Funding ideas for sabbatical planners

Inspired by xykademiqz's comment on my previous post, I am going to link dump everything I had in my bookmark list from when I was planning my sabbatical. No sense in wasting all this work!

Ideas for sabbatical funding:

• Opportunities in France
• Opportunities in Japan: Matsumae and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
• Fulbright program
• Opportunities in Germany: DAAD and Humboldt
• Opportunities in the UK
• Opportunities at US government labs (National Academies). DOE, ONR, AFOSR, and ARO might have opportunities as well, but I didn't look
• NSF: Partnerships for international research and education (PIRE)
• Opportunities in Israel: Technion and Hebrew University
• Opportunities in Australia: Wollongong and Selby Fellowship
• Opportunities in South Africa: Rhodes

These are just what I found when I was looking for my own sabbatical. There are probably more things out there--this is by no means a comprehensive list. If you know of something else, feel free to add it in the comments or send me an email, and I'll add it.

I have also found that many universities have their own internal funding for visiting professors. This money can (usually) only be applied for by a local host, but can pay for travel costs and housing for short term stays. It is worth asking about! After my sabbatical, I was invited to another university for a few weeks though one of these programs, which was fantastic.

Can we return to funding stability?

In the olden days (i.e. for my PhD advisor) in the physical sciences, the funding strategy was simple--get in with a program officer at one of the major funding agencies for your bread and butter grant. Then supplement that with additional proposals. For ProdigalAdvisor, his core grant was DOE. As long as he was productive, the renewal of this grant was more or less guaranteed. It was enough money to support 2-3 students, or a student and a postdoc if budgeted carefully. He knew his PO well, and had regular contacts.

The upsides to this, compared to our current situation are obvious. First, having semi-permanent funding enables risk taking in other proposals, since they aren't make or break for the lab. It also means less time spent proposal writing and more time on other things. Next, it makes the disconnect between PhD time (5-6 years in my field) and grant time (usually 3 years) less painful, since it is unlikely that funding will end mid-PhD causing a shift in research topics midway through. Finally, the reduced mental overhead of near constant worry about funding improves pretty much everything. Because funding was not guaranteed without productivity (and POs do come and go), there was still pressure to produce, but not as acute, and not to the exclusion of all else. 

However, there were also significant downsides to this system. The main one is that it HEAVILY favored people hooked into the Old Boy Network, who could be introduced to the POs they need to network with to get into this kind of favorable funding situation. POs tended to stick to people who reminded them of themselves when younger, which suppressed diversity big time. It also heavily favored older established scientists (who were hooked up with semi-permanent renewals) over younger, upcoming scientists (who had to fight tooth and nail for funding until they could hook up with a PO willing to fund their careers). POs tended to stick with "their" stable of researchers, even past the point of when they were producing good science. Finally, it reduced the "nimbleness" of the funding agencies to change research directions and priorities as situations changed.

Is it possible to get the good of stability in funding without the bad of locking in the status quo for years and years? I don't really know. It seems that both systems were about equally likely to favor famous, established groups and also about equally meritocratic (though the optics now MIGHT look a little better now). Diversity is better now--the Old Boy Network is still present, but not quite as dominant. Risk taking in research is probably less common than before, due to the danger of being unfunded. There always were people who wanted to push the envelope/got bored with their current areas/were creative scientists of any age, but these people could get to stable situations in the past that are much more difficult to reach now. My PhD supervisor, with his semi-guaranteed DOE grant, was not a superstar with a megagroup. He was just a "normal" PI.

I am much, much more worried about funding than my advisor ever was. All of my colleagues are also worried. I spend a huge fraction of my time writing proposals, and I know I write many, many more than my advisor ever did (not just conjecture--we've discussed it since I moved to the TT). Both systems favor flashy science that can be packaged up and sold, and extroverted people with good networking skills, which doesn't necessarily correlate with important science and research talent, respectively. The modern funding schemes favor trend following, and rapidly move funding into and out of areas when they become hot and cold, which is not necessarily a good thing in basic research if we want to develop a deep understanding of something, which takes time. It sometimes seems to me like we moved the deck chairs around to generate at least the appearance of a more meritocratic, inclusive approach and called it progress, while forgetting that the quality of the experience for those in the system is also important.

I'm famous--yay?

Several people have pointed out that I (and my commenters) are quoted in Senator Colburn's "report" on waste in government sponsored research. Given that the quoted text from the blog is taken so completely out of context gives me great confidence in my interpretation that much of the report consists of actual facts taken out of context so as to distort their original meaning. Prodigal Spouse thought my annoyed reaction (to the out of context quotation part anyway) was pretty funny, reminding me that the blessing and curse of blogging means that once the words are out in the world, they take on a life of their own. This is always a good lesson to remember! In fact, one of today's top traffic sources to the blog is a Google search on some of the quoted text from the report. (For those looking for the quoted post, it is here).

Having flipped through the report, it mostly consists of mocking different research projects as wastes of money. Given that most of the great industrial basic research labs are gone, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the last major funder of basic research in many fields in the US. It makes me very sad to see all this ink spilled on attacking the NSF, considering that the entire annual NSF budget is a rounding error on what the US spends annually in Iraq and Afghanistan for results much less likely to be relevant to US taxpayers. I totally agree with Dr. O here--if Senator Colburn has a problem with how NSF funds are being spent, he should have requested hearings or reports from the program managers at NSF, or called on eminent scientists in the field to determine why these projects were funded. It is pretty easy to pick apart many basic research projects based on just the title or abstract (which focus on the work to be done, not on where the work fits in the big picture of the field). It is much harder to predict which projects will be the ones that lead to key breakthroughs ahead of time, which is why they call it research.

Following your bliss vs. getting paid

In a comment, Xombi asked about research you care about vs. putting food on the table. GMP recently also had a post on this topic. As GMP said in her comments, Dr. Sneetch pretty much summed up this issue in a comment--it is a lucky few that can spend most of their time on following their own interests. Everyone else has to spend most of their time on what funding agencies think is important.

Most of the time, I can find interesting aspects to fundable research that I enjoy. This is what keeps the job fun. One thing to keep in mind is that startup funds can seem like freedom to follow your research bliss. I think this is a big mistake. You need to use your startup funds to get evidence that your lab works on RELEVANT and interesting research. The data you generate is the preliminary data for your proposals, and has to show that you are fundable! My strategy was to select target funding agencies/program officers, and shape my starting research to show what I can do in their areas of interest. I picked areas that I am interested in, of course, but fundability has to be a bigger concern than personal interest if I want to keep my lab going.

In a National Lab setting, I found that I could carve out some time to work on my own research interests, especially before I became a PI. As a postdoc, you should have minimal responsibilities in supervision and proposal writing (although if you want to get hired, you need to be somewhat involved in this so you can see how things work). If you work efficiently, you can get your own work done, and then work on side projects. No one will really care if you use National Lab resources as long as it leads to papers/patents/funding. My side projects as a postdoc became the core of proposals (both mine and my PIs--you do need to show your sponsor that you add value after all!).

I don't think that fundable work is in opposition to good work. It is possible to do good, important work that is of interest to funding agencies, and I think this is what most researchers try to do. There is some room to shape the scope of the work after the project is funded, but of course the goals of the program officers need to be kept in mind if you ever want to be renewed/funded by the same agency again! But this shouldn't impact the quality of the science in the end. Just the excitement of the PI.

Quick tips for proposal writers

I am reviewing a bunch of proposals now for my panel. If you are writing a proposal PLEASE keep in mind that many of your reviewers will be reading 10+ proposals in a short period of time, not all of which are well within their expertise. I never appreciated how difficult it is to do a good and thorough job until I am doing it myself!

Prodigal's 10 quick tips:

1. Use figures. Really. It helps break up the text, illustrates your thoughts and plans, and can help someone vaguely familiar with a technique remember more about how it works. You don't need preliminary data as much as schematics and cartoons.

2. Use paragraphs! The wall'o'text is REALLY hard to read through and maintain concentration for 80+ pages!

3. Define your acronyms and abbreviations. Not everyone will remember the abbreviations you use in your daily work, especially after 8 hours on a panel.

4. Make sure you refer to others working in your field who have made significant advances, not just your group and your collaborators/friends. People on the panel WILL notice this one! Don't get lazy on lit review.

5. Make sure your proposed research is easy to find. In some of the proposals I am reading, it is difficult to figure out what has been done recently, what is background, and what will be done with the money over the course of the proposal.

6. Use headers! Go ahead and bold them. When I need to go back to look for something, I want it to be easy to find.

7. Don't blow off broader impacts/diversity statements. They WILL be read, remarked on, and used for funding decisions. The top proposals have both awesome science and well planned broader impacts, so just awesome science alone won't cut it.

8. If your proposal is a team proposal, clearly state what each team member will do. Don't just add names and not talk about their research contributions. Saying "Professor X will make calculations in support of the experiment" or "Professor Y will characterize the samples" are NOT research contributions!

9. If your proposal has both theory and experimental parts, talk about how the two parts will be integrated. Team proposals should be TEAMS, not 2 cool PIs working in parallel. If that is the case, you each should have written a separate proposal.

10. Be concise and as clear as possible. If you have to make a choice, though, pick clarity.

Funding freakout

I was doing my projected budget for this year, and boy am I freaking out. I decided to go for it with a "burn the ships" spending strategy on my startup, but the reality of seeing that nest egg dwindle is jarring.

Due to some unfortunate issues, I had to start preparing a material in my own lab that I used to get from a collaborator. I was always planning on doing this, but not for another year or two. The earlier spending on supplies and equipment severely depleted my emergency fund. I took on 4 students, which is at the upper limit of what I can support, and doesn't leave much leftover for emergencies.

Now, I knew all along that this strategy had risks and rewards. I have all of my equipment installed and running in my renovated lab. By this time next year, it looks like I will have 4 papers based on data exclusively from my new lab, which would not be happening without all the spending. This, on top of the 3 last papers from National Lab data, plus a potential mini-review stemming from all my proposal writing means my CV is definitely benefiting. The issue is converting this early success into more reliable funding. I had some success last year, but all with small grants or new investigator programs. We are in austerity mode, buying only essentials now. I had already planned on attending 2 meetings with significant travel, but other travel will have to be local (or paid for!) until I get more money.

This is why I am spending so much time writing now--3 proposals done for September, with another 2 white papers + 1 proposal to do by mid-November. The reality of my situation hit me hard last week now that I have 4 mouths to feed. I am freaking out!

Overlap in proposal writing

I've got proposals on my mind (polishing #3 for Sept, then on to 3 more white papers by the first week in Nov). One thing I am wrestling with in my mind is on how much overlap is OK between proposals. I've been writing proposals for a while now, so I have a nice library of introductions, methods, and motivations I can copy and paste from, which really helps in the writing efficiency. I have no issues at all with this type of self-plagiarism. But I was talking to a colleague, and this person mentioned using the same project in two proposals. I was a bit taken aback--I never do this, considering it to be unethical to propose the same exact project to two agencies. It certainly was not allowed at National Lab, where we had to promise that our internally funded projects had no external funding (since part of the point of internal funding was to get preliminary data for external funding).

I can certainly understand the temptation. With funding rates so low, odds are that both projects won't be funded at the same time anyway. But this seems like crossing a line to me. If both projects were to be funded, my colleague would either be setting up trainees in direct competition with each other, or else using money earmarked for one thing for something else entirely. It is one thing to use some of a project's budget on interesting side avenues--after all if we knew the outcome already, it wouldn't be research. I've heard that in some fields, it is the norm to have most of the data already (not just preliminary stuff) before submitting proposals, but not in mine. Maybe this is how they do it? It is not like anyone really checks up to make sure that no double dipping is going on.

I do propose strongly related projects that emphasize different aspects of an overall theme, since this is the only sensible way to get enough money to do longterm projects and/or projects that require a lot of resources, especially at my career stage. I also want my students to have clearly delineated and separable projects so there are no issues when it comes to writing up their PhDs. But I try to avoid the temptation to allow the degree of overlap to get too large--if the NSF is paying for something it hardly seems right to charge the DOE for the same thing!

Am I hopelessly naive?

How much is too much?

I am in a proposal writing frenzy right now. I have 3 I intend to submit by the end of the month, and another 3 I am working on for October. One is a dramatic revamp of an older proposal, and one is pretty much a revise and resubmit, but that still leaves 4 fresh proposals to do. Granted there is some degree of overlap between them (for the introduction and methods, anyway), but I am feeling overwhelmed. Working on these is consuming a large fraction of my not already spoken for time, so I feel like I am neglecting my students a bit.

And now I have 4 more to integrate! This recruitment season, I added two more grad students (woot!), so now I have 4. I will also have 2 undergrads working in my lab this year for credit instead of cash. My success in recruiting, while exciting, is also stressing me out, since now I have to feed all of these mouths. In a way, I am feeling more freaked out and lost right now than in my first few months here. I feel like I am being drained of my ideas, but maybe that is the recent overwork period talking. I am also trying to find the line between too much overlap to be ethical, and too little overlap to be practical in my proposals. I am finding that making a research plan in theory is very different from the practically of getting it paid for!

After this fall, I do plan to take a proposing break, but I wonder how wise that is given the current funding climate.