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Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

$1.2 million will fund 4 years of research for 2 professors, and 2 PhD students. It’s not exactly a career making grant.

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No way. Half goes to overhead. 600k/4 people/4years = 38k/person/year.

That seems extravagant. By my calculations it should fund approximately 6 or so years.

Cover the two PhD students at the NIH payscales for PhD students on a standard training grant[1] ($43,894 not including benefits) and you've used up over a quarter of your budget on less than half the salary needs, completely ignoring any research costs that need to be covered on top of the much higher payscales of the professors. Plus a large number of PhD students in this kind of work make more than the states stipend above. Not extravagant.

https://osr.ucsf.edu/news/nih-update-ruth-l-kirschstein-nati....

Where are you seeing $44k? The link you gave shows payscales for postdocs, and points to another page [1] showing that predoctoral trainees get $27k.

Also, in my field and in my region, $27k is massive funding. I don't know anybody who makes that much, let alone $44k, and we also don't get tuition or benefits covered. Our TA/RA union is currently striking because it's essentially impossible to live off of funding alone.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-23-0...

This was my conclusion as well. Will wait to see what the response is here.

I'll give you that I misread bullet 2, so the total is a little over 31k. But grants that fund salaries for predoctoral scholars don't just fund the salary itself, they also cover the additional funds listed on that page. You can't partially fund a trainee on a grant. In any case, this wildly misses the forest for the trees - 1.2 mil in grants does not cover 6 years of salary plus research costs for 2 trainees and 2 professors full stop.

But it’s not 4 years either.

Absolutely, 6 years with a 1.2mil grant is ridiculous. I was just hopeful that somewhere there were PhD students making enough money to live from research

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