IGEM:JohnsHopkins/2008/Ideas/Funding

I've subdivided funding projects for everyone. Most of you should find your name somewhere below. If not, please let me know what funding job you would like to tackle. If you feel your skills are better spent raising funds from a different source (or not at all), please let me know. Either way, I would like some sort of acknowledgment that each person's job is okay with him/her. If don't get a response, I will just assume that you will not be able to work on that particular job, and I will assign it to someone else.

As of right now, we have about six thousand dollars at our disposal. We are shooting for fifty thousand. I anticipate if we shoot that high we could get at least thirty thousand.

The next funding proposal will be to the Provost Undergraduate Research Award Grant (PURA Grant), which is due this coming Friday. Some of us will be gathering in the library at 6 p.m. on Tuesday (March 25th) to iron out the proposal for the yeast sex detector project. We will then e-mail this proposal out to everyone for their opinions/edits, and then this will be sent to the PURA Grant committee by Friday (perhaps earlier). This grant will be the basis for sending out further grant proposals to other organizations and businesses, so don't sweat having to write out your own proposal for the project. We will likely have most of the hard work done by tomorrow evening. We will then work on writing out the proposal for the bio-battery project during Friday's iGEM meeting. This will be e-mailed to everyone for their approval, and that will form the basis for all future grant proposals made to businesses and organizations that we hope will fund the long-term bio-battery project. (Keep in mind that the $30,000 budget I mentioned above is only enough for the yeast detector project and as a small stipend for about six to twelve people to live here during the summer. We are going to have to meet that 50,000 dollar mark if we want to also fund the bio-battery project and support more students to stay here during the summer. The bio-battery proposal is important because it can also set us up financially for several years if it entices NASA enough.)

Here's the break-down. I have assigned multiple people to single groups so that you can coordinate with each other and provide some support. It is best that only one person actually engages each group/individual. We don't want to overwhelm any of these potential donors. 'Y' indicates that you should specifically ask this group to fund the yeast project. 'T' is for the bio-battery. 'B' is for both (or doesn't matter which one, just go with what they might find the most impressive, or appeal to their desire to help budding scientists).

1. Alumni Association Grant- T The Alumni Association's Student Services Grant program provides funding opportunities for student groups and programs that enhance the overall Johns Hopkins student experience culturally, educationally and professionally. Cycle ended March 1st for Summer and Fall, so we are looking to fund the bio-battery project during the 2008-2009 winter/spring cycle (or whatever new project we have for the next iGEM competition). Alyson Nickols Michael Hadjithomas Kayla Cort

2. Michael Bloomberg- B Brian Capaldo Tejasvi Niranjan

3. J. Craig Venter Institute- T Be careful. He may want to patent something from the team. Who knows? James DiCarlo David Gladowski Raghav Badrinath

4. National Science Foundation- Y The National Science Foundation promotes and advances scientific progress in the United States by competitively awarding grants and cooperative agreements for research and education in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Allison Suarez Matt Rubashkin Jasper Chen

5. National Institutes of Health- B Tejasvi Niranjan James DiCarlo Jaime Liu Viktoriya London Allen Yu Marina Paul Nate Sotuyo

6. NASA- T This will be a rather complicated and delicate proposal, but it could really pay off. Jef Boeke Tejasvi Niranjan James DiCarlo Ambhi Ganesan Anyone else who can help.

Companies (Joy Chang may be able to get some of these companies to advertise through us. Joy, just check to see if it possible with each of these companies.) Also, we can create creative ads for some of their products, like the Brown team did with the NanoDrop spectrophotometer.

7. New England Biolabs- B See if we can't get them to donate some of their enzymes (of course money would be better). Brian Capaldo Richard Carrick Raghav Ramachandran Joy Chang

8. Invitrogen, Quiagen, etc.- B See if we can't get them to donate some of their kits or something (of course money would be better). Raghav Ramachandran Venkat Paruchuri Ingrid Spielman David Gladowski Manu Ben Johny Allen Yu Joy Chang

9. Thermo Fischer Scientific/NanoDrop Technologies- B Aquired by Thermo Fischer Scientific. See if they can't donate a NanoDrop spectrophotometer! (Unlikely, but it may come in useful in future projects, and can be shared by all future synthetic biology projects.) Alyson Nickols Raghav Badrinath Joy Chang

10.Gilson Pipetman, Wheaton Socorex, and other companies- B The most valuable scientific equipment we need. First, try get some money out of them. We can use that money to buy used pipetmans or something. New ones are also comparable cheap. Socorex pipetmans (P20, P200, and P1000) may cost us about $450 dollars. Gilson's starter kit (one P20, one P200, and one P1000) runs at $740. It would be nice to have at least six of these. See if you can't get a better price for us, or just money to buy used ones. Newer pipetmans mean more precision. However, repairing/re-calibrating them periodically will likely cost them same as with used ones. Also, we need to get multichannel pipettors if possible. That would greatly speed up our workflow. For prices, go to pipette.com. We can save up to a thousand dollars for three starter kits. Tejasvi Niranjan Allison Suarez Matt Rubashkin Jasper Chen Manu Ben Johny Allen Yu Ambhi Ganesan Joy Chang

11.Martek Biosciences- B Headquartered close to home. Maybe we can get some local help. James DiCarlo Michael Hadjithomas

12.Other local businesses (last resort thing) Subway, Under Armour, Verizon, Comcast. We'll just ask these guys for money and advertise them on our shirts or something (by the way, custom shirts will only cost $10-12 each. So thirty shirts is at most $360. If these companies give us more than $360, than that's a good way of raising funds,) Job assignments will be allocated after the above are accomplished.

13.Other untapped Hopkins sources. Job assignments will be allocated after the above are accomplished.