Erin Giles stepped up to the podium and gazed out at the 300 expectant faces in the hotel ballroom.

The movement science associate professor was nervous; she’d only given one presentation like this before, and she wasn’t sure if the type of work she did was what the organizers of the RISE UP for Breast Cancer Symposium were looking for.

But they’d been offering up to $50,000 for early-stage ideas in “Ideas to Implementation” (I2I), a Shark Tank-style competition where researchers who’d submitted the top-ranked proposals would give brief pitches to a panel of judges — and Giles had been chosen as one of four finalists to get to that stage. She could always use more grant money to support her research. So she took a deep breath; turned to face the investors, scientists, and patient advocates who made up the judging panel; and began to speak.

Seven minutes later, the ordeal was over. The judges left the room to converse.

“I didn’t really know what they were looking for or how they were grading,” Giles says. “When you submit a grant, you know the criteria and what’s required to get funded. You’re playing within the rules of the game. This was more of a black box.”

When the judges returned, they told Giles what they liked about her pitch, which involved identifying biomarkers to predict those most likely to experience significant weight loss and anti-breast cancer effects from tirzepatide, one of the new weight-loss medications (marketed as Zepbound for weight loss and Mounjaro for diabetes). Giles had suggested conducting tests in both animals and humans, and the panel asked that she focus on data in humans. But she’d have the full $50,000 to do so: She had won one of the contest’s Spark Idea Awards.

“I was shocked,” Giles says. “I didn’t think there was any way that what I was proposing even fit what they wanted, which was more of a product at the end. Taking a chance paid off.”

Other conference attendees came up to Giles afterward and gave her positive feedback as well. One even suggested working on an adjacent project together.

“The contest initiated ideas with other people, and that’s really the whole point of science,” Giles says. “We usually present findings from our completed studies at conferences, so presenting an early stage idea to a large group was great for exposure and could also lead to other opportunities and future collaborations.”

Giles will present her findings from the Spark grant at next year’s conference, a rapid turnaround that speaks to I2I’s goal of translating research to the real world more quickly.

Keeping things brief seemed to be the overall theme; Giles says a comparable $50,000 grant would usually require at least a four-page proposal while I2I’s application was shorter — more of an outline of the “big ideas” versus the “nitty-gritty details.”

“But it can take a long time to condense work down into an application that’s really short,” she adds. “And trying to get your ideas across in a short period of time is always a challenge.”

However, Giles says she’s seen more conferences in general asking presenters to give shorter talks and leaving more time for discussion; she was given just seven minutes during the other session she spoke at during RISE UP for Breast Cancer as well.

“In the classroom, we’re talking for long periods of time,” Giles says. “But when we present our ideas to a bigger audience, we have to be concise.”