AlphaBlog

More on the Preamble

I was able to completely outline a set of objectives last night. I've really had only bits of ideas thrown at me for this grant. When, not if, it finally gets funded, I'll be very happy and proud of myself. My primary mentor's idea was bioinformatics, which I went with from the beginning. This is an area I would really enjoy certainly, working with computers to give you the information that you want. I planned large chunks of my CDP around this theme. However, after meeting with my 'sub-mentor', he reinforced that looking into the clinical aspects may be more rewarding for me. After all, I am a clinician. I think that is a fair assessment and can build upon my strengths. He brought this home by reminding me that publishing another microsatellite paper on falciparum would not really get my name out there like a clinical paper on what we are going to be doing would. Hey, I always wanted to do clinical tropical medicine, but never imagined there was any market for that outside of the military. Perhaps there is. I may even be able to go back to my original plan, many years ago, of evaluating strain differences in virulence. Granted that wasn't with falciparum, but still the same idea. Now it is all tied into these challenge trials and will not likely include any overseas work. That I had to come to terms with due to the financial situation of our group.

Our group. Our fearless leader has not been very encouraging after our initial meeting. I was supposed to call him in Malawi yesterday, but couldn't. So, I wrote more last night, came up with the objectives and sent him a draft version of the entire grant. This morning, he had written telling me that I needn't call him. Turns out, he was just wanting to tell me to ditch the idea of submitting the grant until June! Jesus! I have to have something of my own. Even if it doesn't get funding straight off, and it would only be because of our sour financial situation, which is completely beyond my control, it can be reviewed again in October. If I wait until June, the financial situation is unlikely to be improved and a resubmission couldn't be addressed until February! Too close for comfort. Because at best I'll only have a year of funding starting this June. And that depends upon a certain amount of luck anyway. In the end, he was sufficiently impressed with what I sent him last night to back off and say he would support me. I suspect that part of his hesitancy was that he is writing an R01 now due the same time as my grant, and he didn't want to spend much time helping me. Well, he doesn't need to. I'll do it myself. That way, when I get funded, it will be all me. I will submit a small R grant this year as well, try for the June deadline. This will have to have his name on it, how unfortunate.