Funding 101: Advice from successful academics

Here is some advice about finding and applying for research funding from two very successful researchers who sat on the panel, Kimberly Scott from the School of Social Transformation and Executive Director of COMPUGIRLS, and Stuart Lindsay from the Biodesign Institute.

Approach

• Approach program officers. They want to talk with you if you have a clear plan, and if you can demonstrate how what you are proposing fits with their program, and with your past research.
• Send your past research, also send updates to program officers from the project, even after the funding ends (data keeps coming)
• Some program officers go to conferences. If they're at the same session you are at, introduce yourself
• Program officers can go to bat for your, especially when you may be off cycle.
• Volunteer your time as a panel reviewer

Adaptation

• Do what you do, don't let people push you into an area to fit the funding.
• Be flexible, adapt to new areas.
• Be multi-cultural in terms of your language: Need to use a different type of language for different sponsors (e.g. Gates versus NSF). Convey your excitement using a different language.
• The Feds are like a small town: Everyone talks. Everybody knows everybody. Be consistent with how your communicate with people.
• Pitched ideas may be shopped around and come back to you.

Advanced planning

• Get a clear understanding about the expectations from your department as it relates to external funding. Do you have to be funded? Do you need NSF or NIH? Can it be funded by a foundation?
• Talk to people on the Promotion and Tenure committee.
• Courtship: Gates foundation grant took years, unlike federal funding. Takes a lot of advanced funding.  Foundations need to get to know you, who you all are. Two years of talking/calls before being invited to submit a proposal.
• Helpful to find an intellectual partner - "date" your professional partner. Once you are a team with a person (5, 8, 10 years of funding). It's like a marriage. You want to have a good idea of how you are going to get along.
• Funders are looking for collaborative work.

Communicate clearly and take advice

• Explaining highly technical things to a lay audience. Review panels are lay audiences. To that reviewer, most of the proposals will be out of their technical expertise.
• "Explain to your grandma" trope can be useful.
• Don't be afraid of being pushed. Listen to those big questions from the philanthropists.
• Continue to learn from people who ask, "Can you do X?"

General thoughts about academia, broader impacts, and funding

• Every hour that you are in a classroom here, you will be changing lives. At this State school, you are teaching the demographic of the state.
• Funding agencies are conservative.
• Heartbreaking to sit on a review panel and watch brilliant ideas smashed by small minds.
• If your thesis adviser was a bigshot in some field, it is probably an old field.
• Far better to be an untenured failure and go out with a big idea than spend 40 years doing something you dislike.