Funding Saga...

As any graduate student will tell you, maintaining a steady source of funding is always an adventure. This BLOG entry describes struggles I went through recently with my funding.

Dr. Leon Axel is a brilliant man who invented a technique called SPAMM (Spatial Modulation of Magnetization). Back in 1988, he patented the technique:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5054489.PN.&OS=PN/5054489&RS=PN/5054489

What this essentially means is that everytime a company makes an MRI machine, a little chunk of change gets deposited into Dr. Axel's SPAMM Royalty Account at Penn. Dr. Axel, as the inventor of the technique, was given control of the funds to use to further his research and for two years I was supported by these funds as a fulltime staff member at Penn.

In the Spring of 2002 Dr. Axel joined the Department of Radiology at NYU, but retained an Adjunct Professorship at Penn, so that he could continue his research with his students & staff at Penn. At one point in the spring the Radiology Department at Penn tried to redirect the Royalty Funds to other programs and they only restored the funds after the VP of finance was involved in the situation.

In September of 2003 I gave up my fulltime staff position at Penn with the understanding that the Radiology Department would continue to support me for 3 years as a fulltime graduate student. Everything went smoothly for a year, but then suddenly and without any warning the Radiology Department stopped paying the agreed upon fees and it took me months to wrangle a final semester of funding out of them. When all was said and done, they cut me short on funding by a year and a half!

The moral of the story is:
Get it in writing, Get it in writing, Get it in writing!

Dr. Axel and I made the mistake of trusting a verbal agreement with the Penn Radiology Department. The thing I regret most is that Dr. Axel never got any significant publications out of his support for me and that the last 6 months of that support was disrupted by our wrangling with the Penn Radiology Department.

Here is a record of some of the correspondences from this saga.

7/26/2004
http://JoDeMatt.com/blog/funding/funding.html

7/28/2004
http://JoDeMatt.com/blog/funding/funding_2.html

7/30/2004
http://JoDeMatt.com/blog/funding/funding_3.html

10/24/2004
http://JoDeMatt.com/blog/funding/progress.html

10/28/2004
http://JoDeMatt.com/blog/funding/next-step.html

10/28/2004
http://www.JoDeMatt.com/blog/funding/next-step_2.html


Oh well, life goes on. Hopefully someone will learn from my mistakes and this BLOG posting.

-Matt