Grant Review

Grant Proposal Review

Routes a grant proposal to an independent, fresh-context reviewer that scores it against the official NIH or NSF criteria and returns a structured review. This skill is a thin dispatcher: it decides how to run the reviewer and in which mode. The review procedure, criteria, scoring rubrics, and output templates all live in references/ and are loaded by the reviewer, not duplicated here.

When to use

Activate when the user wants feedback on a grant proposal (specific aims, research strategy, project description) evaluated against NIH or NSF review criteria.

Why a fresh-context reviewer

Review validity depends on independence: a reviewer that shares the conversation that produced the proposal is biased toward it. Run the reviewer in a separate context and pass only framing (proposal path, mechanism/agency, resubmission status, target program), never the authoring rationale. This is also why the reviewer is a subagent on tools that support one, and an inline procedure where they do not.

Modes (user decides each run)

• Single (default): one independent reviewer applies the full procedure end to end.
• Panel (opt-in): spawn N independent reviewers in parallel, then a synthesis pass. Trigger on "mock study section", "panel review", or an explicit request for multiple reviewers. NIH: 3 reviewers; NSF: 2-3 panelists. Each reviewer scores independently from references/; a final chair pass reconciles them into one output. Surface genuine disagreement rather than blindly averaging scores.

Dispatch

Pick the branch for the current tool. In every branch the reviewer follows references/review-procedure.md.

• Claude Code: Task(subagent_type: "grant-review", ...) passing the proposal path, mechanism, and mode. For panel mode, launch one Task per reviewer role in parallel, then a final synthesis Task.
• Codex CLI: plugin installation exposes this skill, not a Codex subagent. To use a fresh-context Codex reviewer, first copy agents/templates/grant-review.toml to ~/.codex/agents/ or .codex/agents/, then invoke that configured agent if the current Codex surface supports /agent. For panel mode, ensure max_threads covers the reviewer count. If no Codex subagent is configured or available, use the fallback branch.
• Copilot CLI: plugin installation exposes this skill and, through .github/plugin/plugin.json, the .agent.md reviewer in agents/templates/. Invoke that configured agent when the current Copilot surface supports custom agents; use /fleet for panel mode when available. If running outside a plugin install, copy agents/templates/grant-review.agent.md to .github/agents/ or ~/.copilot/agents/. If no custom agent is available, use the fallback branch.
• Fallback (no subagent support, or the user wants an interactive in-thread review): first locate the rubric ($CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/skills/grant-review/references, else find . -type d -path '*/skills/grant-review/references' | head -1); if it cannot be found, stop and tell the user to install the grant plugin rather than reviewing from memory. Then follow references/review-procedure.md directly in this context.

The brain (do not duplicate into dispatch or agent shells)

• references/review-procedure.md -- step-by-step procedure: mechanism ID, ingest, score, synthesize, output.
• references/nih-review-criteria.md, references/nih-career-training-criteria.md, references/nsf-review-criteria.md -- criteria and scoring.
• references/review-best-practices.md -- calibration and common reviewer comments.
• references/review-output-templates.md -- NIH and NSF output format.
• examples/sample-nih-r01-review.md -- worked review; examples/sample-r01-aims.md -- sample proposal input for testing.
• Sister skill manuscript:humanizer -- AI-writing patterns to flag in grant prose.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: neuromechanist
• Source: neuromechanist/research-skills
• License: BSD-3-Clause

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.