Cancer Cure

Shizelbs

Most every professor I ever had that did research wrote their own grants.

DarqueKnight

The most recent "fad" among the federal agencies and military branches that fund private research is "collaborative effort". They want to see grant applications coming from research teams composed of members from different institutions and from different departments within an institution (multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary collaborative research).

Unless you are a Nobel prize winner or have an international research reputatation in your field, it is very, very difficult for a single person to get a large (several hundred thousand to several million dollar) research grant from a federal agency.

Some professors do not want to deal with the politics and rigmarole in securing large grants and are only interested in applying for small grants (under $100,000). There are those who would prefer to have five $100,000 grants than one $500,000 grant. However, the paperwork involved in managing five grants gets to be abusive. Furthermore, having your attention split among five different projects may cause the quality of the individual projects to suffer, unless they are all complimentary to each other. It all comes down to personal preference and how an individual wants to position themselves with funding agencies.

Early B.

Wow, DK & **** --

You guys sound like experts on the subject. Both of you are correct.


**** -- it's true that most professors write their own grants. Therein lies the problem. Most people would be quite surprised at the lack of writing skill of some of these folks. But hey, they are doctors, not English teachers.

In the medical profession, professors are expected to teach, see patients, conduct research, and write their own grants. There's no way in hell one person can all of those things well. Besides, grant writing is a skill and it requires lots of time which, of course, most professors don't have. So the smart ones hire somebody like me to do their grunt work.:p