Notices

All PIs should have received notice of the results of your 2016 DEB Core Program preliminary proposals by now. Full proposal invitation notices were all sent out by the first week of May (ahead of schedule), giving those invited PIs a solid three months to prepare their full proposals. ‘Do Not Invite’ decisions began going out immediately thereafter and throughout the rest of May.

If you haven’t heard, go to fastlane.nsf.gov and log in. Then, select the options for “proposal functions” then “proposal status.” This should bring up your proposal info. If you were a Co-PI, check with the lead PI on your proposal: that person is designated to receive all of the notifications related to the submission.

If you are the lead PI and still have not heard anything AND do not see an updated proposal status in FastLane, then email your Program Officer/Program Director. Be sure to include the seven-digit proposal ID number of your submission in the message.

Process

All told, DEB took 1474 preliminary proposals to 10 panels during March and April of 2016. A big thank you to all of the panelists who served and provided much thoughtful discussion and reasoned recommendations. Note: if you’re interested in hearing a first-hand account of the DEB preliminary proposal panel process, check out this great post by Mike Kaspari.

Panelists received review assignments several weeks prior to the panels and prepared individual written reviews and individual scores. During the panel, each proposal was discussed by the assigned panelists and then presented to the entire panel for additional discussion and assignment to a rating category. Panels were presented two recommendation options for each preliminary proposal: Invite or Do Not Invite. Following discussion, the assigned panelists prepared a panel summary statement to synthesize the key points of the panel discussion and rationale for the assigned rating.

Both the individual written reviews and the panel summary statement are released to the PI of the preliminary proposal.

As we’ve discussed previously, the final decisions on the preliminary proposals are made by the programs with concurrence of senior management. These decisions take into account the panel recommendations, especially the substance of the discussions, as well as expectations for future award-making capacity based on the availability of funds, additional expected proposal load at the full proposal stage, and portfolio balance issues.

Results

These numbers are consistent with our goal of inviting the most promising projects while targeting a success rate of approximately 25% for the resulting full proposals that will be submitted this summer.

Big Picture

Comparing to the previous rounds of preliminary proposals…

…we see that the system has recovered somewhat from the initial flood of submissions. Moreover, the invite rate, and subsequent full proposal success rate, has stabilized in a range that reasonably balances against the effort required to produce each submission.