In this practical workshop, participants will learn what is needed to write a proposal for a K grant involving intervention optimization, including analytic approach (e.g., DAIVE, outcomes, value function). Attendees will be provided examples from successful K applications and receive individualized grant writing tips from experts working in the intervention optimization paradigm. Participants who complete the grant proposal writing workshop have the opportunity to receive individualized, detailed feedback on their aims by course instructors.

To ensure a personalized experience for all learners, and maximize small group discussions, this course will have a capped enrollment.

This is a synchronous workshop that will be held on Zoom. Please be sure you carefully review the content on this page before applying.

Prerequisites: A PhD, MD, or equivalent degree, and graduate training in applied statistics at least through multiple regression.

It is strongly recommended that learners review our online course, “MOST from a Conceptual Perspective,” before attending.

Training Faculty: Kate Guastaferro, Ph.D., MPH; Jillian Strayhorn, Ph.D.

Session Date: Friday, October 23rd

Session Time: 9am – 5pm ET

Registration Fee: This workshop is funded in part by a NIDA R25 grant (R25DA049699). To help offset the remaining expenses, there is a registration fee of $900 per participant.

Contact Details: cadiotrainings@nyu.edu

Frequently Asked Questions

Please make sure to review these FAQs before submitting your application. Still have questions? Reach out to us at cadiotrainings@nyu.edu.

The objective of this course is to help you gain the skills you need to write a successful K award application, when the goal of the K award work is to prepare you for an R01 to conduct an optimization trial. We will help you to clarify your research and training objectives, and to frame them in a way that is accessible to reviewers, based on our interactions with many K award candidates. We strictly limit the number of attendees to enable small-group and individual attention.

We assume that at a minimum you have completed the asynchronous online course, “MOST from a Conceptual Perspective.” You may benefit more from the course if you have also completed an introductory training on the multiphase optimization strategy (MOST), such as one of our synchronous online trainings, but we realize you may wish to include this in the K award training plan. 

The course will touch on general grantsmanship strategies that are directly related to intervention optimization work, and much of what we discuss will be generalizable to grant proposals on other topics. However, this is not a substitute for a general course on grantsmanship.

Postdoctoral fellows are welcome in this course. We regret that we do not allow graduate students in the course. (As always, anyone can take our asynchronous online courses. As of September 1, 2026, anyone is welcome in the introductory course.)

We want to make sure that attendees of this course get the individual attention they need to learn how to write a successful K award application. For this reason, we have limited the number of attendees so that we can maintain a high faculty-to-attendee ratio.

There were several reasons. First, many people who have attended our trainings have told us they wanted both more time to discuss the fundamentals, AND more time to discuss how to write a grant proposal involving intervention optimization. Second, many people tell us that they need time to process the introductory material before they can think seriously about a grant proposal. Third, we have found that early career people planning K-series applications and later-career people writing R-level and similar applications have different training needs. Fourth, to provide the best experience, we do not want any of our synchronous trainings to be too long.

For these reasons, we have changed our introductory course so that it emphasizes the fundamentals of intervention optimization via MOST, and are rolling out two new courses focusing on how to write grant proposals involving intervention optimization.

We want to make sure that attendees of this course get the individual attention they need to learn how to write a successful K award application. For this reason, we have limited the number of attendees so that we can maintain a high faculty-to-attendee ratio.

We would love to have you in the training. Contact us in advance so that we can work together to make the training a pleasant and productive experience for you.

Certificates can be made available upon request to participants who maintained adequate attendance.

Ready to get started?

Additional Training Opportunities