Stacy L ChinFounder, KeepYourEquity · I get the government to write you checks

Challenges of being an NIH SBIR Reviewer

28 Jun 2024 · 1 min

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In this brief segment, the speaker explains that NIH SBIR reviewers are volunteer experts drawn from a wide range of fields—including research, engineering, clinical practice, and entrepreneurship—who donate their time to assess grant applications. Reviewers must balance these duties with their primary full‑time occupations, and many, like the speaker, have run a startup while reviewing. The speaker also notes that a typical review assignment consists of a batch of roughly 10 to 12 SBIR proposals, highlighting the workload involved.

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NIH reviewers are volunteers that generously offer their time, resources, and expertise to help evaluate SBIR applications. And these reviewers come from diverse backgrounds and industries, including researchers, engineers, clinicians, other healthcare professionals, and even entrepreneurs running their own startup. And most of them have to juggle the NIH reviewing responsibilities alongside their full-time job. I can personally relate to this challenge when I was reviewing SBIR grants while juggling my own startup on the side. Sometimes reviewers can receive a batch from 10 to 12 SBIR applications to review