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Here is the link to the award (I think): https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2245223&HistoricalAwards=false https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAwa
by chriskanan 3y ago
Here is the link to the award (I think):
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2245223&HistoricalAwards=false https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2245223&His...
Probably half the award is taken up by indirect costs at the university, leaving the remainder for a few PhD students to be funded, money for the devices, and any studies where they are probably paying participants to use the device.
$1.2M doesn't go that far in terms of grants. As far as whether this is a good investment for the government's money, I'm a lot less clear. Given all of the recent car thefts due to TikTok, I assume that influenced NSF and the reviewers.
- K0balt 3y agoHonestly good for them. I’m sure they will learn a lot.
- samstave 3y agoCurious, what % of costs of a grant are usually consumed by the UNi - are these to pay for equipment, power, lab time, etc? Or are they slurping funds for other aspects of the uni's operations?
- klodolph 3y agohttps://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/25910/what-does-overhead-rate-mean https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/25910/what-does... Overhead includes things like administrative & support staff, equipment depreciation, etc. It’s often calculated as some percentage of the grant. Then you fill out your timesheet to bill hours to specific grants, so it can all be tracked.
- intrasight 3y agoUniversities typically take 50%
- HWR_14 3y agoUsually about half. It's designed to cover the costs of running a university research program spread across all the projects. So a 10MM project provides 10x the funding that a 1MM project provides. Think things like health insurance for the researchers, covering time between projects, lab capital costs, electricity, administration, accounting, even the cost of writing grants. There's a valid question of if that number can be smaller, but the general concept makes sense.
- sushid 3y agoHalf is taken by the university? How does that work?
- gonzo 3y agoHappens all the time, nearly everywhere.
- justinclift 3y agoRenting the space to the departments and other similar things probably. I wish I was joking, but a friend who works at a Uni was recently complaining of their budget being affected by (mandatory) things like that.
- ModernMech 3y agoSpace is limited and coveted. What better way would you propose to allocate it than to give it to who can bring in the money to pay for it? That money goes to building new spaces, which is good for everyone.
- justinclift 3y agoSure. Because Universities are all about "bringing in the money" rather than education, research, and similar yeah?
- sclarisse 3y agoYeah :(
- ke88y 3y ago> What better way Open up all federal grants -- especially NSF grants -- to anyone with credentials or experience necessary to PI (so, a PhD or equivalent industry experience). Broaden the reviewer pool so that each panel is at least 51% non-Professor expert citizens. I can do a LOT of advising and conduct a LOT of research with close to 0% overhead. But most NSF grants are only possible to get if you attach yourself to a university, and at that point it's just not worth the effort. Everyone loses, except for the academic industry, which gets heinously immoral labor laws exceptions so that TT professors and admins can retire-in-place on the taxpayer's dime in their mid 30s. What possible actual reason does the NSF have for requiring research work to be done at universities?