Lab Budget

Starting a lab inevitably means looking after your lab budget. There’s supposedly ~$500k in my startup that is supposed to be used within the first 2 years. Separately, I also have about 1/3 of that equivalent amount associated with my K22 career transition award, going towards that project. If there is indeed a timer on part of my startup, then I want to spend at least that minimum amount off of my startup in the first two years (so as not to lose it), and I want to make sure I stay at or below the amount offered by the federal grant.

The university gives out monthly reports of our spending on those two grants. I created a short script that takes in key values off of the monthly PDFs (which are REEAAALLLYYY inconvenient for extracting values), and plot them. Here’s the current spending on those grants.

Red lines define the boundaries, and the blue lines denote constant spending to reach the target value. Black dots are real cumulative spending on my reports, and the dotted black line is a linear model fit to the actual data.

So not doing terribly, though probably spending a bit much on the K22, and a little under spending on the startup. Well, I’m sure spending on both grants will decrease a bit now that I’ve bought the majority of my major equipment / reagents. Spending on the startup will have a huge bunch in the next month or so, when my microscope order finally goes through purchasing.

I’ll be sure to keep this updated to keep the lab on target!

Note: The original post was from Feb 2020, after the lab had been active for half a year. The above graphs are being kept up to date, and as of me writing this note, reflects the first 2.5 years of the lab.