Depending on where you set up your lab, the institute will provide some startup funds. This amount can vary from 0 to 50L+. The amount at our institute is currently 10L which is allocated to you once you submit a research proposal. The amount is meager for an experimental lab, especially when there is zero existing data collection infrastructure for a cognitive neuroscience lab like mine. This of course makes sense for an institute like ours that doesn't roll in govt funds and has traditionally not focused on big experimental labs. The institute does support 1 PhD student which helps a lot and there are some internal fellowship schemes students can apply for. There are other places that support 5+ PhD students per faculty but I have found that it really does not matter if you cannot recruit motivated and talented PhD students (which some of these other places face despite having the money to support more PhD students). What sets IIITH apart though is access to a large talented pool of undergraduate/dual degree students who have a research requirement. So, we are able to do a lot of technically oriented work with these students, many of whom are brilliant and have great work ethic. For the deeper work that takes years to do well, we need to find other ways of hiring and funding more MS by research and PhD students which is why for me, it is a dire necessity to bring in some grant money ASAP.
That said, I have been fortunate to have broad training across physics, psychology, language, and neuroscience. So I have been able to get a lot of other interesting work going that does not require significant amounts of money except for perhaps participant fees and student/RA stipends. I've already described my reasons for choosing IIITH in the previous blog post. So let me now talk about my attempts to generate funds.
The first one I wanted to apply for was the DBT Ramalingaswamy reentry fellowship. Before I moved from the US, I attended several webinars and made sure I'd be eligible to apply even after moving to India as long as my move was within 1 year of the application deadline. However, unfortunately, when I moved, they modified the rules to say that this was only possible if the candidate had not already found a regular faculty position. That was the first big blow to my funding ambitions.
In my first ~2.5 years, I applied unsuccessfully for the following grants:
- 2022 SERB SRG
- Google India Research Award 2022
- Pratiksha Trust (EMSTAR) Preliminary application
- 2023 SERB SRG
- IHUB IIITH grant (requested 10L to build a lifelogging device)
- FIST 2023 (together with my colleagues)
These are pending decision:
- UGC DS Kothari Startup Grant
- DBT-India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship (I was shortlisted to interview and completed the interview a few weeks ago)
The above are not counting an IHUB COVID grant that I wrote with my colleagues' input even before I joined the institute, which did get funded. My colleague Priyanka Srivastava graciously agreed to be the PI on it as it did not really align with exactly what I wanted to do in my lab and she had more experience with cognitive batteries and collecting data online, so I was happy to serve as co-PI helping with the statistical analyses and design of the episodic memory components of the battery.
Some rejections were reasonable. For example, Pratiksha Trust asked us to rope in some clinical collaborators if we were to reapply since we were proposing some applied work targeted at the elderly and those with MCI. Others were not so reasonable. I felt like some of the bigger grant bodies were not sending my proposals to domain experts based on the brief comments I received with the rejection. My most theory-driven proposal got a "not hypothesis-driven enough" comment. The next year I submitted an even more hypothesis-driven proposal with the hypotheses very clearly delineated and the rejection comment now read "not novel enough". So I really felt like the reviewers were not reading the proposal and perhaps were instead bean-counting high IF first-author publications. My colleagues from theoretical computer science had the same gripe. Their top faculty performers in terms of productivity in the context of their field got similar rejections. This is not a good way of evaluating proposals from starting faculty across the science and engineering domains. If the decisions were going to boil down primarily to a bean-count of the publication record, they should be inviting preliminary applications to weed out the ones they don't want and then treat the proposals more seriously, saving thousands of hours of hours cumulatively across applicants and reviewers.
The most professional grant application experience was DBT-India Alliance. That experience deserves a completely separate post of its own. So, I will stop by saying that funding my lab in India was harder than I thought when I moved back. Recruiting qualified candidates is also harder than I thought. Out of 100+ applications for our PhD program, barely 2-3 make the cut and the rest are non-serious applications. They come to the interview and say that they applied to our program because they couldn't think of anything else to do with their time or that they were bored with their jobs. I initially thought this was not as much of a problem at the traditionally "elite" institutions but my colleagues from those institutions also report similar issues with the applicant pools across domains. I really think funding issues and corruption in hiring practices (though I haven't experienced that anywhere I interviewed, but I hear grotesque stories o corruption and unfair hiring practices from friends who interviewed elsewhere) are the root cause of this given that there are plenty of faculty vacancies across the country.
The only way around the graduate student recruitment problem, as far as I see it, is to build a reputation for your lab, have your initial cohort of students go on to do well so that your lab is known as a launching pad for successful professionals across academia and industry. This is what I intend/hope to do over time. Meanwhile, the teething troubles will continue. Just have to soldier on and get the work done.
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