 and NCAR, and we focus on modes of variability and climate change. And my piece of that is looking at hydrological cycle. I look a lot at things like atmospheric rivers, monsoons, and extreme weather events. I thought what I've done a lot of, I've been at NCAR for actually quite some time and I've had a lot of different roles and hats. And so I thought I would share two examples of projects I've managed. One is a really broad example. It's called ARTVIP, which is the Atmospheric River Tracking Method Intercomparison Project. And this is something that's outside of NCAR. It's actually an international group with, we've got, I'm trying to remember now, at least 60 or 70 folks that are part of this program. It's a volunteer sort of a project. And so the way you manage it is a little bit different than you would manage something that was internal and small, which is the second example I used to manage, or I used to do a lot of paleoclimat as well. And so I have an example of a small project that I managed just recently actually on deep time paleoclimat. And this was a privately funded project by the Heising Simmons Foundation. And so I thought just sort of I would go through the two different ways I've approached these projects in hopes to help give you an idea of how to do things with firm examples. Okay, so next slide. So here, this is sort of what I just sort of talked about a little bit, the two different types of projects. ARTVIP, yes, this is a grassroots community, a lot of different people, multi-agency universities, NCAR, DOE, Scripps at UC Santa Cruz are just a whole bunch of different people, both the weather community that care about operational and weather forecasting and climate community. So very diverse. And then the internal one was this deep time paleoclimat one. We had four of us who are full-time employees that were funded under this project. And we had a lot of computer simulations that we needed to accomplish and then deliverables to the HSS Foundation. So next slide. So the overarching theme here is organized with the type of project in mind. So I'm gonna show you two different types of examples. There's a lot of commonality between the two different types of projects, but where the differences happen is sort of in the details. There's like, I've written a lot of words on these slides. So maybe you couldn't like refer to them later, but yeah, and in the Q&A if you have very specific questions for a particular type of broad project or a small project, then maybe we can do that in the Q&A. But hopefully this is just sort of like an outline. The first point was just the organizational meeting amongst all of your people in your project is very important. You need to establish your goals, your deliverables, your decision-making structure, especially for this broader community, the decision-making structure is very important because it's often done by a committee. And we have a committee where we have people that lead specific parts of it and then people are responsible for certain parts of it, but it's all voluntary. And so you have to sort of understand that the people that are volunteering their time, it is something that they're doing sort of on the side a little bit. And so you don't wanna give too much to one particular person. And then you also wanna establish your timeline. The second really important piece is to create a working space that is open access. When I mean by open access, it's just really available that you can exchange information back and forth easily. This was really super easy with the Google share directories. I just created some directories and I gave them essentially world permissions. And then I use other things like web pages and we used, for people who have limitations with Google, we actually opened up a box account to exchange information within that because box apparently is a little bit more secure. And we had some NOAA and NASA people that needed to use box. And then just things like global FTP and Globus and getting people on board in permission. So that was so we can exchange information and data sets which is what a very important thing that ARTMIP does. So next slide. Number three, be mindful of time and stresses on group members because this was like a volunteer group. You can't expect people to, you can't expect to send someone an email one day and then get something, get the what you want the next day. You really need like weeks of lead time to be able to get people time to put it into their schedule so you can actually meet your deliverables. And you really need to be flexible too because sometimes stuff happens and someone misses a deadline you can say, well, yeah, you can give this to me in a couple of weeks instead of now or something like that. And the one thing that I tried to do was not bombard people with emails. Like I would only do emails very periodically and I would use like outlines and bold letters just so people were scanning it. They could actually take a look at what the very important things were but the limited email because if you do too much information or too many emails, people just tune out. And then the main, the final thing of outline point I put for this one is that you really need institutional support. I had support from not only Catalyst but I had support from DOE which is my primary funder right now and that is critical because if they aren't on board with it you really can't commit your time to that. So you really need institutional support if you embark on a project like this. And then of course, foster good communication. There's a lot of different cultural differences especially with international community. You really need to be mindful of how you communicate. Okay, so next slide. So this is the second, a smaller type of project. We had four people on this project and the primary decision maker was the principal investigator and he made, he was the one that sort of made the science decisions like, okay, this is what we need and this is how I want it to go and then it was my job to sort of make it happen. So the same sort of thing it's like you need to have this first meeting where you sort of outline who's responsible for what and get your timeline down. It's easier to adjust this timeline with just four people than have like a broader group of people. So for creating the workspace it doesn't necessarily need to be shareable because it's this very small, it's an internal organization. It's easier to share just within your institutional computer systems or web pages or whatever. But I actually still use the Google share for this. I just had a limited, I just had the people that were involved or the people with their permission that had to get into those shared directories. We use calendar a lot, which is great. You can do that with a smaller group of people just to schedule meetings and stuff. Another thing that we did is like we had to worry about computer allocations, where we're gonna keep stuff, where we're gonna run the simulations and how much storage we had and how much time we had for that storage and when we had to move it, things like that we had to sort of consider. Regular meetings is really important for a small group especially of people that need, they're different people of different styles. So first of all, you need to recognize what the style of the people that you're working with is. Is it someone that wants or needs a daily or a weekly check-in or someone who's better if it's for hands-off? So that's the first thing you sort of have to decide. But regular meetings as a group helps with cohesion and it also helps keep you on your timeline. And then if there's an issue, you can sort of spitball about it and figure out how to solve the problem. Next slide. Same thing, be mindful of time and stresses for group members even though you're being paid to do this. This is still, it might not be the only project that they're working on and so if you need to help people try to figure out what their time management is, like how much time you need for a particular task is great if you can give people estimates. I think we have this amount of time to do this task. Can you budget in and with your other responsibilities? Again, early notification of timeline and deliverables is really important. It's never good to give someone an hour or a day or two days worth notice when you need something. Sometimes stuff happens and I get that but it absolutely should not be a regular thing. You need to give people time to plan. Again, flexibility, limited emails, this is all the same. And then finally for the group cohesiveness, again as essential, sometimes it's fun to do things that are outside of work if you want to that just for a picnic or a happy hour or something that just to help with that group cohesiveness and again pay attention to your cultural differences. Next slide. So the second overarching thing was your timeline creation needs flexibility. So when you're first building your timeline you have to really build in problems that are unforeseeable that are gonna extend the timeline. This is harder for, this was sort of easier for ArtMap because we're sort of self-directed and volunteer so we can just keep pushing the timeline back as long as everyone agrees but it's not so easy if you actually have a hard timeline deliverable. So when you're, so you sort of need to manage, figure out what your project is and how much flexibility you need to build in there. So there's a lot of software management tools that are actually out there that I totally would encourage you to engage with because just trying to use your notebook or even just like a Google doc with the outline of what you wanna do is great but the more stuff that happens in your project it's gonna be harder to manage. There's lots of project management tools out there that are great for different things. I used, as I said, the software, the Google just for the organizational structure in terms of folders and where to put things, calendars, Excel, air table is one, you have to pay for air table but air table is a fantastic management tool and then your deliverables you need to be, your dates could be based on the workload of others and then always have a backup plan. It's always good to have a backup plan. So I just put on this slide, just sort of examples of what we did for our next slide. So this is an example of a flow chart I made for my Paleo project. We had a number of simulations that we had to do and some of them are dependent on the other and so this flow chart helped me try to remember what the order of operations were and then it was like a couple different parts. So this is where project management tools can start to help you. If there's different ways you can organize things with colors or with spreadsheets or whatever. So whatever project you're managing, you might wanna pick a tool that has the bells and whistles that you need but I just did this, I just made a flow chart for myself in PowerPoint essentially just to keep my sanity and trying to remember all the different order of operations what we needed for each simulation and the flow of how it was going. And so next slide. And this is the example of a spreadsheet I used just to keep track of the simulations when we're starting them, when we wanted to finish them, what they cost and then the total length of the simulation that we needed. And so I was always adjusting this. The first time I created this spreadsheet was absolutely the not the last time. I must have updated things dozens of times because you have to, as I said, build in that flexibility but keeping track of things in an organized manner will really help with your sanity. So I think that's all I have. Yep, on to James. Awesome, thanks Christine. James, if you wanna go ahead and kick things off, that'd be awesome. Yeah, thanks Aaron. And yeah, thanks for the invitation today and good to see everyone. Yeah, I'm James Stone in M-Cube. So I'm also, I'm a project scientist three. I'm section head for the labs capacity center for climate and weather extremes. So my interest is in the high impact weather in the climate system. So what causes it? And how well can we predict it on seasonal to climate scale? I'm a physical climate scientist. So given this event is about grants, let me tell you where my money comes from. So about 70% of my funding comes from private industry. 20% comes from competitive NSF awards and I get 10% base for section head duties. Oh, I've also had some experience being a project manager on a multi-lab NCAR project. So I can also speak to that. So today I wanted to say a few comments about qualifications. Then I wanted to return to say a few things about project management, building on what Christine has already mentioned. And then I'll say a few things about budget planning. So let's start with qualifications. So there's a number of ways I could interpret this, but this is my perspective on qualifications needed to submit a successful proposal. So I think the number one qualification is intellectual curiosity. So the ability to spark compelling ideas. I think if you have a compelling idea paired with a nice conceptual diagram, then that is probably 70% of the proposal done. But you also need the ability to communicate it. And so that's, I think the key thing there is understanding your audience. So where you submit your proposal really depends how you frame your cool idea. So you really need to know your audience. So for NSF, that means spending a lot of time talking about advances in fundamental science and a whole list of caveats. We're good at that. But when I propose to private industry, I have to turn it on its head and talk about the possibilities that would be created through this project and the outcomes. And then the methods and the caveats are almost often an appendix. So you need to know who your audience is. So your cool idea resonates with them. So over to the next slide, please, Erin. So what's worked for me is to have a cool idea but also an idea that I am really uniquely qualified to do the work. So here's a picture of a cathedral in my hometown of York. It's actually not a cathedral, but that's a story for another day. So there was a fire in this cathedral in the 80s where about a third of it burnt down. And there was really only like one or two stonemations in the city, qualified to rebuild. And so guess what? They got the work. So how does this translate to science? Well, for example, if you develop a new capability in CESM, for example, or some new analysis tool for Wolf Hydro and you propose to advance this tool, then really you are uniquely qualified to do the work. So what's worked for me is to have this cool idea and be the only one who can do it. And then on the next slide, you also need to make sure that what the solicitation is asking for is what your cool idea responds to. So where I have failed in the past is trying to crowbar ideas that I thought were good and that I was uniquely qualified but did not resonate with the solicitation. So not only do you have to read the solicitation but actually listen carefully and read between the lines of exactly what's being asked and stick to it. So that's what's worked for me. On to the next one, Erin. So talking about qualifications. So yes, it's important to shout about your qualifications in the proposal. So an obvious way of doing that is to cite relevant papers. But if this is a new area of work for you and you don't have a already published paper then a nice way of showing you are qualified is to include some short pilot analysis. So if there's a question in a reviewer's mind thinking, oh, well, that data is not going to fit with this software, you need to demonstrate that yes, actually it does. So a nice short analysis, not too much. And then also it's important to identify obstacles because if you don't identify them, the reviewer's will. And so if you identify them and show that you have a contingency in place then that is a very compelling proposal that shows you've thought about it and you're qualified to complete the work no matter what comes up over, say, the three years of the project. So I would say that is an important way of showing you're qualified. Next one, please, Erin. Okay, well, that was just some remarks about qualifications. Now I wanted to return to project management and just talk about two principles that have really helped me, that I learned from the UCAL Leadership Academy. So I would highly recommend this Leadership Academy for anyone who's interested and I can chat with anyone who wants to know more about it. But so the first principle has helped me is that there's three vertices, I guess, for a project. There's the scope. So what work are you going to do? There's the finite budget and finite time. And if you change one of these, the others need to shift as well. So what has often happened with me, especially with the private industry funded projects, as you go in along, you think of this other great idea and you think, oh, we should do this also. But if you do add something, you also need to either increase the time or increase the budget. Otherwise you're going to be squeezed. So that is principle number one. Don't allow a project creep without asking for more money. On to the second principle. So for a successful project and successful project management, firstly, everyone needs to agree on the direction of the project. So Christine already talked about this. So if your end goal of the project is unfocused or vague, you're never going to get there because you don't know where you're going. So one way to agree on the end goal is to create bottom-up consensus on what the end goal is of the project. Another key attribute of a successful project is alignment. So if you have five people on your project, what normally happens if you have scientists on your project, they like to work on their pet projects, which are not necessarily part of your project. So they can go off and do what they want to do. And I think I've been guilty about this. So you really need the work to be aligned with everyone else. One way to achieve that is to define metrics or specific objectives that are about alignment between project components. And then finally, you need commitment. So over a long, multi-year project with large teams, people may not always be committed to your project. And the number of ways that you can encourage people to be committed, you could make logical appeals. So I could say, Aaron, we really need you to do your piece of work so Mariana can then start her piece of the project. Or you could make cooperative appeals and talk about, like Hugh, I could say, how great it's gonna be to finally submit our interdisciplinary project. And then something I'm less good at is making emotional appeals because these have to be authentic. So I could say, like Kelly, I really appreciated the contribution you made to our meeting. It really created alignment among the project components. So, but it has to be authentic. If you're not feeling it yourself, then don't do it because it couldn't backfire. So that was just two principles of project management I wanted to share. And then I was asked 20 minutes ago to say something about budget. So I just wanted to share some thoughts about creating a budget. No, I'm really lucky and I'm cubed. I have really, really good proposal support. So my job for the budget then is to reduce to mapping out the tests that are needed and matching my team member skills to the tasks and estimating the number of hours it's going to take each team member to complete each task. That's easier said than done. And I always fall into the trap of underestimating the amount of time taken for projects. I do this in every project and I always say I'm not going to do it on the next one, but I always end up doing it. And then you end up being squeezed. So a good rule of thumb is to estimate the hours and then at least add 50%. And I've noticed other proposals that I've reviewed are much better than I am at accurately estimating people's time, because I think it's not going to take that long to achieve this task, but it actually does. There must be some psychology going on there. So that was the first point about my experience with budgets. Let's see, I had some other thoughts about budgets. Oh yes, I've had success with proposal of not maxing out my budget. I'm not sure what other people think about this, but if it's a million dollar ceiling, I tend to ask, let's say 750,000 instead of a million dollars. But other people have had success and get in the maximum, but I always find it's advantageous to ask for a bit less and also if you can leverage other sources of funding, agencies and well, I know private industry like it if they can leverage other funds that you're also working on. So yeah, that was a couple of thoughts about budget, but maybe there's some specific questions that I can talk around also. Well, yeah, that's the end of my thoughts and look forward to the questions. So back to you, Erin, thanks. Yeah, thanks James, really appreciate that insight there. So yeah, this is a perfect segue into our Q&A session. So again, feel free to submit questions to Slido and I'll hand it over to Kelly to share those questions and to moderate the Q&A session. But thanks again to our speakers. Thank you, Erin and to our speakers. I'll go ahead and share my screen. All right, is that working? Yes, we can do it. Looks good. Okay, perfect. So we have a question here, the very first one says asked, did either of you take any project management courses or did you just learn as you go and both can jump in whenever you're ready? Well, I guess I'll start because I just learned on the go. I have not had any formal training with the project management. It's just sort of, projects have been handed to me and I've learned by trial and error to be honest. So I think James has had professional training though. Well, yeah, this is a great question because maybe two years ago, I naively thought that project management was not much involved in that. You just kind of get on with it. But actually it doesn't happen accidentally. You have to intentionally engage in the process. And I learned that both through this leadership academy, we had specific like two days training on project management where I learned those principles and other things I shared. But then I was also hired as a project manager even though I hadn't played that role before on this five lab NCAR project. It was about boundary layer science. And so that really opened my eyes about the need to be organized, make sure everyone knows what the task is, when it's due and hold people accountable and lots of other things to create commitment, alignment and direction. So yeah, the training, usually I'm a bit cynical about these trainings but it was actually really helpful. Interesting to different perspectives there. The next question, what should be the proportion of the pilot analysis, preliminary results, including texts and figures out of the entire length of the proposal? I think I mentioned that, didn't I? So let me say a bit more about it. I would say when you're writing the proposal, if there's any doubts in your mind about how pieces might fit together either like in a technical way or a more qualitative way, you need to remove doubts in the reviewers mind that it can be done. So if there's at least tried to download a sample data set that it is actually accessible. So I would say only do enough to remove doubt the complete work can be done. The smaller the better, I would say, because you don't want to do everything because then it's done. Yeah, good question. Christine, do you have anything to say about that one? No, I agree with James. When I have reviewed proposals before with that, there is just like some sort of figure that convinces me that removes my doubt of what they're saying that actually goes a really, really long way. So I think that's great advice. Great, thank you. The next question, what kind of timeline do you operate under when drafting the proposal? And how far ahead of a request for proposals do you already have the components drafted? Okay, I guess I'll start just because with the catalyst group that I work with now where it's a very large proposal and we start working on it a year ahead of time. And that it's a, yeah. So you do need a very long timeline if it's a very big, big proposal. For smaller proposals like, for example, the HSF one with the paleo group, we probably started ahead of time on that. Probably wasn't quite a year, but it might have been like six months ahead of time. And then, you start with your outline and you get your components and then you work on each segment as it is. But you do, the lab offices often need the proposal information. I actually don't really know off the top of my hand, but it's quite some time, it's weeks or months, depending on the how big the proposal is on how, when it needs to go to the lab office because there's a lot of administrative stuff that needs to happen. James, you might actually know a little bit more about that than I do. Yeah, and MQ, typically it's about two weeks before the proposal is due to the sponsor. But then if you are including other institutions, sometimes their deadlines are earlier, sometimes up to a month before it's due. So my timelines overall are a bit shorter than yours, Christine. I normally start two months before it's due just because I don't want it consuming too much time. So I like to limit it. Yeah, so I usually start two months and a good strategy is also if you have if some cool idea comes up as part of a different project, I write like a one page summary of it. And then I'm ready to go. I have like these five cool ideas that I'm ready to propose places and I've already kind of mapped out who I want to work on them. So that's a good strategy, especially when suddenly like from NOAA, sometimes they have sudden end of year funds that are suddenly available and you have to have an idea ready to go in like three days. So that can be good. Interesting. I'll add that, like when I'm thinking of these long timelines, it's primarily because you have people on your staff that have funding that is running out or something. So you need to plant like, if you know someone's funding is running out in a year or six months, you really want to start working on something to fund them ahead of time. So that's also a consideration. Just if you have people working for you, what you're responsible for their funding. That's great. It's interesting. I thought maybe like, I guess it depends on the length of the proposal, the budget, but also the deadline. So it's a little bit of everything. Just really no straight answer to it, I guess. So there's a next question here and it's asking, are there any difficulties aligning priorities with private industry funding? That's another good question. So the reason why I like to work with private industry is they inspire new fundamental science questions. So I learned about the climate vulnerabilities. For example, I work a lot with insurance and for example, I might have exposure in Miami and New York, so they want to know the likelihood of a hurricane track that passes through Miami and New York within like a two week period. So these kind of questions I wouldn't think about myself, but then I can write a proposal like, what's the physical drivers creating such a hurricane track and how likely is it in today's climate, for example? And so there's always, I always find there's interesting overlaps between fundamental science advances and the information needs of private industry. So it's the opposite of a difficulty. It's actually an area where ideas are created. Christine? The only difficulties that we've had with the private industry is just getting it to work with the overhead and the whole NCAR-UCAR system. So I think there's a lot of opportunities, at least from my experience, I think might be a little bit different from James is that it's, you know, we've had opportunity, but it hasn't worked out just with the logistics in terms of the overhead and how much you have to, you know, add into the budget to go through, you know, the UCAR process. So I think it's still sort of hard to bring in some of the private funding that way. I'm not sure if James, if you want to speak to that, like how you were able to manage that. Yeah, that's a good point. Christine, I know that can be a challenge with foundations that often do not pay overhead. So the awards I've had from private industry, I need to educate them in the need to pay overhead and the need to pay for my broader duties, you know, reviewing papers, reviewing proposals, mentoring or supervising NCAR staff. So they need to understand I'm not a consultant. You are paying some of my time, which is not just working on your project. So there needs to be some education on both sides. Oh, I was going to just say one more thing about working with private industry. So let me tell you a story. I recently got an award from a new company and it's a new insurance company. And they asked about six academics for ideas, for proposals, and a lot of the academics have their cool ideas that only they could do, but they didn't listen to the needs of the sponsor. And apparently I was the one that asked, you know, what are your vulnerabilities to high impact weather? So I think that was, and I got the award. So I think the point being it's important to engage in a conversation with the sponsor, whether that's private industry or NSF or DOE to fully understand exactly what they're asking for. And that puts you at the, towards the top of the pack. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that, James. Great. We have several more questions here. So building on, convince them you are qualified. Does it help to be a co-PI on a proposal with a more experienced lead PI versus jumping right in as a lead? I'll start. I think places like NSF, I know they do favor new PIs. They pay more attention to proposals that are written by early career scientists. I think that's true and still true. Interesting. Yeah, Christine, please don't paint while I'm thinking. I'm actually not sure how to answer this question because I think it really depends on the funding agency and often it might depend on who's reviewing the proposals and what their opinions are. You know, review process and the proposal is, you know, can be hard, right? So I'm not really sure how to answer that question. And that's completely fine. Thank you for your answers. We have a few more questions here. I'm not sure how long we should go here, Mariana or Erin, but I think we have three more to go. So I'll go ahead and ask the next question. So how do you frame the need for your time on proposals as self-funded scientists, especially when professors will ask for less support for the same call? I'm not sure I understand that question. Do we mean how do we defend our need, how do we pay for time to work on proposals as self-funded? Is that the question? I think it's along those lines, but if the person wants to write in the chat what they meant or speak out. That was me. So thinking about, you have an NSF call, you have a professor who's going to call for a quarter month and ask for grad student funding because they have more base funding. But if you need like three months, how do you validate that against people who are doing a similar thing with less money time because they have base funding? Because I was on a project with the self-funded scientists and they wrote a grant and they added extra text to be like 92 months, which is four times the rest of all the other senior personnel, which I understand because I'm self-funded. So like how do you walk that line of knowing you'll be in a pool of people who may be taking zero time funded or a quarter month or maybe a month at max with needing to fund like larger percentages of your time? If that makes sense. Yeah, I haven't really thought about that before but I suppose if you defend the time you're asking for by breaking down how long it's going to take to complete each task then it's justifiable and should be viewed on the power with other proposals. I haven't come across that as an issue. Yeah, I'm not sure I have much other than maybe just something like, you know, you can do it in terms of percentages instead of absolute hours. I don't know if that helps like, yeah, well, this is actually gonna take, you know, because I've got all these other things I'm working on, you know, I can dedicate this amount of hours to you but this is actually, you know, big percent of, you know, I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that's helpful at all. Thank you. Okay, we have three more questions. We've heard a lot about admin support when writing grants. Could you please elaborate on what specific tasks you delegate to the lab staff? Yeah, let me say how it works in my lab. There's an NCAR system called Panda Proposal and I can't even remember what the acronyms went on there. But that's where all the documents are put together. And yeah, I'm lucky and I'm cute that they take the lead on creating all the internally required documents and then they email me a timeline of when all these documents are due, there's about 10 of them and I have to complete various aspects of each document, you know, such as sending in resumes and declaring my existing awards, conflict of interest statements, there's a whole list. And then I have to write the statement of work and justify it to internal reviewers to make sure we're not inadvertently being competitive against university researchers. Everything has to be fair and above board. So, and there's not justification that needs doing but I'm handheld throughout the process. So I just respond to requests, which is really good. I don't have to direct anything. And then when I'm exhausted after doing all that, then I have to write the proposal. So it's never ending. So yeah, so lots of direction and thinking is done by my lab, which is great. Same for CGD, they hold their hands throughout the process and tell us when things are due. And it's all, they also coordinate with, like if it's a multi-agency proposal, like if you have collaborators at a university or different agency, they coordinate with the points there are counterparts at those different agencies and exchange the information. Cause like, for what CU might require is going to be different what CGD requires. And so internally and so coordinating that and then presenting a unified proposal to whoever the proposal is going to. So the lab offices and the administrators know their stuff and they're really are your, you know, they're making it happen for you. Wonderful. That's great to have that lab support. And so we'll just take one last question. And then with that, we'll leave some time for the speakers. If they have some last concluding remarks to share before we close this session. So the last question is any thoughts about how to co-develop or manage these sections across disciplines? How about people at different levels of an organization postdocs with project scientists? Okay, I'll jump in first here because I've done a lot of this sort of collaborative work with different people. And you know, I think everyone's approach is a little bit different, but my approach is I have a very collaborative sort of approach. So I usually try to schedule a, you know, like a meeting, you know, across, you know, could be Zoom that these days is usually Zoom because there's different people. And then, you know, there's just sort of like a, you know, I'm called like a spitballing session where you just brainstorming, you know, the different ways that you can, you know, present a unified message and, you know, what each person brings to the table. I mean, the main thing is making sure everyone has a voice. You know, you as the manager can take those voices in and develop something that's more unified. And then once, you know, so you get all these different voices, you try to unify it and then you send it back out for comment to make sure everyone felt like their opinions and what they, our ideas were represented. And it's like an iterative process. And that's sort of what I do. I don't know, James, you want to? Yeah, I was going to reflect that interdisciplinary work, it takes a lot more time to set up the project in the first place because we have to understand how to talk to each other and learn enough about the other disciplines to know how pieces fit together. So that takes a lot of time. What, and I've been successful in writing multiple proposals with the same team, maybe at the same time or successively, so you don't have to spin up from scratch each time. Although it is important to have your proposal preparation be an inclusive process. So don't block new opportunities. And then my final comment is if there's room in the budget it's a good idea to actually hire a project manager on your project. So if it's a large project that needs a lot of coordination and alignment, it's a good idea to actually budget someone to do that for you. So you can take the lead as scientific PI and not necessarily also doing the project management, which if it's done well, takes a lot of time. Great, wonderful. Well, thank you to the speakers for all this informative session. And now with that, we want to make sure you share any last remarks, anything you think that we should know as postdocs soon writing proposals. I have the final thought. If when you're thinking about proposing to a call or just thinking about ideas, if you're not excited about it at the initial stage but you think you're gonna get funded, I would advise against doing it because the only thing worse than not getting funded is being funded to do something you no longer interested in. And I put myself in that position and it's a real drag. Well, yeah, don't propose work, you don't want to do. It's my final thought. That's great advice. I would add to that is make sure you give yourself enough time. I, you know, everyone is different. I'm definitely not a last minute person. So I like to build in a lot of time for things, which probably the example is like I may take six months for a proposal and James takes two or something so, but I, you know, that's, yeah, just build yourself enough time and build in, be thoughtful about who you wanna include on your team and the cohesiveness of that team because if the team isn't cohesive, it's not gonna happen for you. Thank you, James and Christine. All right, I'll take it, Aaron will take over now. Yeah, we'll just close by saying thank you to all the speakers, to everyone who attended today and also a plug for the next session occurring on November 17th. So right before Thanksgiving, you can marinate in these ideas while you're on break and eating turkey and that one will discuss research relevance and broader impacts. So thank you, everyone.