Grants and grantspersonship

This week I've been to two sessions about grants we'd like to apply for. The first was a half-day session on NIH grants, and the other was a lunchtime information session on seed money available from our local genome centre. I'll write a little bit here about the genome centre grants, and do a longer post on what I learned from the NIH workshop later.

The genome centre grants range from $25,000 to $200,000, for a single year. They're not renewable, and only about a dozen are awarded. They're not to support ongoing projects, but to provide preliminary data that can then go to other granting agencies or to industry partners.

The applications are due Nov. 3. I haven't read the proposal forms myself yet, but the post-doc says the proposal itself is only 5 pages. And it would be similar enough to parts of our CIHR and NIH proposals (and to the post-doc's fellowship applications) that it shouldn't be onerous to write.

The big complication, at least for us and, judging from the questions, for many others, is the need for matching funds. These funds must have been applied for since May 2008, so we can't use our current CIHR grant. Using it would be tricky anyway, because the sequencing we want to do is not directly related to the goals of that grant. They want 75% of the matching funding to be in place at the time the application is submitted, which appears to rule out the CIHR grant we just submitted, as we won't learn the results until January (though I gather there is some flexibility about this). If one of the post-doc's fellowship applications succeeds we could use that as matching funds - it wouldn't be a lot of money but we don't plan to ask for a lot of money anyway.

So I think we'd better start work on this right away. Step 1 - read the application form.