DARPA projects are often moderately large, say about a dozen researchers on one grant.
Here, the PI is basically full-time writing grants/managing the budget/managing people, and their minions ar3 doing the actual research. Can work.
A stupid bug in the system at my current institution. So, we have full time researchers and teaching staff. Teaching staff have permanent contracts. Research staff are only ever employed until the end of whatever research grant the6 are currently employed on. Bug: research staff cannot be PIs. Because, well, the grant will end and the researcher will cease to be employed, but there might still need to be government paperwork to be done wrt the grant by the PI, which well won’t happen if you’ve just terminated the PIs contract because the grant ended. But .. Hang on a minute ..l didn’t we just say that being a PI is a full-time management position? And you’re asking that guy to teach classes too?
[Amusing factoid. I once had an EU research contract with a strict condition that we absolutely not do any research. Background: original grant has ended, but we haven’t had the wrap up meeting where you present the results to the evaluators. Somehow, the travel expenses for that meeting need a grant extension to cover them, but, says the sponsors, understand this additional money is travel expenses only and don’t you guys dare to charge any actual research costs to this contract]
In case it isn’t obvious. Consequence of the above institutional rule is that your full-time research staff are not, and be rule cannot be, principal investigators.
Me: “I need to get some business cards printed, and the online form here says I can put whatever I like in the title field. I think I’m going with ‘senior research fellow’.”
member of academc staff, and my long term collaborator: “That would have the advantage that it’s actually true. Someone could probably do more damage by writing in “head of finance” in there...”
DARPA projects are often moderately large, say about a dozen researchers on one grant.
Here, the PI is basically full-time writing grants/managing the budget/managing people, and their minions ar3 doing the actual research. Can work.
A stupid bug in the system at my current institution. So, we have full time researchers and teaching staff. Teaching staff have permanent contracts. Research staff are only ever employed until the end of whatever research grant the6 are currently employed on. Bug: research staff cannot be PIs. Because, well, the grant will end and the researcher will cease to be employed, but there might still need to be government paperwork to be done wrt the grant by the PI, which well won’t happen if you’ve just terminated the PIs contract because the grant ended. But .. Hang on a minute ..l didn’t we just say that being a PI is a full-time management position? And you’re asking that guy to teach classes too?
[Amusing factoid. I once had an EU research contract with a strict condition that we absolutely not do any research. Background: original grant has ended, but we haven’t had the wrap up meeting where you present the results to the evaluators. Somehow, the travel expenses for that meeting need a grant extension to cover them, but, says the sponsors, understand this additional money is travel expenses only and don’t you guys dare to charge any actual research costs to this contract]
In case it isn’t obvious. Consequence of the above institutional rule is that your full-time research staff are not, and be rule cannot be, principal investigators.
Me: “I need to get some business cards printed, and the online form here says I can put whatever I like in the title field. I think I’m going with ‘senior research fellow’.”
member of academc staff, and my long term collaborator: “That would have the advantage that it’s actually true. Someone could probably do more damage by writing in “head of finance” in there...”
So, apparently, “senior research fellow” is what your postdoc research staff get called.