Significant Impact: from K Award to Your First Big R01
Significant Impact: from K Award to Your First Big R01

Significant Impact: from K Award to Your First Big R01

Sarah Dobson

Overview
Episodes

Details

For women faculty, transitioning from a Career Development (K) Award to your first NIH R01 is about more than just writing a fundable grant. Host and expert NIH grant consultant Sarah Dobson guides early career researchers through the roadmap for overcoming the hurdles of being a woman in academia and avoiding the K cliff. She’s ready to see passionate and tenacious women K Award recipients level up to R01 funding and build impactful, thriving, and fulfilling research careers. Visit https://sarahdobson.co to learn more.

Recent Episodes

Whose Career Are You Building?
MAY 28, 2026
Whose Career Are You Building?
Your calendar is full. You're productive. But if someone asked you to describe your research vision in two sentences, you might struggle. In this episode, I explore why so many early career researchers end up building careers out of other people's priorities, and why the pattern is so hard to break. Part of it is your own conditioning to be helpful and accommodating. And part of it is that the people around you were socialized to expect exactly that from you. I introduce the golden goose conc...
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19 MIN
Mentors Can't Do This For You
MAY 14, 2026
Mentors Can't Do This For You
Making the transition from mentored researcher to independent investigator requires things your mentors can help you with and things they can't. In this episode, I break down what this transition actually asks of you, where mentoring is really beneficial, and where even the best mentors hit a limit. I share stories from three graduates who had outstanding mentorship and still needed something more to develop the clarity, self-trust, and judgment this career stage demands. If you have great me...
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14 MIN
Ten Lessons From Ten Years
APR 30, 2026
Ten Lessons From Ten Years
Tomorrow this business turns 10 years old. And somewhere along the way, I also passed 100 podcast episodes without any fanfare. So today I'm pausing to mark both milestones and share 10 lessons from the journey — on finding your focus, trusting your instincts, being reliable, saying what's true, building consistency, finding your people, creating environments worth working in, staying in dialogue with yourself, growing into someone new, and defining success for yourself. These are the lessons...
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29 MIN
The Skills That Transfer No Matter Where the Funding Comes From
APR 16, 2026
The Skills That Transfer No Matter Where the Funding Comes From
If you're a K award recipient, chances are your career has been geared towards securing NIH funding. In this episode, I make the case that the skills you're building as you transition from mentored researcher to independent investigator — clarifying your research direction, developing self-trust and leadership, thinking strategically, learning to communicate the value of your work — are career-wide skills, not NIH-specific skills. The "R" in K to R is a career milestone, not a specific grant ...
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19 MIN
When Every Funding Opportunity Feels Urgent (And How to Know Which Ones Actually Are)
APR 2, 2026
When Every Funding Opportunity Feels Urgent (And How to Know Which Ones Actually Are)
If you're a K award recipient right now, your inbox probably feels like a minefield of "opportunities" — RFAs, collaboration requests, suggestions from mentors — and every single one feels urgent. Meanwhile, you're toggling between two competing feelings: a defeated, what's-the-point nihilism and a panicky, I'm-running-out-of-time anxiety. In this episode, I talk about why those feelings are coexisting right now, what it costs you when you let panic drive your grant decisions, and how to tell...
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28 MIN