Grant insights: An interview with Dr. Dan McCarthy
Alicia Kiremire
In the last year, I’ve had the privilege of working with Dr. Dan McCarthy, Dean of Research and Innovation at Southeastern Louisiana University. From the beginning, I knew Dr. McCarthy was a dreamer AND a doer. I had to know more about his story.
Welcome to our conversation.
Can you give me a brief history of your work, especially related to grant projects?
Sure. I'm a physicist - I studied fusion energy. And so the bulk of my grants were research grants funded for about 10 years from the US Department of Energy. These grants funded my research at Southeastern, but also in collaboration with physicists at MIT, UC San Diego, and UK Atomic Energy Agency as well.
Awesome. Okay. What do you like about working on grant projects?
I like getting them funded. It's a lot of work, and there's a degree of randomness. You can have a fantastic proposal - well you think you do - and it doesn't work. And other times it works out well. You are always at the whims of the reviewers, so I like when proposals are successful because it's the same amount of work for successful or unsuccessful. It's always a real thrill to get them awarded.
So true. Next question, what is the smallest grant that you've been awarded, and can you tell me about it?
I'd say the smallest might have been the most important. When I was first an Assistant Professor in 1994, the State of Louisiana had known at the time the Louisiana Educational Quality Support Fund, now called the Board of Regents Support Fund. Those grants were for junior faculty just to get started. I was awarded one, and it wasn't much. I mean, I'm not an expensive researcher. I'm a theorist and computational person, so I just needed some summertime and student time and travel. The total cost of the grant was maybe $75,000 for three years. It wasn't much, but it led me to getting funded by DOE for the next 10 years. It was the springboard to long-term funding from the Federal government, which is the entire purpose of those grants. It's meant to make you Federally competitive, and it did.
That’s so cool - faithful with the little things!
Next, what's the largest grant you've been awarded, and can you tell me about it?
When I was Dean of Science and Technology, I was very closely involved in a large grant from a private company called Air Products. The project was to do environmental monitoring related to a carbon capture project they're proposing. It was a $10 million grant over three years. So it was a thrill, as you can imagine.
Very exciting because we have had five investigators on the project. There was a real challenge of bringing them all together and then tying all the separate projects into one coherent product. We've never had anything like that at Southeastern. Again, not your typical Federal award, but one from a private industry and a big dollar amount. So that's what led to me moving into the Dean position - I realized there are more opportunities for grants like that, and I needed a lot more time to work on them.
Wow yes, that’s big. Can you share a little more about the project? What led to it, and what have the outcomes been so far?
Well, we're in the third year. It's ongoing, but the work's been so successful, they're going to ask us to do it for two more years. They didn’t put an RFP out; rather it was more relationship building. We had to convince the company that we were capable of doing the work. They recognized our capacity and asked us to do it.
As far as outcomes, the project involves environmental monitoring of Lake Maurepas. One component is the aquatic environment, both the populations and health of all the fish and the crabs and shrimp, and then also the stresses of the various organisms. It's a very poorly understood lake. We've discovered species in Lake Maurepas we didn't know existed. We found that even though it's labeled as a shrimp sanctuary, in three years we only found eight shrimp. We found Gulf sturgeon there, never seen before in that lake at all. We're finding a lot of interesting things about the various heavy metals in the lake which we did not know before. We're doing both mechanical analysis and also Tisch samples.
We're also working on the wetlands. We're planting a number of trees and trying to reforest the area. We’re doing experiments as to what's the best environment for the trees to grow. What can we do to get them reforested? Because there used to be a huge cypress forest there, and it was logged. And it's been a real challenge getting things to grow back.
The whole project is a variety of things that are way outside of my field of physics! But it's still been cool to learn about all this stuff.
Yes, and you talked about your role bringing people together with the right expertise.
Right, that's the big part. And getting people who normally don't work with each other to work with each other. That's been really beneficial, and we're seeing a lot of synergy. So it's really more of a project management type role.
Another part is relating to the community, getting these data out to the community. A lot of the work will be published in scientific journals, but a huge component of this is making sure the community understands what we're doing. And talking to elected officials; they need to know too because the science in this area is going to have an impact on policy, and elected officials need to be informed about the science.
So it's a very far reaching project with a lot of different stakeholders. As opposed to back in my research days where communicating with stakeholders was going to conferences and publishing papers; it was really other physicists who I'd work with. This is now working with all sorts of different people.
Yes, I can only imagine!
Next, what has been your favorite grant project and why?
This is a project we started recently. I worked with a fellow colleague of mine who's also a physicist, and we started a program at Southeastern called STEM Scholars. We received private funding, and we also have NSF funding through the FUEL grant led by LSU and DOE funding through the H2theFuture grant led by the Greater New Orleans Development Foundation.
The STEM Scholars program provides a very intensive year-long research experience for high school students from underserved populations in Louisiana. The students work with our own faculty and with our undergrads on a research project over a year, and it's had a tremendous impact on the students. Many of our populations just don't have access to things like this. So we're really reaching out and showing students that they are able to do this work, they can do it, and they should do it. And it's making them much more interested in going to college and pursuing a degree in an energy-related discipline. It's also been really gratifying to see the program grow. The first year we had 30 students, and now we serve about 150 students.
So that's my favorite project because I really do think it's the most meaningful and is truly changing lives of students and also improving the state. We're accessing a population that had been largely overlooked before; and now they are moving into higher secondary education, post secondary education, and hopefully really good careers in STEM fields. It’s a very exciting program, and we're very proud of it. And it’s going to be ongoing for a while - I think we're going to have another contract signed next week with another company.
It's so neat and inspiring to me to see your journey from being a growing researcher, then a successful researcher, and now full circle to helping the next generation to do the same.
Next, how have you changed as a PI? What's the biggest thing you've learned?
A lot of times, when junior faculty start, they don't really know how to be a PI. I didn't, but I was lucky in that I had worked with really good people when I was at University of Maryland. I had written a lot of papers, which helped with grant proposals because it meant I had some ideas.
Now I’ve moved from doing my own thing to really helping facilitate others and find their talents. What I'm supposed to be doing as a Dean of Research is not so much advancing my own individual agenda, but advancing the research agenda and priorities of the entire university and identifying the skills in the university and opportunities that we maybe haven't thought about before, such as STEM Scholars and working with companies.
Okay, that leads right into the next question. What is your advice for up and coming PIs?
There are three basic elements to writing a grant. First of all, understand what the agency wants to fund. I mean if they want to fund K-12 education, don't write a research grant about neutrinos. It just doesn't make any sense. So understand what they want.
Explain to them why what you're doing is important and relevant. You need to let them know this is an important thing, this is relevant, this is meaningful. So it's really understanding your audience and then letting them know why it's important.
And then, and this is the last part, tell them why you're the person to do it. Show them you can do it and you can do it where you are. So let’s say I’m at Southeastern, and I identified a good problem, but I needed a million dollar piece of equipment in a lab - that would make no sense because then I can't do it here. So you need to make sure that you have the ability to do it, not just within your own talents, but at your institution… which could mean collaborating with another institution. So that was actually what happened with DOE when I was collaborating with others at MIT. They clearly have resources at MIT that we're not going to have in Hammond, Louisiana.
You have to be honest about your idea and your capabilities. Reviewers will figure out quickly if you aren't telling the full story. Show them you really understand what you're doing, you understand your barriers, and you know what it takes to successfully overcome those barriers. If your problem isn’t that important, try to find another important problem. Or if you need some help, find an institution down the road or another state that can help you out.
That’s great. So in the last year, you worked with me and my colleague, Dr. Allie DeLeo-Allen. Can you share about that experience?
We have written some proposals which required assessment, a type of assessment which we didn't have the skill set for, and you certainly have that skill set. So that's been really helpful. You've assisted us in identifying some opportunities which I did not know about before, finding a rural workforce development grant. And I think it's going to be really helpful with you guys working with our junior faculty to give them some skills that they're going to need to move forward. Sometimes hearing it from someone external is more powerful than hearing it from someone internally.
Yes, we’re looking forward to that!
All right, anything else you want to share? Questions I haven't asked?
You talked about my different path, and I guess it's like everything you do. Something can have an impact on what you're doing, and it is completely different later on. So the more experiences you accumulate, the more you are able to fit yourself into a place that you never imagined you could before. I never could have done what I'm doing now when I first started as assistant professor. It's a variety of experiences which have allowed that to happen.