Category: grants

Cost sharing

It’s a requirement of many federal grants and potentially is a deal killer for younger institutions which may not have the resources to pull it off. The upshot of this problem is that institutions which may win awards on pure merit may have to forego competing for new awards with significant cost share. At the same time, institutions with much more massive resource pools, available to be deployed as cost share, have less competition for scarce federal grants. Merit becomes less important as a criterion while institutional resource base becomes more important. The rich get richer.

Now, I’m not saying that rich institutions don’t deserve a lot of grant support purely based on scientific merit. That’s clear; they do. But I’m also worried that newer institutions will have a much more difficult time getting up to speed, as a result of grant cost-share requirements.

It’s time to rethink grant cost share so that newer places have a chance to compete purely on the merits of the science.

The Problems with European Union Science Support

From ScienceInsider, an excellent look at proposed changes to the way the European Research Council administers research grants here.

Money quote:

A key target in the panel’s harshly worded review, published in July, was the managerial dichotomy at the ERC. A Scientific Council, made up of volunteers and chaired by Imperial College London biologist Fotis Kafatos, sets the ERC’s scientific agenda. But day-to-day-management is in the hands of civil servants at the Executive Agency in Brussels, which is controlled by the European Commission. The two clash frequently.

HHMI to the rescue: new PI grants program

Jack Dixon, now at HHMI, is heading up a new program to help newly minted assistant professors in the biomedical research areas.

Here’s the quote:

The Early Career Scientist Program will pay salaries and provide research money for people who have held tenure-track positions for only two to six years, with the goal of supporting them through the early period before they are likely to get a research grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Jim

Big Tobacco Grant Money Drying Up?

A confusing story from the Chronicle suggests that Philip Morris is getting out of the extramural grant business. But towards the end of the piece it gets nuanced….

How the decision will affect many academic research projects was unclear, but one antitobacco crusader, Stanton Glantz, a bioengineer at the University of California at San Francisco, pointed out that tobacco money was not going away.

He cited the $6-million Philip Morris grant won by Edythe D. London, the researcher at the university’s Los Angeles campus whose home was flooded by animal-rights extremists in October and who was the target of a firebomb attack this month. Her grant was not awarded through the external-research program, Mr. Glantz told the magazine.

The question about these grant dollars is of course the same as taking money from the big drug companies: are they paying for a specific result?

Jim