Spaceballs

 "God willing, we'll all meet again in Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money."
- the movie Spaceballs

Science is a constant search for money. Since I spend so much of my time applying for grants, I thought I should take some time to tell you what that process is like. 

It always starts with an idea. Maybe that idea takes the form of a question, or an observation, or some funny result I got in the lab. I decide on something that is both interesting and important to investigate, and I set about writing. Usually at this stage, I draft about a paragraph or a page with my idea. 

The next step is assembling a team. Some projects I'm capable of doing on my own, but most require collaborators. As some of you may know, I have ongoing collaborations with a maritime archaeologist, a coral geneticist, and colleagues in Germany and Norway. The one-page outline serves as a convenient way to share my idea and get feedback. There are meetings upon meetings until the whole team has is invested in the proposal and agrees on a plan. Then we write. 

Obviously, what I've described (idea-team-proposal) is the ideal way for things to come together, but if there's one thing I've learned in the last two years as soft-money faculty, it's that you can't wait for brilliant ideas to just arrive when a proposal is due. I actually keep a running list of proposal ideas in the back of my planner, and every time a call for proposals is published, I read the call, then scan my list to see if one of the projects would fit the funder's priorities. I am constantly tailoring my science to fit what I think the agency is looking to fund. 

The other caveat I have to add is about preliminary data. Every proposal requires you to show some form of preliminary results - just enough to prove that you can do the study you're proposing and your hypotheses aren't totally off. It sounds trivial (just run an experiment!), but it is absolutely not trivial. Sometimes, gathering preliminary data requires enough money to deserve its own proposal. (In fact, the cynical view is that you have to do a study in order to then get it funded, and I'm not convinced that's wrong.) Gathering preliminary data sucks. 

A standard proposal that I might submit to a federal agency is about 15 pages of core text describing the project, but there are also a ton of peripheral documents - budgets, budget justifications, facilities statements, data management plans, postdoc mentoring plans, letters of support, etc. The final tally is somewhere on the order of 80-90 pages. Proposals to private foundations are generally shorter, but they can have more complicated formatting to fit the foundation's requirements - at least federal ones are more standardized. 

Proposals get sent off into the ether, and they may or may not come back with money attached. The turnaround time can be extremely slow - sometimes over a year - and sometimes, a proposal never gets an answer. I submitted one proposal in 2018 to a foundation that still has not issued a funding decision (and by now, I doubt they ever will). Any given proposal has about a 10-30% chance of getting funded. For some of the federal agencies, it's nearly guaranteed that you'll be denied the first time and have to revise and resubmit your proposal a year later to get funded. 

Just for some perspective, in 2020, I submitted 8 federal proposals, 6 of them as the lead Principal Investigator, and so far, I've gotten official answers back on 3 of them. I'm likely to submit a similar number of proposals this year. 

As much work as this process is, I actually kind of like it. Obviously, I enjoy writing about science (take this blog as evidence), and it's always exciting to see my team's ideas come together. In some ways, science is a very forgiving career, because only my best work ever gets funded and sees the light of day. If I submit a dumb idea, it's only seen by a handful of individuals - a program officer, 3-5 reviewers, and the panel - all of whom are bound by anonymity. I see proposal-writing as a way to sift and refine my ideas before embarking on a study. 

Right now, I'm working on two different proposals and outlining two more. I do all this alongside my normal field work, data analysis, mentoring students, and writing papers. It's a key part of the scientific process - we are constantly searching for money.