friendly funding

Many congratulations go out to a friend who has just secured external funding for a very cool (non-biological) research project. I'm exceedingly happy for him!!! Since the funding is coming from the Space Vehicles Directorate, this makes him, at least temporarily, a rocket scientist.



At least some of the grants we're all writing are getting funded... it brings me hope.

the economic downturn hits my department

I have not yet been part of the very public, very unfortunate budget problems that have affected public institutions of higher learning... but just now, the rumors and worrying crystallized in my inbox: a proposal to hold an anonymous vote on whether to forgo the negotiated raises in our contract to help close our widening budget gap.

I'm very (very) glad to have a job, and that my university isn't laying off TT faculty. Not getting my raise, in this economic climate, isn't something I am upset about. I remember my father's salary being frozen in some years, without any cost of living increases...and those were in more flush times. So many workers in and outside of academia will make the same choice to forgo raises/have it foisted upon them. As the new fiscal year approaches... how many other academics have already decided/been told that salaries will be frozen this year? I think the universality of the problems makes losing our raises more palatable.

challenges, indeed

I worked my way through the 52 page pdf of stimulus-package NIH challenge area grants that will be offered, and I don't think there are any calls suitable for my research. However, I did find several calls to send onto friends, and there was one hidden gem in the document:

06-RR-101* Virtual environments for multidisciplinary and translational research. Virtual networking environments like Science Commons, Facebook, and Second Life, create platforms that can eliminate many barriers in scientific collaborations. These environments integrate fragmented information sources, enable “one-click” access to research resources, and assist in re-use of scientific workflows. Funded projects would develop and implement virtual collaborative environments to facilitate biomedical and translational research, e.g. addressing issues of privacy, technology transfers, and sharing resources. Contact: Dr. Olga Brazhnik, 301-435-0758, brazhnik@mail.nih.gov

I'm not on Facebook, but I certainly understand how and why it could facilitate communication among collaborators. But Second Life??? Does it allow collaborators to work out their sexual tension virtually?? Or are there glass-and-steel biotech institutes where scientists come, wear form-fitting lab coats, prepare coffee in faux-wood alcoves near spacious conference tables and have virtual meetings?

blame the grants: biology comic instead of a post

NYT op-ed on science funding

Stephen Quake took over for Olivia Judson this week and wrote about his lucky experiences with funding as an early career scientist and what's wrong with the 'free market' of grants. Among his litany of accomplishments, Quake has pioneered single-molecule sequencing. I am in awe of all scientists who stepped back and asked "how can DNA sequencing be better?" while I was still feeling blessed I became a scientist at a time we could do DNA sequencing at all.

There are some minuses to Quake's idea of every scientist getting guaranteed minimal research support... because of those funds going to faculty no longer doing research (even if they claim they are), or to scientists who are not particularly good at research, mentoring, and because it holds back research that requires expensive techniques. Grants with lower dollar values going to more scientists would move the US towards other countries' funding systems. We'd have to shift how we fund personnel as well, because one can run a lab and get some experiments done on a shoestring budget, but short of using an army of unpaid undergrads, the majority of the cost of even a minimal lab budget will be salaries and stipends. But these changes have notable upsides as well, including dampening the effects of boom-bust cycles on laboratories.

As for 11-month salaries being covered by our universities -- yes please! In the current economy, however, AFT/AAUP shouldn't rise up and demand such things. It would be nice if it were more publicly known that many (most?) professors are already on summer furlough, and some schools are already furloughing faculty during the year to save money. Academics often work for free, we're not all cushy and secure in recession-proof ivory tower tenured positions. Knowing that we are sharing the pain with workers all across America might make people feel more sanguine about supporting the federal granting agencies and continuing to fund their state universities through these budget crises.

8% of my love

In this season of grants, in my first big grant-pushing year, I'm facing problems I never conceived of. One is how much of my time to allocate (on paper) to each of these projects. The basic problem is that you can't have funding for more than 100% of your time... the funding agencies are not willing to break the definition of 100% even for sleep-deprived academics. You have to devote 'enough' time to a grant for the agency to feel you will be a competent supervisor of the research and steward of their dollars, and you have to pick a small enough number so that you can potentially obtain additional grants. You can change the allocation of time you have on a project if you need to after you are funded, but I can't comment on how that affects your program officer's opinion of you and your research, or how that affects your chance of non-competitive renewal.

For shorter grants this is less of a problem; if a grant is funded and I over-estimated my time allocation, the grant will expire before it's a problem that prevents me from applying for additional funding.

I know I'm living in a fantasy world to contemplate this ever being a problem for me. I'm not going to get enough grants to be anywhere near a 100% time allocation in the next few years. However, I have to list my projected time allocation for all pending grants when I submit additional applications... and it's starting to add up. This is also on my mind because I am going to be a co-PI on a grant where the only funding that would come to my lab would be summer salary and travel support for me (no money for equipment or trainees). I am contemplating what percent allocation of my time I have to put down for this project in order to ensure one month of summer salary wouldn't be cut from the budget, while preserving enough of my time for grants I'm submitting that can support students.

I also thought of this because of a recent discussion over at Drugmonkey, where it was brought up that percent allocation could be used as a proxy for "lab with too much money" as a rational reason to give lower marks to grants from very comfortable, established labs. I was an ad hoc reviewer on a grant recently that had two PIs -- one junior and not published at all in the proposed experimental system, and one senior who is the queen of the experimental system. But the Queen PI has so many grants she could only allocate 8% of her time to the proposed research. While I think this PI is very good at juggling her responsibilities, it certainly made me wonder whether she'd give the project the attention and expertise it would need. I have seen grants where subcontractors allocate very low (5%) amounts of their time, but this was the first single-digit allocation for one of the major PIs I'd seen. There were other weaknesses in the grant, it wasn't a perfect, incredible proposal with this being its sole potential flaw...

Percent time allocation to different research projects was something I'd never thought about before this year. I have thought about the amount of time I devote to preparing lectures (too much) and the amount of time I spend writing papers up (too little), but I have always just rotated around my research projects as deadlines demand and my interests dictated.

Now we know what NSF employees had been doing in the low-funding-rate years:

looking at porn at work. One particular employee (no longer with the NSF) spent 20% of his time looking at porn and paying $40,000 on his credit cards for chat sites. Nature's blog refers to the NSF's porn-at-work problem as "systemic."

The ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee wants a full investigation of the extent of these abuses of government computers and taxpayer-funded salary before the NSF gets their fraction of the stimulus package... which will more likely result in the extra funding for NSF being cut out of the bill than stalling the stimulus package.

*sigh*

The very first problem I ever had in lab management was that an undergraduate I was supervising was using a lab computer to look at porn. I discovered this because it was his first day and he did not yet have his own account on the lab computers, and so he was using my login. I wasn't snooping on his activities, but the following day, when I began typing in a URL into my browser... a site that I hadn't visited, nor one that I thought was particularly work-appropriate popped up. It's apparently gone offline in the last 9 years, otherwise I would have provided the link. I quickly confirmed that it was a porn site, and since my PI was out of town, I decided to solve the problem by sending the undergrad a polite email that said that some sites are better viewed in the dorm than at work. The undergrad never referenced having received this email, and he got his own account, so I have no idea whether he repeated his salacious websearching.

When I asked the PI about it later, he said he would have not said or done anything about it. I don't think I overreacted, but what would others have done, especially in light of the computers having been purchased on federal grants?

doing it for love

A number of science bloggers have been pretty quiet in 2009... maybe like me they were working on grants. There's good reason to be more excited about grants in the near term: NSF funding rates might not be as dismal as they have been in previous years, and science funding might be included as part of a stimulus package. Despite the current optimism, people are talking about working without funding, or with very very little funding. And even if the funding taps are opened full blast, there will be hard times ahead (boom-bust funding cycles), and some people will be asked to work on a shoestring lab budget, or work for free. As far/near as I can tell, working for the love of science, not financial security, has been asked of generations of scientists (less now than in the past, it seems)... but it's definitely not the sort of thing we advertise to prospective scientists.

Many of us work in labs for credit, or just as volunteers, as undergraduates. Whether this is a time-honored tradition or exploitation has been discussed in the comments here. Regardless, I don't think many undergraduates would think that this early donation of time is a harbinger of future sacrifices they might be asked to make for science.

In the old days, students paid universities for the privilege of being a graduate student. In some places, those "old days" weren't so long ago; one of my friends has a 2000 PhD and he had to pay for his tuition and went without a stipend for all semesters he wasn't a teaching assistant (and the stipend was very low when he did receive it, but the accompanying tuition remission was a big benefit). Before anyone tries to guess which university inflicted this on him, let me say his PhD was in biology, in an arguably biomedical field, the school is a large state R01, and he was a stellar graduate student. He just happened to want to work in a lab that while well-respected, was not well-funded. He had a previous career in computer programming in order to save the money to attend graduate school and specialize in the field of his choosing. In general, however, grad students today go to programs and labs where they are supported through four (maybe five or six) years through a combination of RAs and TAs, and don't have to go into the same levels of debt as humanities graduate students while getting a PhD. If their PI runs out of funding early on in their graduate career, the students often change labs rather than work for free and wait for the lab to become better funded. These are perfectly rational decisions, but the same financially-sound decision making doesn't apply when you are an older, getting-ready-to-graduate student whose lab runs out of funding. Especially if you had a guarantee of five years of funding from your advisor when you started, and you need a sixth year... it's not uncommon to have to donate your time for a semester, a year at the end of your graduate work.

Until fairly recently, this unpaid last year of the thesis was codified in the UK. PhDs are supposed to take three years, and students receive three years of support, though funding in the fourth year is now more common for biomedical graduate students. For students outside of these well-funded fields, any funding for the fourth year is ad hoc and is not merit-based.

I spent a semester unfunded at the end of my thesis, but that was more my choice than necessity. I defended and could have gone straight to my postdoc, but I wanted some time to destress and to finish up experiments in my thesis lab. I asked my PI to pay health insurance coverage and the registered student fee (this came to less than $1000), and I spent about half of my time in the lab, but came and went as I pleased. I have known students who had more penurious PIs who wanted the students themselves to pay these continuing student registration fees -- while they had no income -- so I consider myself lucky.

Most postdocs would not entertain the idea of working for free, but I have two friends who have done this. The first I have already blogged about, and she is doing a postdoc in her "spare time" while carrying a full teaching load in order to pay the rent. She is doing so in the city where her spouse has an official, paid postdoc. The other stayed in the town in which he did his doctoral work while his wife finished her degree. Both of these friends were unpaid postdocs for two years, and both had a partner with some kind of income at the time. This also took care of their health insurance needs. In both cases, these free postdocs would not be working for free but for their geographic restrictions.

The working for free does not stop once we get professorships. Many PIs go without summer funding -- calendar year contracts are an endangered species outside of medical schools, and summer salary was a routine casualty in the tight budgets at NSF over the last few years. Even when a PI has summer salary in the budget, there are advisors who, in shoestring budget times, choose to forgo their summer salary to give a graduate student another year's stipend and benefits.

There are concrete downsides to our working for love and not money. Many of us are not independently wealthy, and so we incur credit card debt to help us live through our unfunded patches. [Note: even if you receive a stipend you may be eligible for a Stafford Federal Loan while you are a graduate student... many are interest-free until you graduate and it's a much, much better option than carrying credit card debt for years] It harms our ability to save for retirement, build up a house downpayment, do all those fiscally responsible adult things that we see some of our friends doing. It can stress our relationships when we work all day (and night) and yet are not bringing home any bacon. Similarly, working in science and working a second job in order to pay the bills can create a stressful home environment. Yet, I know very very few people in science who haven't worked at least a few months unpaid while pursuing a science career. I have no idea how common this sacrifice is in other careers (especially those that require much less schooling; I know medical students go greatly into debt and might be laughing at this post). Is working for free one of the ways we distinguish the passionate from the complacent? Is this a continual initiation rite that we ask even professors to go through? Has it become more common while we were living in Bush administration budgets, and will it be more or less common in the next few years?

People I'm taking for granted

I have been busy working on grant applications lately, and I want to publicly, if anonymously, thank all of my non-scientist friends for their support as I work through this.

I am grateful for my supportive academic friends, too! But it's something special to get encouraging and inquisitive Twitters from distant friends who don't particularly care what I study. It's important to them because it's important to me... and maybe because I tend to gesticulate wildly when I tell funny anecdotes about my work.

(Besides, my scientist friends are still on the hook to read my drafts... they'll get their thanks later ;-))

science spending spree!

Few things make me happier than ordering books without any thought to the price, because the no-cost-extension of the grant is expiring soon. I happen to work in an area where single-author monographs and contributed volumes from the 1950s-1970s are very useful, so some very expensive used books are coming my way!

I wonder how many other fields still find the literature (especially the non-journal literature) from the pre-pubmed era so useful...