Surviving Difficult Funding Periods Posted on January 9, 2008 Megan R. Gunnar (bio) offers strategies for maintaining a research career when funding is scarce.

One of the things that I know young or newer researchers, actually, all of us at this point, are worried about, but it’s particularly problematic for folks who have not had a lot of experience in the funding arena, is that we’re in a really challenging period for funding right now.

The percentiles that are getting funded, that is, the score of your grant that would achieve a fundable level, it varies from institute and time to time, but approximately it’s half of what we generally consider to be a really healthy funding level for a field. It’s a really difficult time.

I lived through a period like this early in my career, and I was probably at the associate level at that point. I just think it’s terribly important for young researchers to realize two things. One, you don’t get a grant if you don’t submit a grant, and these days, not getting a grant is not any sign that you can’t do good work.

So look at what used to be called the pink sheets, the feedback you’re getting on the grant. Pay attention to that, but just because you didn’t get it, hopefully, if it’s a good grant, you’ve got what we used to call "warm and fuzzy" pink sheets that indicated that this is great, and just keep trying.

The other thing that I really encourage young people to do is to think about less and more expensive series of questions, and try to develop a series of questions that almost costs nothing to do so they can keep getting published if they don’t have funding. And then put a lot of time and energy into writing, rewriting, hunting for that money because the ones who keep trying will survive this period.

The ones who get totally demoralized will fall off the funding cycle. So just keep trying, but also think about, pragmatically are there some studies that you can accomplish working with undergraduates and pencils and paper, and that will nonetheless be interesting and provide data that will get in the journals.

I certainly had to think about that, given the area of research that I’m in, which can be very expensive, and when I started out, I had a cheap and expensive line of studies. And I ran both kinds of studies for the first few years of my career.

I ran the cheap studies all the time. I ran the expensive ones when I could get help in doing it, and then when I started getting the grant money, more of my work moved into the more expensive line that required having more funding to be able to do.

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