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Everything about this sounds highly unusual: 1. Universities do not typically allow graduate students to be PIs on grants. This is for liability reasons. Even

by pmags 2y ago

Everything about this sounds highly unusual: 1. Universities do not typically allow graduate students to be PIs on grants. This is for liability reasons. Even for postdocs it would be highly unusual to have full, solo PI status on a grant. 2. Federal funding agencies, and the panels that review grants, would be highly dubious about a graduate student as the sole PI on a grant. For example, NSF's Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) (NSF 24-1; https://www.nsf.gov/policies/pappg/24-1/ch-1-pre-submission#ch1E https://www.nsf.gov/policies/pappg/24-1/ch-1-pre-submission#...) explicitly states: "Graduate students are not encouraged to submit research proposals but should arrange to serve as research assistants to faculty members." NIH is even more constrained w/respect to graduate students. Even pre-doctoral fellowships (F31) at NIH to support a specific graduate student are submitted by a faculty member. I can't speak to DOE or DARPA policies off the top of my head on this point. 3. Could you provide a grant/award number to lookup on NSF Award Search (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch), NIH Reporter (https://reporter.nih.gov/ https://reporter.nih.gov/) or the award search page of whatever federal agency awarded this grant?

toomim 2y ago
You're misunderstanding. I wasn't the PI, and never said I was. My PhD advisor was the PI. I wrote the grant as a graduate student, and did the research. It was an NSF grant, with a title on something about Social Computing Systems, in like 2010 or 2011 or so. You can search for it if you want.
- rsfern 2y ago
  So what did the 40k for your research cover? It sounds like you are probably discounting the cost of your own salary as a graduate student supported by the grant, which is usually the bulk of the direct cost for NSF grants like this and probably runs 100k/year, with the grant covering maybe 3 years of your time.
- pmags 2y ago
  Perhaps this award? James Landay (Principal Investigator) Claus Portner (Co-Principal Investigator) Interaction Economics: Instruments that Measure Social-Computational Systems https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1110965 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1110965 There's a single publication listed as resulting from this award (NB: I'd guess there's probably additional papers stemming from this grant; NSF award search only lists what has been published at the time of the annual report for the FY referenced). That publication includes 4 co-authors: Michael Toomim, Travis Kriplean, Claus Portner, and James A. Landay "Utility of Human-Computer Interactions: Toward a Science of Preference Measurement" ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) , v.May , 2011 This doesn't sound like a "research without depending on other people" type situation, unless you're suggesting your co-authors didn't contribute meaningfully to the research. We can't pull up the detailed budget, but let's do some quick math for what such a grant would typically fund for a CS type project. Assuming a 3-year grant ($140K/year) the directs would have looked like this: * 2 graduate students - 12 months of stipend, fringe, and tuition/fees. This will be the largest portion of the grant; Total: ~$95K/year (Note: 2010 grad student support costs; would be lot more now): * 2 PIs -- probably 0.5 or 1 month summer salary ([1] see below) for each PI each plus fringe; Total: $40K/year * A small travel budget to pay for partipants to attend a conference or meeting (like the ACM conference this paper was presented at); Total: $5K/year [1]: Faculty in most schools of arts and sciences schools at major universities are only guaranteed a 9-month salary (paid out over 12 months). Note this can differ even within a University. For example, A&S faculty might have one standard; the School of Medicine another; etc.
- dekhn 2y ago
  You said "So I wrote, and won, a grant for $650,000." Who submitted the grant? They are the person who "won".

by pmags 2y ago

toomim 2y ago

You're misunderstanding. I wasn't the PI, and never said I was. My PhD advisor was the PI. I wrote the grant as a graduate student, and did the research. It was an NSF grant, with a title on something about Social Computing Systems, in like 2010 or 2011 or so. You can search for it if you want.

rsfern 2y ago
So what did the 40k for your research cover? It sounds like you are probably discounting the cost of your own salary as a graduate student supported by the grant, which is usually the bulk of the direct cost for NSF grants like this and probably runs 100k/year, with the grant covering maybe 3 years of your time.
pmags 2y ago
Perhaps this award? James Landay (Principal Investigator) Claus Portner (Co-Principal Investigator) Interaction Economics: Instruments that Measure Social-Computational Systems https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1110965 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1110965 There's a single publication listed as resulting from this award (NB: I'd guess there's probably additional papers stemming from this grant; NSF award search only lists what has been published at the time of the annual report for the FY referenced). That publication includes 4 co-authors: Michael Toomim, Travis Kriplean, Claus Portner, and James A. Landay "Utility of Human-Computer Interactions: Toward a Science of Preference Measurement" ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) , v.May , 2011 This doesn't sound like a "research without depending on other people" type situation, unless you're suggesting your co-authors didn't contribute meaningfully to the research. We can't pull up the detailed budget, but let's do some quick math for what such a grant would typically fund for a CS type project. Assuming a 3-year grant ($140K/year) the directs would have looked like this: * 2 graduate students - 12 months of stipend, fringe, and tuition/fees. This will be the largest portion of the grant; Total: ~$95K/year (Note: 2010 grad student support costs; would be lot more now): * 2 PIs -- probably 0.5 or 1 month summer salary ([1] see below) for each PI each plus fringe; Total: $40K/year * A small travel budget to pay for partipants to attend a conference or meeting (like the ACM conference this paper was presented at); Total: $5K/year [1]: Faculty in most schools of arts and sciences schools at major universities are only guaranteed a 9-month salary (paid out over 12 months). Note this can differ even within a University. For example, A&S faculty might have one standard; the School of Medicine another; etc.
dekhn 2y ago
You said "So I wrote, and won, a grant for $650,000." Who submitted the grant? They are the person who "won".