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"Nature.com" featured College of Health Professions Professor Joshua Mendelsohn in "The hunt for the lesser-known funding source"
When infectious-disease epidemiologist Joshua Mendelsohn accepted a job at Pace University in New York City in 2015, he knew that the odds of securing a large government research grant were stacked against him. Funding success rates are notoriously low at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — especially for those under 40, as Mendelsohn was at the time. And Pace has tended to be more focused on teaching than on research, with few resources with which to pursue large federal grants.
Opting not to waste his time on long-shot petitions to the NIH, Mendelsohn has continued his research by finding grant support from a less-obvious source: a foreign government. A Canadian expat, Mendelsohn leaned on his professional network north of the border to back his research into HIV treatment and prevention in at-risk populations, both as a principal investigator and as co-lead on several major projects funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Mendelsohn hopes to target NIH funding soon, but in the meantime, the Canadian money has served as a bridge. And that Can$350,000 (US$260,000) or so per year, shared with his collaborators, has allowed Mendelsohn to travel regularly to places such as China and Uganda to study HIV mitigation strategies. “I was in a good position to advance my work because of the links I had in Canada,” he says.
Funds are available for those who are willing to hunt them out, says Peg AtKisson, a consultant in Millis, Massachusetts, who helps faculty members to develop their research. The trick remains knowing where to look “outside the standard grant box”, she says.
Yet to succeed financially in academia, especially as an early-career investigator, researchers must think strategically about pursuing multiple smaller grants from unlikely sources, AtKisson says — not just those government bodies and large non-profits that advertise their funding opportunities through requests for applications. “You have to develop really good search skills.”
The search is on
One of the first places to rummage around for alternative grant opportunities is online portals such as PIVOT, SPIN and Grant Forward. These tools generally list different grants, awards and fellowships available to scientists throughout the world, mostly from philanthropies and other non-governmental grant-makers — the “unusual usual suspects”, says Alan Paul, president of Giant Angstrom, a funding consultancy in Los Angeles, California.
Many of the databases require a subscription, something most large university libraries offer. But if none of those resources is available, scientists can still gain access to one of the paid databases, notes Diane Leonard, a grants consultant in Clayton, New York. Through the Funding Information Network, a global group of libraries, community foundations and resource centres, anyone can view listings on the Foundation Directory Online. Although grant-seekers do have to spend funds to travel to a participating site and take time away from the laboratory, it’s worth it for the wealth of information that they can tap into, Leonard says.
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