There is a disparity between how much time I want to spend on basic research (as much as possible), how much time I actually spend on basic research, and how much time I’m supposed to be spending on basic research (no more than 20% of my work time). This is a problem that frequently frustrates and upsets me, and I continue to try to address it in several ways. First, I’m always on the look out for new career opportunities. My desire to spend more time on basic research is what caused me to move from Sandia National Labs, where I had almost no support for my research interests (which were deemed too academic for Sandia), to the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI), where I have 20% of my time allocated to personal research interests. At the MolSSI, I also have the opportunity to make the case that my research interests are sufficiently aligned with the Institute’s mission that they deserve official backing and a larger fraction of my time. I have been trying to make this case since the beginning of this year, but my success has been limited so far. The final way that I can solve this problem is to obtain research funding to support spending additional time on my research and displace other work responsibilities.

A few months ago, I decided to go through the exercise of attempting to secure research funding through the standard government channels (NSF, DOE, DOD). Because of massive cost overheads and various governmental interagency restrictions, I had few opportunities to apply for funding while at Sandia, so much of this was new to me. The prevailing outlook on research funding is rather bleak these days, therefore I wasn’t expecting much. Also, there weren’t any specific calls for proposals relevant to my interests when I started looking, thus I was limited to open funding calls that are very unlikely to have spare money lying around. Of the five relevant program managers that I contacted, one never replied to emails, two said they had no interest in semiempirical modeling, one said they were interested but had no funding available now or for the foreseeable future to warrant continuing a conversation, and one was interested and willing to entertain a white paper (i.e. a pre-proposal). Overall, this was a very chilly reception, but it did give me an opportunity to write a white paper and get some feedback. My initial blog posts were a good dry run for proposal writing, and you can see for yourself how that coalesced into a more polished and focused white paper. The program manager said that he liked my white paper, but that he was unable to fund it at this time. With better timing and more demonstrable experience in this research area, I think that I’ll have a decent chance at getting funding for semiempirical electronic structure at some point in the next few years.

While I’m not quite ready for it yet, I might also try to solicit research funding from industry somehow. US government R&D spending as a fraction of GDP has been in decline for decades, but US industrial R&D spending has risen to more than pick up that slack. The problem is that private companies don’t usually spend much of their money on basic research, and there aren’t any standard channels for soliciting research funding from them. There are growing concerns that dwindling opportunities in basic research may eventually limit our overall system of industrial innovation if these trends continue. Semiempirical electronic structure has historically been used a fair bit in industry, so it is in a better-than-average position than most research topics to attempt to tap into these nontraditional, reluctant funding sources.

I am also going to adjust my research priorities a bit to align them more with popular research trends. Quantum computing research is rapidly growing in popularity, and I have a healthy amount of research experience in that area from my time at Sandia. The initial technical thrust of my semiempirical electronic structure effort is to develop more efficient models for quantum correlations, which conceptually is about further resolving and sharpening the boundary between classical and quantum physics. While my ultimate goal is to build very limited and relatively cheap models of electron correlation, it will be easier to build these models if I have more expensive and reliable methods for generating reference data. In particular, I want reference data for quantum many-body systems at finite temperature, which is an especially difficult problem with few applicable methods available (and none that are reliable). Thus I plan to simultaneously tap into the hype of quantum computing and quantum simulation while building essential computational tools for my underlying long-term research goals. I will discuss my views on quantum computing research and these specific research plans in future blog posts.

I wish that we lived in a world where all technically capable scientists were free to spend all of their time exploring their research interests for the common good (e.g. the concents of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem). Unfortunately, we live in a world that is far from this ideal, and so scientists inevitably spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to survive in their chosen careers. There are many scientists whose careers are in much better shape than my own, but probably far more whose careers are in worse shape.