Final Project

Overview

Success in science can depend upon the ability to obtain funding for your research. For your final project, you will write a short grant proposal, in which you will describe experiments to follow-up on a study you read about this semester, or in another area (relevant to Developmental Biology) that is interesting to you. In addition, you will critically review other students’ proposals in a mock ‘study section.’ These reviews will be double blind, so you may not want to broadcast your topic.

The top grant in each of the two study sections will be 'funded' ... and will win a delicious prize

Topic choice

To minimize overlap and duplication of effort, each student’s topic must be unique.  Topic selection will be first come – first served, so you if you have a topic that is particularly interesting to you, claim it soon.

All of the papers we read for journal club this semester are fair game. Most of these papers had an associated ‘commentary’ paper that attempted to place the study into a larger scientific context. Many of these commentaries explicitly mentioned useful follow-up experiments. In addition, the discussion section of each paper is a likely source for future experiment ideas. Finally, you will generate ideas on your own, from the weekly journal clubs.

Another rich source of ideas is any recent (within the last year) issue of Cell, Science, or Nature (all available online through the IC library). Nature has a section called “News and Views” that briefly discusses especially important or interesting papers in each issue; again, these commentaries are good sources of ideas for future experiments. Science and Cell have similar commentary sections.