Weaned, via Whitaker

In 2006, the Whitaker Foundation decided its work was done. The philanthropic organization was formed by U.A. and Helen Whitaker with the goal of creating a worldwide field of biomedical engineering. Once it determined it had achieved its "primary objective," it shut down.

The year before, 31 biomedical researchers received Whitaker grants, some close to $100,000. Trouble was, the money was guaranteed to disappear - and soon. Here, some present their advice on how to handle funding you know will run out.

Plan ahead.

It's obvious advice, but bears a mention. The minute Edward Brown at the University of Rochester received $93,550 from the Whitaker Foundation to pursue research on imaging angiogenesis and vascular function in tumors, he started looking for his next grant. "Certainly, you're looking for funding within the next year," he said. "Fortunately, that worked." Before his Whitaker grant was up, Brown had obtained a five-year grant from the Department of Defense to continue his work with breast cancer. "I was onto a longer and larger grant" before he ran out of Whitaker dollars.

Planning ahead takes many forms, but essentially means submitting more grant submissions (without watering down the quality), and looking to new sources of money, such as different agencies, foundations, or corporations, says Robin Coger at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, who received more than $75,000 to study engineered liver systems. "Fortunately in my case the Whitaker closing coincided with an NIH grant being funded," she says in an Email.

Position funds as leverage.

One way to make sure you're not left empty handed when a grant runs out is to treat it like a mortgage or other line of credit: Leverage it for something else. Not literally, of course - Deepak Vashishth at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for instance, used the $80,000 he received from the Whitaker Foundation to generate preliminary data that enabled him to apply for grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. "You know right from the beginning that it is only a one-time award," he says of the Whitaker money. "And you should use it to generate preliminary data to go for" a federal grant." Now, Vashishth has two NIH grants.

Pair up.

"It's extremely important in the current environment to establish collaborations," Vashishth says. While you're still funded, partner with people who need your expertise, and vice versa. Whitaker required him to collaborate, he says, and believes that doing so helped him obtain one of his NIH grants, reasoning that applications with more than one scientist may look more attractive. Now, he is serving as co-investigator on his co-investigator's application for funding.

Publish!

It's another obvious suggestion, but it works: Vashishth published every bit of data he obtained using his Whitaker grant, and presenting federal agencies with preliminary data that was also published may have given him a leg up, he reasons.