How To Drink and Write Grant Proposals

Amy and Meaghan are experts on writing grant proposals.

It takes lots of grants to fund these pimpin' gold chains.

No really, we are. We've written dozens of grants and scholarship applications, from tiny 100$ travel grants to enormous grants that provide funding for several years. We've also even received several of these grants - Amy received both the Goldwater Scholarship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and Meaghan has received grants from the Field Museum of Natural History, American Museum of Natural History, Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and others. But this isn't going to be a post on how to make your proposal great, because honestly that's the least difficult part of actually writing a grant proposal (strange though it may seem). The very hardest part is actually vomiting that shit out on paper so you have something to get started with. That's what we're going to talk about today: paper brain vomit.

A Moment of Silence for Omomyids

There's plenty of good news from Vengeance Team North - not only has Amy not been eaten by any bears, her Honors College thesis is officially printed and turned in!  Now that the thesis process is over, Amy has made herself quite comfortable in the Alaskan wilderness, focusing on Cretaceous age organisms including, of course, dinosaurs. As absolutely stoked as she is for this exciting new adventure in life, Amy is also finding herself sad to be leaving (for the moment at least) her beloved omomyids. In order to mourn the commencement of this project and properly move on, Amy has decided to cathartically explain the fantasticness of omomyids. And you should pay some attention because this shit was funded by a very competitive national scholarship, therefore solidifying what Amy has long known to be true: cuteness is a fascinating and intriguing scientific phenomenon.

Goldwater-funded adorableness.

Other than cooing about how cute omomyids are, Amy spent her senior year using phylogenetics to explore some of the evolutionary patterns of this group.

Phylogen-what-now? some of you may be saying (we have a substantial readership in the shocked-grandma demographic). Despite what it sounds like, phylogenetics isn't the science of wrapping extinct organisms in flaky and delicious phyllo dough crust and devouring them. It's actually a type of research that shows the evolutionary relationships between organisms. It's the science of creating meaningful family trees. Many of the scientists who do phylogenetic research are biologists who use molecular sequencing data that they extract from living creatures. Contrary to Jurassic Park, fossils are A) super dead and B) usually lacking DNA, so how do paleontologists use this particular toolset?