Sometimes your lab just runs out of money. When she established her lab, Dr. Becca easily obtained R21 funding, and she writes at her blog Fumbling Towards Tenure that she thought she was set.
Unfortunately, she's since been unable to secure outside funds, and is a little over a year away from going up for tenure. But, Dr. Becca has come up with a "survival strategy" to help her through — and it involves a lot of writing.
She plans to write two NIH grants per cycle — one new and one revision — while also searching for foundation funds and seeking bridge funding.
At the same time, Dr. Becca says she'll focus on writing up and publishing the data she's generated thus far, and to keep moving forward on her shoestring budget, she adds that she's going to beef up her collaborations as well as try to network more.
"So here we are. I have half as many full-time personnel as I did a year ago, and our animal rooms are eerily quiet," she writes, adding that "[w]e got a really nice paper in a really nice journal out of that R21 (and another on its way), and a beautiful image from that work will be on the journal cover this summer. Everything is amazing, except we are broke."