grants

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“Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West”, the Wizard of Oz booms. It is an iconic phrase in one of the most-watched movies of all time. The phrase is also both poignant and baffling. Of course, Dorothy and her companions are crestfallen to hear this “very small task” the Wizard has in mind for them. “If we do that”, the Tin Man stammers, “we would have to kill her.”

It is impossible not to side with Dorothy and the Tin Man here. The Wizard’s task – which requires that the four floundering protagonists gain entry into a well-fortified castle and kill a powerful witch who is bent on vengeance — seems disproportionate to the companions’ requests of the Wizard. In addition, three of the four requests our heroes make — a brain, a heart, and courage – are arguably possessions needed before the task, not afterwards. The task seems all the more unfair because it is arbitrary. Plucking a broomstick from the clutches of a dead witch and presenting it to the Wizard in no way helps him provide the companions with a heart, a brain, courage, or a trip to Kansas.

So it seems also with proposals to the National Science Foundation. Getting a proposal funded by NSF requires generating a central scientific question, crafting a clever and engaging thesis, producing a set of testable and bulletproof predictions, and making the case that the research will both engage undergraduate students and edify the public. Don’t misunderstand me here; these are all worthy goals. I am glad that the NSF insists on these strict standards. Yet scientists seeking funds from NSF often feel that, like the Tin Man, they must “prove themselves worthy” of funding by completing a task both disproportionate and disconnected to the scientific work they propose to do.

Like the broomstick challenge faced by Dorothy and her companions, an NSF proposal is a formidable undertaking. While I am sure some of my colleagues come to the task more easily than I do, I estimate that preparing a grant proposal to NSF from scratch takes about as much time as writing two scientific papers. Therefore, it is often not clear whether I should spend my time writing a grant proposal that stands little chance of funding but would permit us to continue our work or publishing two papers. An NSF proposal, as you can imagine, is never published. Bits and pieces of a proposal might find their way into later journal articles, but the proposal itself is a document read only by a panel of colleagues who sit in judgment. Considering the time spent in preparation and the fact that the funding rate has fallen by about half in the past ten years (to 1/6 of all ecology proposals funded over a three-year period, including initial submissions and re-submissions), submitting an NSF proposal has become a high stakes gamble.

Proposal-writing, moreover, is not like doing scientific work. Most scientists work within a certain conceptual framework, to be sure, but their day-to-day efforts to answer scientific questions within this framework force them to follow a tortuous path comprising many steps. Here is the first disconnect between scientific research and a grant proposal. A successful proposal must center around a single, unifying question. Scientific research rarely addresses a single, coherent, all-encompassing question. Instead, most science is particulate, consisting of a long set of meandering steps, each clearly related only to the preceding one.

On the Loon Project, I first learned that loons engage in territorial battles. Thus, I initially aimed to describe territorial contests and their purpose. During that work, I learned that males fight more dangerously than females. This finding led me to examine differences between males and females that might lead to the difference in fighting, which, in turn, led to the discovery that males choose the nest location and have a greater stake in remaining on a familiar territory than females. Even after three logical steps, my journey had taken me far afield — from territoriality to nesting behavior. Discrete steps are essential, by the way, because scientists must publish their findings routinely in scientific journals in order to justify further research, gain tenure, and have a chance to attract extramural funding. So, like most other scientists, I published my work incrementally through short papers focused on narrow topics, not in a book or monograph addressing a broad question. Most importantly, while the logical path I followed makes sense in retrospect, I could not have written a grant proposal that anticipated it.

Another difference between the practice of science and the task of attracting funding for science relates to the role of serendipity and chance discovery. At its best, science is exciting, because the outcome of any experiment or set of observations is not known ahead of time. Some years ago, we expanded our study area to include a larger sample of marked loons for territorial study, chiefly to learn if young adult prebreeders establish “footholds” in certain lakes where they intruded often in order to increase their chance of later competing successfully to settle on those lakes. We did ultimately answer this question — young loons do not use footholds – but while surveying new lakes of various shapes and sizes, we blundered upon an unsuspected pattern. Young loons, we learned, settle to breed on lakes that closely resemble their natal one in size and pH. (The finding stands as a rare case in which an animal seems to learn a preference early in life that is disadvantageous to it later.) If we had not veered from our normal path to describe natal habitat imprinting, we would have been ignoring a crucial finding of great value to other scientists. Yet publishing a paper on natal habitat imprinting cost us precious time and energy that might have been spent solely studying territorial behavior. The new finding took us into the field of habitat selection, a subdiscipline that our proposal had not anticipated. So neither writing a grant proposal nor conducting funded work leaves room for an unexpected discovery that leads to a new line of investigation.

Why am I suddenly so critical of the procedure for acquiring research funding from the National Science Foundation? You guessed it: sour grapes. I just learned that our proposal to NSF, which I spent most of my spring semester working on, was not recommended for funding. Two reviewers loved it, two hated it, and several others were on the fence. While I am in mourning now and shall be for some time, this is not a complete train-wreck; the reviewers were quite specific and helpful in their criticisms. So resubmission of a greatly-revised version of the proposal that addresses reviewers’ concerns might meet with a better outcome. At the moment, though, I am feeling like the Tin Man did after the Wizard’s request!

 

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The Loon Project is my life’s work. While I greatly enjoy teaching Chapman students, serving on committees with my colleagues, and living in southern California, a part of me resides permanently in the Northwoods with the loons.

I inherited my love of loons. Mom introduced me to them in the 1970s when we made trips to Temagami, a deep, clear, sinuous, 30-mile-long lake in central Ontario. “Listen…..do you hear the loons?” she would ask my brothers and me as we lay beneath thick woolen blankets. As a resident of far-off Houston, I recall feeling awe, and some fear, to hear the mournful wails and maniacal tremolos echo across the huge lake. I wondered what messages loons could be sending each other in the middle of the night.

So I guess I was predisposed to study loons when I re-encountered them in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1992. By the time I had finished listening to Dave Evers (then director of the Whitefish Point Bird Observatory) describe battles for territorial ownership that he and his staff had witnessed during their capture and marking efforts, I was hooked. At first, I implored him to conduct further research. “Your observations suggest a cool territorial system in loons, Dave. There are important questions about behavior and ecology to address here.” But Dave’s interest was not territorial behavior. If anyone was going to follow up those exciting early findings, I, a trained behavioral ecologist, would have to do it.

I began my loon study in 1993 and ran the project on a shoestring back in the mid 1990s. Then a postdoc at Indiana University, I really had no business setting aside my work on parentage analysis by DNA fingerprinting – expertise much sought-after by universities at the time – for a logistically-challenging project that required an enormous investment of time and energy. There was no low hanging fruit here. Several years were required simply to collect enough data to publish my first paper.

It took a decade — until 2003 — to pull together a sufficient cluster of banded loons and early findings to convince reviewers at the National Science Foundation that I was doing productive, cutting-edge research. I was awarded additional funding in 2007 and 2012. But funding rates for ecological proposals are now in the 7 to 9 percent range — roughly a third of where they were 30 years ago.

I love my work and have enjoyed learning about loon behavior, ecology, and population dynamics over the past 27 years. The project is more important now than ever before for loon conservation. With the future of loons in Wisconsin somewhat in doubt, our long-term measurement of breeding success and territory occupancy of marked birds in a large, fixed set of lakes provides us with a vital “early warning system” to detect population decline.

I am excited to invite you to support my efforts to learn about loon behavior and ecology while creating educational opportunities for undergraduates. Here is a link that will take you to our brand new “Donate” page. Thank you in advance for any amount you are able to give — and for your commitment to the loons of the Northwoods!

 

 

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Several events were happening at once last June. I was about to turn 60. The entire college of science at Chapman was moving to a new building. We had just brought our loon research goals to a conclusion, which left me uncertain what questions to tackle in the future. Most important, the money was running out. These events conspired and left me thinking: should I keep studying loons? Or is it time to step back from field research and devote my energy to service to the University?

This question loomed over me for many months. When anyone asked, I was pushing ahead with plans to look at causes of aging in loons through our study of telomeres, but doubt nagged at me each day. Why continue? Have I answered all of the important questions? Should I just rest my back and write my book?

Strangely, I pulled out of this funk not through some unexpected statistical breakthrough or spellbinding discovery but by writing a grant proposal.

To me, grant proposals are a necessary evil. I do not enjoy marketing my ideas to colleagues in my field, who will weigh in with a thumbs up or down – perhaps for the wrong reasons. Selling ideas in an effort to secure funds seems shameless and mercenary. I became an academic in the first place partly to avoid such work. Yet to many scientists, grants are the bread and butter. Without funds to purchase equipment and supplies and hire personnel, most of us are quite limited in what we can study. So we write grant proposals.

Although I had pieced together the rudiments of an outline during this past summer, it was not until November that I started to turn that outline into the introduction and body of a proposal. Even then, I moved at an almost comically glacial pace. Each finished sentence, it seemed, was a great victory and warranted taking time off to recharge. I would find a clever opening phrase and birdwatch for two hours; locate a useful journal article and birdwatch for three. I was going nowhere.

Oddly, I gained momentum. As I added a reference here, ran a new statistical analysis there, a robust, compelling set of hypotheses began to emerge. In the process of constructing a document to convince other ecologists that I had ideas worthy of testing, I convinced myself that I had such ideas. What had begun as a hollow, pro forma exercise culminated in a thoughtful, executable plan for ten years of future loon research directed at the question of why loons settle and breed on small lakes that produce few offspring.

So I am back on track. Far from drifting numbly towards a new research season, I am energized and anxious to hit the lakes again. The sense of dread at facing a year of field work short‑staffed has lifted. Now I relish the challenge of keeping tabs on all of our study animals this summer with fewer field workers – as long as my back holds out.