it's not uncommon for labs to ahve a grad student working on a skunkworks project funded by a previous, unrelated grant. They generate initial data, which is s

it's not uncommon for labs to ahve a grad student working on a skunkworks project funded by a previous, unrelated grant. They generate initial data, which is shown in the grant application. But often the grad student is still working in parallel with the extremely long grant cycle to get more publishable results and can sometimes even get to a full paper before being funded. I think of it like speculative execution and pipelining.