About the course
You've been told you need a career development plan. A mentoring committee. Training goals. A timeline to independence. But nobody taught you how to write about yourself as the central argument of a grant application. That's the K Inversion — and it's the single biggest shift between writing an R01 and writing a K award. In an R01, the research leads. In a K, the reviewer is asking a different question: Should we invest in this person? Most early career scientists approach the K the way they were trained to write every other grant — lead with the science, tack on the career plan, list the mentors. And most K applications read exactly like that: disconnected pieces that don't tell a story. This two-module course teaches you how to flip that. What you'll walk away with: The K Inversion framework — how to position yourself as a developing scientist without it reading like a personal essay or a CV in paragraph form. A career development plan that reviewers actually believe — because it's built on a coherent story about where you're going, not a checklist of activities. A mentoring committee that signals strategic thinking — not just a list of impressive names, but a team that makes sense for your specific developmental gaps. Training goals that connect to your research aims — so reviewers see one integrated trajectory, not two separate documents stapled together. This course is for you if: You're a postdoctoral fellow or early career faculty member preparing a K01, K08, K23, K99, or other NIH career development award. You've been told your career development plan "needs work" but nobody can tell you what that actually means. Or you're resubmitting and need to understand what reviewers were really asking for. Who built this: Lisa Carter-Bawa, PhD, MPH, APRN, FAAN, FSBM — behavioral scientist, NIH grant reviewer, and creator of the Lost in Translation Grantsmanship Curriculum. She's reviewed grants from both sides of the table and built this module for the scientists she mentors who keep asking the same question: How do I write about myself? Ready to start? Enroll now and get immediate access to both modules and the companion workbook.
Lisa Carter-Bawa, PhD, APRN, ANP-C, FAAN, FSBM
I'm Lisa Carter-Bawa — a behavioral scientist, NIH grant reviewer, and someone who has sat on both sides of the funding table. I started my career as a nurse practitioner, working in ERs, ICUs, labor and delivery, and hospice before founding the first NP-owned primary care practice in Kentucky. I went back for my PhD, completed a T32 behavioral oncology postdoc, earned my MPH from Yale summa cum laude, and built a research program in lung cancer screening, stigma, and shared decision-making that now spans over $23 million in funded research and 91 peer-reviewed publications. None of that happened in a straight line. I wrote grants that didn't get funded. I sat in rooms where I was the only person who looked like me. I learned the hard way that knowing your science and knowing how to translate it for reviewers are two completely different skills — and that nobody teaches you the second one. That gap is what led me to create the Lost in Translation Grantsmanship Curriculum. I kept watching brilliant early career scientists write applications that buried their best ideas under jargon, hedging, and templates that stripped out everything that made their work compelling. And when it came to K awards specifically, I saw the same pattern over and over: scientists who could write beautifully about their research but froze when they had to write about themselves. As an NIH reviewer, I've read K applications where the career development plan felt like an afterthought — and others where it was the most persuasive page in the entire application. The difference was never talent. It was always translation. That's what I teach. Not templates. Not formulas. The inner shift that lets you write about who you're becoming as a scientist with the same confidence you bring to writing about your science. My biggest goal is simple: I want fewer brilliant scientists to lose funding because nobody taught them how to tell their own story.
Stop writing your K award like an R01.
Enroll now and get immediate access to both modules, the companion workbook, and a framework you'll use for every career development application you write.
$97.00