Biosketches and Support Documents Agent Skill

Draft the content of biosketches and support documents as paste-ready SciENcv field text (never as a Word/PDF biosketch) — NIH Biosketch…

Context cost
2.4k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 9.4 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Draft the content of biosketches and support documents as paste-ready SciENcv field text (never as a Word/PDF biosketch) — NIH Biosketch (personal statement, contributions to science), NSF Biographical Sketch and Current & Pending (Other) Support via SciENcv, Other Support pages, and COA templates; also revise an existing SciENcv-downloaded biosketch. Use whenever the user mentions biosketch, biographical sketch, personal statement, contributions to science, Other Support, current and pending, disclosure forms, common forms, SciENcv, or COA for any senior/key person on a grant.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

productivity

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md9.4 kB · preview
--- name: grant-biosketch-support ---
6# Biosketches and Support Documents
7
8These documents answer review Factor 3 (NIH: Expertise and Resources) — whether this team can do this work. The high-leverage part is tailoring: a biosketch recycled from the last grant argues for the last grant. For multi-PI applications, coordinate the PIs' personal statements with grant-multi-pi-plan — the biosketches and the leadership plan must tell the same complementarity story.
9
10Read _agent/project-config.md for the team list and mechanism. Collect current CVs or prior biosketches from the user as source material.
11
12## What this skill produces — and what it never produces
13
14The deliverable is **content, not the document**. Biosketches and support forms are generated by the agency's own system: NSF requires SciENcv for the Biographical Sketch and Current & Pending; NIH accepts SciENcv-generated biosketches and, with the Common Disclosure Forms adoption, is moving to require them; Other Support and the common forms carry certifications and signatures that only the researcher can apply inside the system. A Word or PDF biosketch assembled by the model is therefore the wrong artifact: it will be discarded and re-entered by hand, it risks drifting from the required layout, and for NSF it is non-compliant on its face. Do not generate one, and when asked to "edit the biosketch," edit the *text* — never the file.
15
16Work in SciENcv's units. Draft each field as a paste-ready block — Personal Statement; each Contribution to Science with its products; the positions/honors entries; overlap statements — and save them as plain text or markdown in 04_biosketches/<person>_biosketch-content_v<NN>_<date>_<status>.md (or a stable filename in git mode), one file per person, so the user pastes field by field and regenerates the PDF. When a prior biosketch exists, the source is the PDF the user downloaded from SciENcv (or the text they export from it); extract the text, revise, and deliver the revised fields as paste-ready blocks with a short change list, then have the user update SciENcv and download the new PDF, which is filed in 04_biosketches/ as the record of what will be submitted. The one exception is a funder that accepts a free-form CV or NIH-style biosketch outside SciENcv (some DoD and foundation announcements) — check the FOA and the config; only there is producing the document itself legitimate.
17
18**Formatting and limits inside SciENcv fields.** SciENcv's text fields accept a small **Markdown** subset and explicitly do *not* support HTML tags (<br>, <b>, etc. render as literal text). Supported: **bold**, *italic*, #/##/### headers, 1. ordered and * unordered lists (nestable), a manual line break by ending a line with two or more spaces, ^text^ superscript and ~text~ subscript (10^6^, H~2~O), and backslash escapes for literal * or _. Use it sparingly to make a five-page document scannable: a blank line between Personal Statement paragraphs and between a Contribution's narrative and its products; **bold** on the opening phrase of each Contribution and on the role or aim a sentence maps to (**Role on this project:**); *italic* for journal or software names where the person's convention uses it. Hard limits enforced by the form: Personal Statement **3,500 characters**; each Contribution to Science **2,000 characters, excluding markdown syntax**; up to 5 contributions; up to 15 honors. Draft to these limits and report the character count of each block alongside it — a block over the limit cannot be pasted. Deliver blocks with the markdown in place and have the user preview the generated PDF after pasting. (Syntax and limits from the SciENcv help manual, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK154494/, and its markdown help page, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sciencv/wikihelp/; checked September 2026 — verify there if the preview looks wrong or a paste is rejected.)
19
20Everything factual — products, dates, positions, grant numbers, effort figures — comes from the user's CV, an ORCID/My Bibliography export, or a verified lookup. Never reconstruct a publication or award number from memory: a biosketch listing a product that does not exist as cited carries the same integrity weight as a fabricated reference. Where a product's metadata cannot be confirmed against a source, flag it rather than smoothing it.
21
22## Format ground rules (verify before drafting — formats change)
23
24Both agencies have been converging on the NSPM-33 Common Disclosure Forms generated in SciENcv (NSF adopted first; NIH announced adoption for biosketch and Other Support in 2025). Which format, certification, and signature rules apply depends on the deadline — check the FOA and the current agency guide before drafting, and treat the specifics below as defaults to verify:
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md1,407 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈160
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
2,190
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
1.2%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 12% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

2.4k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Middling. Fine to keep on in a project where you use it weekly, worth unloading in one where you never do.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 9.4 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md9.4 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Biosketches and Support Documents · 2.4k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/biosketches-and-support-documents" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents ] || { mv .claude/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/biosketches-and-support-documents" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add joshua-d-campbell/biosketches-and-support-documents

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/biosketches-and-support-documents" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/biosketches-and-support-documents" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/biosketches-and-support-documents/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as grant-biosketch-support in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, biosketches-and-support-documents.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencejoshua-d-campbell/biosketches-and-support-documents

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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