2024: Taking stock; and looking forward to 2025!

Previous posts have reported on various failures to get grants. Several people on Twitter and elsewhere told me that they were all stepping stones to success. Of course, we've all heard that, but it is quite difficult to believe it when you face rejections. 

I'm glad to report that we have finally begun to taste success. The DBT-India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship that was the most heartbreaking rejection for me despite a positive final round experience has now come back to help me, just as people predicted back then. I was able to repurpose some of the ideas in it, and together with colleagues from the department, we submitted a departmental grant application last year on a cohesive theme (which was missing from our previous attempt that was unsuccessful). The panel seemed quite happy with our presentation that was spearheaded by the dept chair. We just got news that we were successful! With DBT-IA, one of my primary goals, in addition to supporting PhD students, was to get a high-density EEG system so that we could do novel neuroscience experiments without having to depend on the good will of people in other institutes, though we are incredibly lucky to have many such friends and mentors in other institutes who are willing to help and collaborate. This grant awarded to the cogsci department will allow us to get the equipment we need. There are a few hurdles to cross for it to happen, but these are on the institute end, and my experience so far dealing with the institute gives me hope that it will go through as they have been very supportive. Getting this done is critical not just for my lab but also for several others to be able to do interesting neuroscience work. Building our departmental infrastructure will also help us recruit good faculty and students going forward. 

An individual grant for some applied work is in the final stages of approval and signing of agreements. So we'll also get some money to fund PhD students for a couple of years. So while it has taken me 3+ years to bring in some external funding, we're finally there and hopefully will have more success with individual grant applications going forward now that we have started publishing independent work from the lab (Interspeech 2024, Neuropsychologia review paper 2024, WACV 2025). 

Additionally, some money that the institute had promised as part of my startup will also be released soon because we met their criteria of a certain number of external grant applications per year. I wasn't tracking that number, but we tried hard enough that we surpassed those requirements quite easily. This will help pay for some studies and provide more support for our students. So the lab should be somewhat comfortable for at least the next year as we seek more external funding support.

During the lean period last year, several colleagues stepped up to help in many ways. One colleague from a completely different center/dept got one of my travel bills refunded from some of his travel funds. Another colleague sponsored a combined lab retreat from her contingency funds from a project. Another colleague and collaborator offered to partially fund one of my students' travel to a conference. The PG chair has also been really helpful by meeting with me and discussing my requirements and making sure he did whatever he could to expedite the release of some startup money for which I was eligible. So I'm very grateful to be in an institute with supportive and helpful colleagues.

We have a few journal submissions of empirical work lined up for the next few months and some smaller conference papers as well. One of our stellar research team members just completed data collection for a Hindi memory experiment with 740 participants with some exciting results that we are writing up. I have my own postdoc paper to submit, which will also happen next semester as I made some progress on it this semester. I hope to carry on working on it in Spring 2025 and submit the revised paper to a good journal. 

With our publication record started and some grant money coming in, I have also taken some time to reflect on the research directions of the lab. I have not figured it all out yet, but I would like for us to do more substantive work, especially with our PhD students, who have longer graduation timelines compared to our MS and DD students. Having our own departmental equipment will give us more freedom to do exactly this: think of ambitious studies for which we can collect data on campus. 

Thanks to all of my colleagues, collaborators, well-wishers, and students for their contributions to making all of this happen. Looking forward to a great 2025!