# research-grants

> Write competitive research proposals for NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA, and Taiwan NSTC with agency-specific formatting, review criteria, budget preparation, broader impacts, significance statements, innovation narratives, and submission compliance.

**Use case**: Draft competitive grant proposals for major funding agencies

**Canonical URL**: https://agentcookbooks.com/skills/research-grants/

**Topics**: claude-code, skills, science, scientific-writing

**Trigger phrases**: "write a grant proposal", "draft an NIH application", "NSF broader impacts", "write specific aims", "DARPA proposal"

**Source**: [K-Dense AI](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/research-grants)

**License**: MIT

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## What it does

`research-grants` is a Claude Code skill from K-Dense AI's [scientific-agent-skills repo](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills). It turns Claude into a grant-writing collaborator that knows the specific requirements, review criteria, and formatting rules for major funding agencies — NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA, and Taiwan NSTC.

A session produces targeted proposal sections: specific aims pages, significance and innovation narratives, research strategy sections, broader impacts, and budget justifications — each calibrated to the agency's reviewer scoring criteria. The skill handles the agency-specific page limits, formatting requirements, and compliance details that make or break submissions.

## When to use it

Reach for it when:

- You're starting a new grant application and need to structure the narrative around the funder's review criteria
- You have a rough research plan and need to translate it into the significance/innovation/approach structure NIH reviewers expect
- You're writing NSF broader impacts and want language that addresses the review criteria without sounding boilerplate

When *not* to reach for it:

- Scientific paper writing — use `scientific-writing` for manuscripts
- Generating the preliminary data itself — the skill writes about data, it doesn't produce it

## Install

Copy the `SKILL.md` from K-Dense AI's [research-grants folder](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/research-grants) into `.claude/skills/research-grants/` in your project.

Trigger phrases: "write a grant proposal", "draft an NIH application", "NSF broader impacts", "write specific aims".

## What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. **Agency and section scoping.** Identify the target agency, funding mechanism, and which sections need drafting. Claude retrieves the current review criteria and page limits for that mechanism.
2. **Section drafting.** Each section is drafted with the reviewer's scoring lens in mind — significance frames the gap, innovation articulates the advance, approach maps methods to aims with contingency plans.
3. **Compliance check.** Claude reviews the draft against formatting requirements (margins, font size, page count) and flags anything that would trigger an administrative return.

## Receipts

**Where it works well:**
- Specific aims pages — the one-page structure where framing and logic density matter most; Claude produces well-organized first drafts quickly
- Agency-specific boilerplate like data management plans and resource sharing statements, where the required elements are well-defined

**Where it backfires:**
- Highly novel research areas where Claude's knowledge of the current funding landscape may be out of date
- Budget preparation for complex subcontracts — the numbers need to come from your institution's grants office

**Pattern that works:** write the specific aims first with this skill, then use the approved aims as the anchor for all other sections in the application.

## Source and attribution

Originally authored by [K-Dense Inc.](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI). The canonical SKILL.md lives in the [`research-grants` folder](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/research-grants) of their public scientific-agent-skills repository.

License: MIT. Install, adapt, and redistribute with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner's perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.