Email Your Program Officer Posted on January 20, 2009 Communicating early with your program officer is essential, states Dr. Yonette Thomas.

The ideal thing is to go to the NIDA website. So you'd go through the division, and if you were to click on the Division of Epidemiology Services and Prevention Research, you can actually click on each branch, the epidemiology, the prevention, and the services branch. And you actually get to see who are the program officers in the branch, what their areas of expertise are, so that helps you to see who you can talk to, "Oh so and so may be interested."

But even if you don't actually see specifically what you're looking for, I always tell people to call me up and say or send me an e-mail saying, "I'm so and so," and I get lots of those, "and I'm interested in this." And invariably the person will get an e-mail back from me saying, "That sounds very interesting. Why don't you send me a one-page thought piece of what you have in mind, and then when you send that, we'll schedule time on the phone to talk about that."

And that's starting, that gives me an immediate sense of what it is they're looking for, and I enjoy, really, that's part of my job that I like. I love talking to people and brainstorming with them. And then, because I'm the Branch Chief, then I think of who in my branch would be most appropriate to work with that person.

That's really strongly encouraged because often times people think, "Oh I'll just submit an application, and we'll see where it falls." Not a great idea. Success rate is not often great with those individuals because actually you can learn a lot from talking to your program officer, and we actually enjoy being helpful. I mean we can brainstorm with the person, offer ideas. We can't give them specifics about somebody else's grant, but we know what we've seen and what we know, what review expects. And all those things and we can give them a lot of information to help them along the way.