Many people think that graduate students in the sciences are responsible for the financial burden of their degree. This is not the case, though the path the money trickles down into my shallow pockets is convoluted.

Firstly, I am committed to a single laboratory in my department, which focuses on a very specific topic. Each lab is comprised of graduate students, technicians, and post-doctoral researchers under the guidance of one professor, the principal investigator (P.I.). My department has approximately two dozen P.I.’s, each with their own laboratory personnel. Other graduate students who committed to other labs the same year I did are considered my classmates, though we often do not work together. The remaining students are “in the program” with me until completing enough research to merit a dissertation defense.

The P.I.s are responsible for compensating their graduate students for tuition plus a stipend after their first (and essentially sole) year of classes. (The first year is paid for by performing a teaching assistantship for three quarters during my second year.) Most professors in molecular biology are funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health. The most common grant given to a P.I. is an R01 (pronounced `Ar-Oh-One`) which are “discrete, specified, circumscribed projects to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing the investigator’s specific interest and competencies, based on the mission of the NIH (ref).” These grants are funded in amounts of $25-$250k per year for 1-5 years.

This pool of money is where most graduate student and laboratory employee compensation is derived from as well as all research reagents and new equipment. (It is possible for graduate students to be funded by external scholarships or training grants, but those are competitively applied for.) As you can imagine, a million dollars doesn’t go very far for five years with several researchers performing experiments every day in a single lab. Nonetheless, what is even more counter intuitive is that the NIH funds the R01 grants at twice the value of the direct costs of the researcher. The hosting University takes half of the money and considers it “indirect funds.” Those funds are what pays for University resources like electricity and maintenance of the research facilities. Interestingly, some of those indirect funds are redirected to other departments at the discretion of the University. Therefore, tax payer dollars allocated to the National Institutes of Health are partially funding the arts and humanities too.

[tags]graduate student, grants, laboratory, NIH[/tags]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.