COMSEP Grant Program

COMSEP offers two grant application cycles, one in the Spring and one in the Fall. This Fall, COMSEP is offering 2 types of grants to members:

COMSEP GRANT: to promote and support innovative educational scholarship that is designed, implemented, and evaluated by COMSEP members. Selected educational grant(s) will be supported for a total of $5,000 each. Grant funding is contingent upon available funds.

COMSEP APPD/LEARN GRANT: creates an opportunity for a larger grant promoting multi-institutional educational scholarship that spans the continuum of undergraduate medical education to graduate medical education (UME to GME). Study subjects are learners (medical students and residents), although UME educators could also be included. Selected educational grant(s) will be supported up to $15,000. Grant funding is contingent upon available funds.

This is an exciting opportunity for COMSEP members to advance their educational scholarship with innovative research, to expand the scholarly activities of COMSEP members, departments and the COMSEP organization as a whole. See specific information on each grant type below. Please email the Chair of the COMSEP Grant Committee Caroline Paul, MD at info@comsep.org with questions or if you would like assistance in networking with collaborators within or
outside of COMSEP.

COMSEP Grant

Purpose
The purpose of this initiative is to promote and support innovative educational scholarship that is designed, implemented, and evaluated by COMSEP members. Selected educational grant(s) will be supported for a total of $5,000 each. Grant funding is contingent upon available funds.

Mentorship and its associated feedback and guidance are important to COMSEP and so each grant application should include information about the principal investigator’s project mentor, described in greater detail below. The total funding period of the grant is 24 months; hence projects that can be completed in 18 months are advised so that the remainder of the time can be used for data analysis/presentation and manuscript preparation.

Grant Instructions

Grants Checklist

Acknowledgements
This grant program is supported, in part, by generous donations from the Richard T. Sarkin Foundation, celebrating the late Dr. Sarkin's commitment to creative and innovative teaching and learning in Pediatrics, from private donations, and from Aquifer, a worldwide consortium of medical educators working together to transform health care education through the effective use of technology in teaching and assessment (https://aquifer.org/).

Eligibility
The principal investigator of the COMSEP grant and any Site-investigators must be a member of COMSEP at the time of application and throughout the funding period; to learn how to become a member click on the following link: https://www.comsep.org/become-a-member/. The topic of the grant proposal must align with COMSEP’s mission and strategic plan which can be found at this link: https://www.comsep.org/vision-sp-guiding-principles/

Previous COMSEP grantees are welcome to apply with a new project or clearly delineated "next steps" in a previously completed project. Slicing of data is viewed upon negatively. Projects that have not been completed at the time of application are not eligible for funding. PIs must disclose if their projects are being supported by other funds; projects receiving funding from other sources may still be eligible for a COMSEP grant if the COMSEP award would extend or deepen the work and does not request budgetary allocation for work that the other grant is already supporting.

Confidentiality Statement
Committee discussion of grant proposals is confidential, with feedback provided solely to the project PI by the Committee Chair, and shared with the project mentor(s), if the PI so desires. The Committee’s dedication to a completely fair and impartial review process requires that Committee members cannot serve as PI or mentor on any grant submitted for review, and if listed as a co-investigator or has a role in a multi-institution proposal, or currently works at the institution of a submitted proposal, that Committee member recuses themselves from the grant review process for that application cycle before the application’s submission. The proposal will be considered nonresponse to Committee membership guidelines if this guideline is not followed and the proposal will not be accepted for review.

COMSEP APPD/LEARN Grant

Purpose: The joint COMSEP/APPD-LEARN grant creates an opportunity for a larger grant promoting multi-institutional educational scholarship that spans the continuum of undergraduate medical education to graduate medical education (UME to GME). Study subjects are learners (medical students and residents), although UME educators could also be included.

Prior to submitting your proposal, applicants MUST contact Alan Schwartz (alansz@uic.edu) to discuss the scope of your proposal and costs. When contacting Alan, a draft of your abstract should be included. A letter of support for your grant from Alan must accompany your submission.

Due to the unique focus of this grant, it may not be as intuitive of a grant application. Dr. Veronica Gonzalez (veronica.m.gonzalez@uth.tmc.edu) and Dr. Molly Rideout (molly.rideout@med.uvm.edu) who have received this grant have graciously offered to answer any questions related to the application process and working with APPD.