I'm part of one of these! Very exciting. Overall fastgrants is a great organization. 48 hour turnaround is incredible and could be paradigm shifting for getting science done. Thanks pc and everyone else for the chance to get some science done!
I'm working with the Satpathy lab on their project. I'm a PI at the Parker Institute. We usually do cancer, but are bringing our tools to COVID research in this time.
Glad to see Dr. Patrick Hsu (https://bioeng.berkeley.edu/faculty/patrick-hsu) among the recipients. He is one of the smartest and most impressive people I know, so at least from my limited vantage point, this money is going to the right people :).
This is a great initiative, and it's heart warming to see that the list is getting quite long. Most of these go far beyond my level of understanding, so I'm guessing I'm not the target audience. Nevertheless, it would be great if they could a one or two line elevator pitch-style "why this is important" section to each recipient's blurb.
Sadly, no one appears to be funding the COVID-19 mental health crisis. This would be a great opportunity for Fast Grants to be proactive. I personally know clinical psychologists and researches desperately looking for funding to get ahead of this next wave. LMK if you're interested in helping.
Nice to see Dr.Netea there. I had the opportunity to work with him and his team in a collaboration ten years ago, when studying the pathways leading to antigen presenting cells activation.
On the topic of the immune system he certainly knows his quarters.
All very worthy, but nothing really unexpected [0]. I was hoping we would see some radical ideas and scientists from obscure universities getting funded.
0. Disclosure. I was a failed applicant, but I am not surprised as I am neither an academic these days (I am in industry), nor did I ask for any money.
Yep. I have money, what I asked for was collaborators. Of course I was rejected because the fund supposedly ran out of money!
I should add I got no help with collaborators, but given the form letter I was sent I strongly suspect nobody even read my application. If this wasn’t such a serious problem it would be comical.
This makes me hopeful for the future, the next decade is likely to be amazing for healthcare research.
Hopefully some good comes out of this unfolding tragedy and drives the next generation to critical issues like healthcare & climate change than building yet another photo/video sharing app.
Update: Very good points, and I'm glad the interviewers pretty much gave her a format to let her run free and discuss a myriad of points from Viral structure, research efficacy, potential vaccine approaches, and regulatory capture/political failure in diagnostics. She uses how the NIH pulled funding prior to having a vaccine imminent only to have the priorities shift entirely as a recent example of how short-lived memories and fashion can be deadly if this government funded research paradigm alone is how we approach these problems.
She seems like a very knowledge person (beyond her academic concentration) and understands the implications to other catastrophes when dealing with an unnecessary bureaucratic-political maze, its just not suited for foresight or critical crisis management. Its a best reactionary in a knee-jerk manner, and fails at scale in a catastrophic way. She makes a salient, albeit alarming, point how this can be seen with how climate-change is being mishandled.
I'd like to get to know more about her and her work, highly recommended podcast.
I was under the impression that those universities took good care of their researchers.
I'm under the impression that most university researchers's reputation, labs, and tenure cases rely heavily on grants, and that most university "scientists" today are really grant writers and grant managers.
That might be a little too cynical a take, but I've heard variations of it enough times to take the view pretty seriously.
Unfortunately it's not cynical but the reality. Most people would be shocked how much time academics have to spend on grant writing and other administrative things. The whole system is completely broken, essentially we are applying for money to spend time on writing grants to apply for more money. The unfortunate reality is that in the experimental sciences there is no way around this. You need the funds to be able to run experiments (grad students are part of this as well) and if you ever stop you will never be able to start back up again. Essentially you need to be able to show a track record & preliminary results to be successful at getting a grant, if you stopped applying for grants you have neither. Moreover often universities will give you more teaching duties because you are not bringing in research funding. It is a vicious circle.
Not cynical at all. Speaking from experience, it is just reality. They are still scientists, but in practice it is more like the technical lead who also does the fundraising. At least in the US, universities do not take "good care" of their researchers. Researchers take care of the university. Direct funding and overhead income from grants is super important to university budgets.
Not cynical. Also, academic institutions take "overhead" from grants, sometimes up to 100%, ostensibly to provide infrastructure, keep the lights on, etc. (this means the $5m grant from NIH for the researcher really costs the NIH $10m).
"cores" in an academic setting refer to shared institutional resources, e.g. for DNA (or other) sequencing, mass spectrometry, computing resources, cell lines, etc.
