In these tough times, young researchers need to be more enterprising in hunting for other funding sources and improving their prospects.
Lori Valigra
Penny Beuning felt some trepidation when she left her postdoc position at MIT to start her own lab at Northeastern University this past summer. While she was excited about the new opportunity, Beuning knew she had to take on the dreaded task of writing grant proposals.
“It’s pretty scary,” says Beuning, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern, who studies DNA damage tolerance. She was fortunate, recently receiving an unrestricted $50,000 Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award.
Beuning exemplifies what it takes for a young researcher to make it in today’s lean and competitive funding atmosphere. “Students now need to be more savvy,” says Sara Wadia-Fascetti, associate vice provost for faculty advancement at Northeastern. “There’s no 12-step program” for finding, writing, or getting a grant.
She recommends that students network with mentors and collaborators who in turn could write a grant letter that could help them get funding. “You have to be persistent,” she advises.
Persistence paid off for Beuning. She spent months seeking out funding sources—especially ones targeted at young researchers—and writing grant applications at night while continuing her own research by day.
With federal grant success rates falling in recent years, Beuning knew she had to cast a wide net when searching for funding. She visited grant offices at Northeastern, attended a new faculty orientation that included funding information, and searched the Web exhaustively. She scoured the Web pages of private foundations, other universities, professional associations, and even the home pages of scientists and college acquaintances in the same field who had received funding.
“The only grant you are guaranteed not to get is the one you don’t apply for,” Beuning says. “It takes time.”
Beuning has had luck with foundations. In addition to her current grant, she got a three-year fellowship from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation while doing her postdoctoral work at MIT.
Some foundations, societies, and other nonprofit groups devoted to funding research target some of their awards to postdocs and junior faculty in certain fields. These groups range from the well known, like the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the American Chemical Society, to the more obscure, such as the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation (for studies on alcohol use and the health effects of alcohol) and the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Young Investigator Awards (for research on childhood cancers). Beuning also points to overseas foundations, such as the Frauenhofer Gesellschaft and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which provide grants to young researchers from the United States.
Trying to find all these foundations can be daunting, but Beuning developed some tactics. For example, some foundations list the names of grants from other organizations that cannot be held concurrently with their own. Such a list can be a goldmine for more places to look, she says.
“The primary thing is to find a foundation where your work fits their mission,” says Beuning. University development offices and sponsored research offices typically handle interactions with foundations, so it’s important to keep visiting those offices, she adds.
Some awards, including the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award, require nomination by your university, so talking about the nomination with your department chair is key, Beuning says.
Researchers should also consider activities outside of pure research that might improve their chances of winning grants, such as public education. Some federal grants require applicants to include an educational component as part of the proposal.
Rebeca Rosengaus, an assistant professor of biology at Northeastern University, received a five-year, $503,000 Faculty Early Career Program (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) last year. She credits her success partly to her part-time job teaching high-school biology during her postdoctoral years at Boston University.
At BU, she tried but initially failed to get funding for her work on the behavioral ecology and sociobiology of termites. To help pay the bills, she started teaching biology to high-school juniors. She devised hour-long, hands-on laboratory lessons.
When Rosengaus later applied for the CAREER grant as a young faculty member, she realized her experience developing high-school science lessons could help fulfill the educational requirements of the award. She adapted her lessons for use on high-school teachers wanting to brush up on their skills and included them as part of the grant application.
Now, during the five years of the grant, Rosengaus is hosting high-school teachers at Northeastern for one week every summer using the lessons she first devised as a high-school teacher.
Still, her award didn’t come easy. After months of writing the grant proposal, her first version was turned down. Only after revising and submitting it again did she win. “No one should write a grant in today’s world and think they should not resubmit,” she says.
That successful proposal did double duty for Rosengaus. This July, Rosengaus was one of 56 researchers in the United States to win the prestigious Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. The NSF nominated some of its CAREER awardees, including Rosengaus, for this prize.
For Rosengaus, who struggled to find funding early in her career, persistence paid off. Her advice to other young researchers: don’t give up.
A sampling of additional resources online:
National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence Award
MIT postdoc resources (includes funding information)
The Eleanor and Miles Shore Fiftieth Anniversary Program for Scholars in Medicine
The Smith Family New Investigator Awards Program (for independent investigators at Massachusetts academic or research institutes in specific areas of the life sciences)
Charles A. King Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (for postdocs at Massachusetts institutions doing research on human diseases)
Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs (national funding sources)
American Cancer Society Institutional Research Grants (for institutions to provide seed money to junior investigators to initiate new projects)