Application

Letter of Intent

Interested teams must submit a Letter of Intent (LOI) by March 7, 2025.

The Letter of Intent (LOI) must include the following items and is limited to 2 single-spaced pages including tables and/or figures; Use Arial 11-point font size or larger; minimum 1.0 inch for all margins for all pages. 

  1. List your team members, their role, and their organizational affiliation (BJC or WashU)
  2. Define your team’s identified Problem Statement
    • What current problem is your team trying to solve?
    • Provide supporting evidence of this current problem – metrics, publications, etc.
  3. Present your team’s Innovative Solution
    • Include your hypothesis
  4. Describe your team’s Project Plan to test your Innovative Solution
  5. Share any stakeholders identified for your Idea, i.e. department leaders, etc.

Completed LOIs should be mailed in PDF format to bigideas@wustl.edu.

Application

Accepted letter of intent proposals will be invited to apply and detailed instructions will be sent to the Principal Investigator/Project Lead.

The Application will include the following items:

  1. Specific Aims
    • State concisely the hypothesis to be tested and the specific aim(s) to be achieved during the pilot award.
    • The aims must be reasonable to achieve during the one-year budget period of the grant.
  2. Significance and Innovation
    • Explain the importance of the problem or critical barrier to progress in the field that the proposed project addresses
    • Provide supporting evidence to the nature of the problem being addressed
  3. Approach
    • Describe the overall strategy, methodology, and analyses to be used to accomplish the specific aims of the project
    • Describe the metrics that will be used to track project impact including how the data will be collected, analyzed, and interpreted
    • Identify any potential problems or alternative strategies that may arise during the project
    • Please provide a timeline and milestones to be achieved to ensure project completion at the end of the academic year.
  4. Detailed Budget Plan and Justification

Former Big Ideas Applications

Letters of intent and applications of former winning Big Ideas teams have been posted to the WUSTL Grants Library.  Individuals with access to the WUSTL Grants Library can access these documents here under Institutional Grants and Big Ideas.

While the content of these documents can be relied upon for examples of winning Big Idea submissions, teams are required to comply with the new format for this year’s letters of intent and applications. Instructions will be included in the RedCap survey for each.

View previous applications