The Research Evangelist

I have often written about the need for adequate research funding and the challenge researchers have funding their labs. The cancer researchers that I met over the past 4 years consistently told me they spend up to 75% of their time fundraising - between writing grants to the National Institues of Health (NIH) , private foundations and public charities, and meeting with individual donors. Scientists like John Whetstine at Massachusetts General Hospital happily meet with people to talk about their research and John works a lot of hours writing grants. The more time he spends in his lab the less time he has to test new ideas. Another scientist, Dr. Wayne Marasco at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute laments the fact that he could be in the lab making discoveries were it not for the fact that he has to spend so much time writing grants. And in oncology, the chance of receiving an NIH grant is only 10%. Having now spent almost a year at FRAXA Research Foundation , I see that it is no diffe...

In 2017, I joined FRAXA Research Foundation, a national nonprofit in Newburyport, MA as Director of Development and Community Relations. FRAXA’s mission is to find effective treatments and a cure for fragile X, the most common inherited cause of autism and intellectual disabilities. I had spent the previous 17 years in cancer education and research, most recently as Vice President of Development at the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) in Bethesda, MD. While fragile X research was a departure from cancer, I was drawn to FRAXA firstly because of the mission focus on research. The model of funding individual research labs across many different institutions was similar to how NFCR approached researcher: accept proposals from several labs, vet them through a rigorous scientific review process, and select the most promising projects. FRAXA has been putting over $1 million into fragile X research since its inception in 1994, over $26 million to date. Another reason I joined...