One week early

My Office of Sponsored Research has informed me that they've now received all my paperwork. They helped me fix my last couple of mistakes and omissions, and the proposal is going to be signed off a full week before the deadline.

So let's talk money. Just how much am I asking for, and what are the biggest expenses?

The total, for a three year project, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Specifically? Let's say in the $200,000-300,000 range. Needless to say, I've never handled or been responsible for that much money in my life. Yes, it is a little intimidating. While I expected a difference in the dollar values you worry about when you're a graduate student or post-doc compared to a faculty member, the division is sharper than I expected.

The biggest expense? Each of the three years is a little different, but more than half of the budget for every year is one just one line item: salary. Equipment? Supplies? Purchasing animals? Small potatoes. You want a post-doc to help in the lab, now you're talking dollars.

Besides asking for funds for a post-doctoral research fellow, I can also ask for money for me. Because many academic institutions (like mine) do not appoint you for a full year, asking for a salary for yourself is an acceptable cost. In some cases, I believe, it is possible to "buy" your way out of teaching by having grant money salary that you'd normally earn in the academic year.

And people wonder why researchers are so gung ho to apply for grant money.

Yet more chemicals continue to arrive. Today's delivery: alcohol! Not stuff you'd want to drink, though: this is 100% ethanol.

Tomorrow, and possibly Friday, I will be on South Padre Island doing science. I'm going there to meet Doctors Virginia Scofield and Baruch Rinkevich, the latter visiting Texas from Israel (!). Both Virginia and Baruch work on small little animals known either as tunicates or ascidians. For most locals, they're probably just the bane of boat owners, because they're colonial animals that grow on exposed surfaces and will foul the bottom of boats. They're very interesting scientifically, though, and are actively being studied as a model connected with AIDS.