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. - Readability (run BEFORE the panel): one fresh-context reviewer restricted to clarity, with no merit scoring. Follow
references/readability-procedure.md; a panel can run clean while the first page still contains prose the PI cannot follow on first read. The default pass reports line-anchored, length-neutral rewrites for long chained sentences, ambiguous pronouns, premature terms or abbreviations, rhetorical inversions, and gratuitous self-undermining while preserving substantive limitations. If requested, the same reviewer can add the optional conciseness hunt as a second pass; do not fan out a second agent unless the caller asks for it. Conciseness rewrites must be strictly shorter while preserving every number, citation, qualification, and required element.