Finding funding

The quest for research funding takes up increasing amounts of time, as competition gets stiffer and funding more scarce. Surfing the web doesn’t simply provide a welcome distraction from the tedium of writing grant proposals — The spider also found numerous sites offering information, useful shortcuts and handy hints. The Society of Research Administrators (SRA) Grants Web is a great place for those new to grantwriting and grant-seeking. It’s easy to get around, and contains links to government agencies as well as to private non-profit associations and foundations. The links are mainly to funding resources in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, but there is also general advice on submitting grant applications. Another good starting point is the Community of Science, a consortium of research institutions which has one of the largest stores of science information on the internet. There is an excellent online database of research grant information from public and private sources. Searching is easy and can be made very specific. Although it’s mainly geared towards North Americans, the search can be restricted, for example, to throw up only resources for which there’s no citizenship requirement. Access is free, as long as your institution is a member of the Community of Science. If you’re looking for Federal funding in the US, you’re bound to end up at the well-organized National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grants & Contracts site, which includes application kits and information on grant policy. Once you’ve exhausted all the government resources, why not try The Foundation Center Grantmaker Information site, a database of private foundations with links directly to their home pages. As you might expect of the largest private funder of biomedical research in the US, The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has a pretty flash site, with its own Grants for Science Eduction ‘Virtual Campus’. Although HHMI mainly supports designated investigators, there is information here about graduate fellowships and resources for medical schools. If you work on the human genome, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s US Genome Research Funding site offers some useful resources, including links to Small Business Innovation grants. Information on grants in Europe is not quite as easy to come by, but the Network of Excellence (ESPRIT) Research Funding Programmes and Agencies site from the European Union (EU) has links to various EU resources as well as a list of national funding agencies which includes many non-EU neighbour states. The European Science Foundation’s site, by contrast, is frustratingly nonspecific, with more emphasis on jargon such as ‘European added value’ than on how and where to apply for funds. The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Fellowships page tells you what fellowships are available and how long they last, but hasn’t got as far as online application forms. The Bioresearch Funding Newsletter, published by Beckman and Birkbeck College London, used to be produced regularly and issues are still available free online, although the last issue The spider found was from October 1995. Each issue lists UK funding sources including charitable trusts. Also for the UK, the Wellcome Foundation WISDOM database of funding resources is available by telnet and is due on the web this month. Many institutions, like the University of Wisconsin–Madison, maintain useful lists of funding resources, designed for use by their members but now open to all. A good example is the University of Miami’s site, where you can also find Professor Ellen Barratt’s hints for writing successful NIH grants. Some of the advice is equally useful for other grants, and she doesn’t mince words. Under ‘Budgets’ she says: “I have never seen renovation expenses awarded. Forget it.”