TWENTY YEARS OUT OF THE LOOP AND WHAT WILL IT BE: SUCCESSFUL FUNDING OR SCIENCE ON A SHOESTRING?

Funding in pursuit of paradigm-shifting research seems justified. But what if the discovery came after a 20 year hiatus from research in one's specialty? What if heavy teaching commitments and a lack of university support for space, technical assistance and infrastructure led to diversion into low cost field investigations? And what if after this 20 year hiatus, one found oneself back at the center of the exact problem left two decades earlier? And further, what if this time, one came armed with seemingly unequivocal field evidence supporting a radically different geologic model from that popularized in the intervening decades? In this situation, for an academician at a university devoted primarily to teaching, what is the most efficient and succesful approach to adequate funding? In this presentation, we will examine a work in progress (my life in academia) to look for a possible fast-track to successful funding, effectively leap-frogging over the plethora of denials that confront most first-time grant writers. My experience probably duplicates that of many teacher/researchers at primarily undergraduate institutions, where inadequate technical support, space and funding make it almost impossible to acquire and maintain sophisticated analytical/experimental equipment. Therefore the best model for success may be to solicit funding for collaboration with major PhD granting institutions near the home campus in order to share access to potentially underutilized analytical and experimental equipment. How will a proposal for such collaboration be received? Are there already working examples of the success of this approach in operation today?