How Weil Makes An Idea A Reality

Written by Meagan Ramsey, MCIRCC Proposal Development Unit Manager

Dr. Neumar contacted the Weil Institute Proposal Development team in early October 2018 when he learned that the AHA opened their call for the Arrhythmias and Sudden Cardiac Death Strategically Focused Research Network, which is a large, complex, team science funding opportunity. By the end of October, we had carefully reviewed AHA’s documentation to begin planning the submission. Kevin Ward, M.D., director of the Weil Institute and a professor of emergency medicine and biomedical engineering at Michigan Medicine, and I worked with Dr. Neumar to identify a competitive team for M-RISE, and we set up a series of team meetings to keep us on track throughout the grant development process.

The Proposal Development team became an integral part of the proposal team, and we contributed by ensuring strong alignment with AHA’s requirements and vision; developing writing timelines, checklists, and templates; facilitating team meetings to help the group make key decisions collectively; collaborating with the lead grants administrators; and identifying additional U-M grant development resources. We also helped draft both technical and non-technical proposal documents, gathered support files including over 60 letters of support and biosketches, worked with Weil’s Marketing team on over 20 high-quality figures, and provided substantive editing on all technical portions of the proposal to ensure we had a clear and competitive grant submission. The whole team worked extremely hard between November 2018 to early February 2019 when we submitted the full proposal.

By mid-April, AHA contacted Dr. Neumar with news that the team had been selected to move on to the next round, which was a Reverse Site Visit. Over the next month, the Proposal Development team worked with the M-RISE team to plan their presentation (again in alignment with AHA’s requirements and vision), create slides in collaboration with Weil Institute marketing, and coordinate mock review sessions for the team to practice and refine their presentation. We were thrilled to learn that M-RISE was funded—their passion for this work could not be clearer, and their highly innovative vision and translational, multidisciplinary approach to prevent brain damage caused by out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a shining example of everything that the Weil Institute was designed for.

Moving Forward, Together

M-RISE utilized Weil’s Proposal Development and Marketing teams to write and submit the initial proposal and presentation for funding and will continue to benefit from working with Weil, having access to more than 200 MCIRCC members -  researchers, scientists, and clinicians  dedicated to finding innovative solutions in critical care.

“We’re thrilled to have been able to leverage Weil’s infrastructure to successfully compete for this award and to add the M-RISE research program to our institute’s work,” says Dr. Kevin Ward. “With such collaborative missions, strategies and researchers shared between the AHA, Weil and now M-RISE, we believe we can make a difference in the lives of sudden cardiac arrest patients.”