We’ve Learned Much About The Funding Landscape
My success rate writing grants was about 10%. This meant writing at least 10 grant proposals per year to keep my lab going. We've heard and seen similar stories from PIs looking for funding, worried about funding, and spending the best hours of their days writing proposals that get repeatedly rejected. Is there a better way. Yes!.
Indirect Costs and Competition
We've interviewed hundreds of university scientists about their own individual funding challenges and their stories are remarkably similar. Their universities put enormous pressure on them to secure federal funding primarily because federal grants pay large indirect costs.
Indirect costs are a huge source of income for universities. However, the competition for federal funding is intense and most PIs find themselves in a position of competing for diminishing resources as government budgets are flat, or declining when adjusted for inflation.
As if this situation isn't bad enough, ~10% of universities receive ~40% of NIH funds. This money tends to go to more established PIs who keep getting funded over and over. There are also racial and gender biases when it comes to who gets funded.
Are there other sources of money?
No one can deny that actually winning NIH, NSF, DoD, or DoE funding can be game-changing for a scientific career. Once you get one, however, everyone from deans to department chairs want to know “where is your next grant coming from?”
It is less known that there are billions of dollars in foundation grants available for the scientific community. These grants can also be game-changing. These grants are available across all areas of science. In the life sciences and medicine, cancer, vascular disease, neuroscience, computer science, cell therapy, surgery, and imaging represent some major subject areas for these billions of dollars. These grants are easier to get because the competition is less fierce, many foundations are more flexible on the kinds of research that they fund, and the administrative burden is frequently smaller. Some foundations offer awards that are larger than provided by NIH.
Let Astound be your funding scout
These opportunities can also be game-changing for a scientific career. Please consider Astound's funding scout. All you do is upload your CV or biosketch and we show the opportunities available to you based on keyword matching. It's just that simple.
We have over 1,000 foundation opportunities available on our platform. The best part is that we keep notifying you as these opportunities roll on to the platform. We become your admin. So, please give us a try.
