were concerned about my advisor’s ability to provide mentoring due to their busy schedule.
  4. In each application, my undergraduate grades were brought up. This was a frustrating point to me because during my undergraduate studies, I was involved in lab research and enjoyed the research aspects much more than actual classwork. As a result, my grades suffered (many C’s, failed OChem). One important point that my advisor made though in response to this, was that once I got a publication out, reviewers would stop bringing up my grades (which is true).

While these were not successful, I do think that applying for these previous opportunities before the F99 was important and helpful. Writing an F-series fellowship application is a huge undertaking and given the timeline I was under for the F99 application, it would have been crazy to be writing my first F-series fellowship application for the F99. And for context, my impact score was 53 on my original NIDDK F31 application. During the time between my unsuccessful GRFP and F31, I did successfully get funding through an NIDDK T32, with the focus being “Computational Approaches to Diabetes and Metabolism”.


Getting Started: Submitting my Institutional Letter of Intent

I had previously discussed with my advisor my interest in applying for the F99 fellowship, especially as I had a friend in grad school who was awarded the F99 two years before, and a post-doc in our lab was on the K00 portion of their fellowship. For whatever reason, I did not find out about the institutional competition for the F99 application until Nov 7, 2019, and the internal application was due Nov 14th. Whoever was selected then had to submit their full F99 application by Dec 4th ( ❗ – so in my case, it was really fortunate that I had already applied for an F-series fellowship before and had started a new F31 application a few months before). Luckily, the internal application was pretty straight-forward as the only documents requested were my NIH Biosketch and a Letter of Intent.

By this point, I had already completed my first publication from grad school, which had been posted on bioRxiv, and we had just submitted the revisions for this paper to the journal. I had also participated in a couple of collaborative projects with several that were either already published or undergoing revisions with a journal. In my Letter of Intent, I made sure to emphasize these publications. Another big point I tried to sell was how my research was interdisciplinary – where I utilized mostly computational approaches to solving metabolic questions, but at the same time collaborated closely with a lot of wet lab biologists. At the time, I believe the NCI had recently announced some of their dedicated initiatives for Big Data in Cancer Research, which was another point I tried to emphasize here.


Writing my Application

On Nov 15th, I received the news that I had been selected to be the University of Utah/Huntsman Cancer Institute’s applicant for that cycle. Which was exciting, yet horrifying, since that meant I had just about 3 weeks to get everything together and submit my application. On top of all of this, I was going to be out of town Nov 18th - Dec 2nd for a conference and then a vacation right after with my partner and her parents. Fortunately, my original plan had been to apply again for an F31 during the Fall of 2019, so I had already begun this application to some extent.

Immediately after I found out I was selected, I emailed my letter writers for letters of recommendation and reached out to the post-doctoral fellow in our lab and the other graduate friend, and they were gracious enough to send me their F99 applications to use as guidance. I had also previously read Jean Fan's excellent blog post outlining tips and tricks for the F99 application. Additionally, Dr. Fan's application can be found on the linked blog post, as well as a link to Open Grants.

Another initial step I took when I started writing my F99 application was to re-read the reviews from my previously unsuccessful F31 application. As I already outlined above, there were some particular points of feedback that stood out to me from my previous application and, luckily, point #4 from above was taken care of as I had a first author publication in the works. To work on the remaining points listed above, I focused on three “lines of attack” for preparing my application:

  1. Emphasize points of interest for the funding agency

    Obviously, it needs to be clear to the funding agency that funding your research will advance their goals. To address this point, I tried to emphasize in each document (cover letter, research plan, training plan, etc.) that my research was interdisciplinary and would produce valuable tools and research that would help us better understand the complex systems of cancer metabolism. I also made sure to emphasize that while cancer metabolism is a very established field, a huge hurdle to accelerating advances was a lack of computational tools for analyzing these data, and pointed out a semi-recent review by Ralph DeBerardinis and Navdeep Chandel (Sci Adv, 2016) that made this point clear. I also made sure to mention my co-mentor’s expertise in computer science and network modeling in nearly every section of my application (take-away: any points you want to emphasize in your application should be mentioned in every section of your application where appropriate). Make sure your reviewer's remember those points!

    Another point I wanted to emphasize based on previous feedback was my mentor’s ability to provide mentoring based on the “large group of trainees working in the lab”. This point I tried to emphasize mainly in my training plan.

    I am extremely fortunate to work in Dr. Rutter’s lab, where I am given a great amount of trust and independence with my project and the its direction. I meet with Dr. Rutter one-on-one once a week to discuss ideas and experimental plans, and also frequently in person or via email other times throughout the week. Dr. Rutter has always provided prompt feedback that has been invaluable as I develop my projects. Dr. Rutter has truly become a mentor in every sense of the term, and someone I have learned from immeasurably. I also meet with the Rutter lab Big Data group every week to discuss the ideas proposed in this application and their progress. I am also able to provide feedback for my peers in this venue. I present my research often in lab meeting to get feedback on the direction of my projects. These meetings have been consequential to the development of my ideas as the members of the lab come from diverse backgrounds and have valuable perspectives. Additionally, I have cultivated a network of computational biologists at the University of Utah and often reach out to them with questions. The University of Utah has a strong collaborative spirit, therefore when my established network is unable to provide the necessary guidance, it is easy to reach out to someone with the necessary expertise at the University and they have always welcomed these interactions. For example, before presenting my research to a more computational audience, I meet with this network to hone my presentation for scientists from a computational background. Not only do these interactions help improve the research that I perform, but they also provide me with training to present my ideas and results in a concise and clear manner and defend those ideas in front of experienced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and senior scientists.

    I also tried to emphasize my collaborator network and the feedback I have been able to receive from them to supplement the training from my advisor.

  2. Organization/readability

    Another theme from my previous application that I felt was common was the lack of clarity. Sure, I thought I had been clear, but I know what I am thinking and the context behind my thoughts, so obviously what I thought was clear was not. In looking at a friend’s successful F99 application, one striking pattern I saw in their application was the usage of tables and sub-section headers. With this in mind, I tried to make my Training Plan very organized and succinct, using headers such as “Research Development”, “Computational Training”, “Science Communication”, “Leadership”. I feel like this helped my overall organization of thoughts and ideas, and even if something was not totally clear to a reviewer, the theme was there underlined and in bold. I also included a table of my timeline and the milestones I wanted to reach during my training. I maybe also overused bolded text, but I do think it really helps emphasize the important points I wanted to make in my application.

  3. Feedback

    The final concrete theme I want to emphasize in preparing my application was getting feedback. This was particularly important given the accelerated timeline on I was on in preparing the application. In all, I think I remember three people giving me feedback on my Research Plan: 1) the post-doc in our lab on the K00-phase of their fellowship, 2) a fellow graduate student who was most familiar with my research and could make sure the key tenets of my project were clear and well-thought-out, and 3) my partner, who coincidentally is also in the Rutter lab.

  4. Other

    Another interesting point of concern in preparing my application was that I might be emphasizing my collaborative project too much. I think luckily more and more people are recognizing the importance of collaborative research more and placing less emphasis on “genius science”. My advisor let me know though that this is potentially a point some reviewer could view as a weakness. Thus, I made sure to emphasize this point in my Training Plan with the following:

    In addition to the papers I will publish as first author, and to make full use of my unique background in computational metabolism, I plan to work on 2-4 collaboration projects per year that will lead to additional coauthor papers. While I have been able to contribute significantly to each of these projects, it has not deterred me from maintaining a high level of productivity on my personal projects.

    And,

    Make sure you follow the Fellowship (F) instructions in the SF424 (R&R) Application Guide. Read through every section and make sure you have formatted everything correctly, included all the information asked for, and so on!

    Hopefully, these points are useful and give an alternative perspective to someone considering applying for an F99 fellowship. Particularly, it is low-cost to write a Letter of Intent for your institutional competition (assuming that is all they require in addition to your biosketch) and if you are selected, there is a relatively reasonable chance to be awarded the fellowship since you are only competing against one possible applicant from (in the case of the NCI) around 70 NCI-Designated Cancer Centers.

You can access my application here.



Application Feedback and Waiting for the Final Notice

So, long story short, I submitted my application in December 2019 and then waited. And waited. And waited. Also, a few months after my application submission, the COVID pandemic hit, and so then I had questions like “are they going to cut funding?”, “is this going to complicate the review?”, etc. I probably checked eRA commons hundreds of times. Finally, reviews were released April 22, 2020 and I received my Notice of Award July 22, 2020 with a start date of Aug 1, 2020. And to be honest, I don’t know if this is the general timeline (like getting no other indication of the award until the NOA a week before the start date) or if this was a delayed timeline due to all things COVID.

For my F99 application, I got an impact score of 19 (a big improvement from 53 from my previous F31!). It definitely wasn't a perfect application, and some of the same issues I ran into earlier were mentioned, but but instead of all of the reviewers bringing something up, usually only one reviewer would mention a given weakness and didn't seem to emphasize the point too much.



Overall Timeline
Institute LOI Deadline: 11/14/2019
Application Submission: 12/04/2019
Reviews Recieved: 04/22/2020
NOA: 7/22/2020
Start Date: 08/01/2020


Conclusion

I know this is a case of survivor bias, but you should apply! It is definitely worth it, and you never know what will happen! I definitely thought it was a long-shot, but I'm glad I did it. And I know a lot of people with F99's that had previously received an F31 beforehand, but that is not always the case! I definitely didn't have one, and I know of others personally who didn't have one beforehand either!


Read: I still have no clue what I'm doing...

Let me know if you have any questions! I am happy to answer application-related questions, and, based on schedule, review parts of your application if you decide to apply and want some feedback. You can email me (maybe add a subject line of “F99 question” or something to make sure it doesn’t get lost in my inbox), and feel free to pester me if you don’t hear back.