I skipped blogging for a while (about a month). The reason being, some seasonal allergy (how annoying) and grant preparation this past one and a half month.
This federal grant will be awarded to a collaboration project between cancer researchers and aging researchers. My ongoing project seems to be a good fit. It took us some time to obtain pilot results and assemble a team of researchers from Stephenson Cancer Center (where I work) and the Reynold Oklahoma Center on Aging and the Nathan Shock Center in Oklahoma City (one of strategic centers for aging-related studies, funded by National Institute on Aging [NIA]).
A part of my research led me to Alzheimer's disease study in this past 3-4 years. I want to investigate functional aging (behavior/cognition) in my model mouse. But functional aging (behavior/cognition) assays are a specialty for aging or neuroscience or traumatic brain injury researchers (....maybe for developmental biologist, too?) Anyhow we cancer researchers hardly do the assays. We usually see histopathological changes (pre-cancerous lesions and actual cancers) and molecular signaling behind the pathology, but physiology or higher-order function like cognition do not always get close attention. Depending on expertise and research field, we researchers tend to see different things.
Although I do intend to be able to read papers and evaluate the results, I am not planning on re-doing graduate school all over to study aging research methodologies. Instead, we collaborate with the pros. Indeed it is good to have experts around.
On this past weekend, version 5 of the proposal was sent to collaborating professor and institutional editor for checkup and edit.
Today I was working to finalize the budget. Calculating people cost, facility cost, research reagents and supplies, cost for outsourced sample analysis, cost for major equipment,....I got to make sure the project gets done.
The internal due date is 10/22. We are planning to start routing the whole package around early next week (10/12-13). We are collecting documents and letter of support (LOS) from collaborators/co-investigators, and have begun to upload necessary files to the grant site.
We want to send the grant some days early. So we can have extra time, even if I or a collaborator catch COVID19 tomorrow and it delays the process.
Even the virus denier/downplaying president caught the virus. The virus going around is real. We got to be careful.
