Grant proposals done!

Both my grant proposals are done. Competition is very tight this year, and I won't learn the outcomes until sometime in July.

I think the problems we propose to address are very important, the questions we pose get to the heart of the problems, and the experiments we're proposing are excellent ways to answer them. The proposals themselves are very clearly written and nicely presented; the text is well spaced and has little colour illustrations embedded in it, and is supplemented with very clear and carefully drawn illustrations. Much of the credit goes to the grad students and post-docs, whose insights and work were critical in getting the proposals done.

The proposals would have been even better if I had been able to include more preliminary data for some of the experiments, to reassure the reviewers that the planned experiments will actually work. A related problem is the need for more discussion of what problems could arise with the proposed experiments and how such problems will be dealt with.

Now we have these great research programs worked out, we need to adjust our immediate research priorities a bit. This will have the added benefit of generating some preliminary data and a better understanding of possible problems, so if the proposals don't get funded we'll be ready to submit stronger ones in September.