This is not a secrete anymore, I will receive the travel grant from NextBio for latest round. No doubt this was one of very special Aha moment for me. A big thanks to NextBio Student Travel Grant program which provides a modest stipend support for students currently enrolled in a MS, MD or PhD program to attend the conference or academic meetings of their choice. Even a modest one can make a significant difference, when I say modest I mean it. I am glad that NextBio as company has found a unique way to connect with a major demand of student community. As a student I am always needy, for me even a small financial support can defray the costs of attending a conference. This year NextBio has already announced two rounds of travel grant and they are also considering to increase the numbers as well as frequencies. For me numbers are more important than amount, despite they offer a small support I hope every year a lot more students will be benefited with their travel grant. This also reminds me success of microfinancing in developing world and particularly the way it provides an increased access to financial services for poor people which is translated into improved quality of living in low-income countries. Again microfinancing is not intended for poor people or developing countries only, indeed microfinancing offers few basic principals for all sections- effective management, high accessibility and an equitable distribution of resources. Why science funding can not be more accessible, equitable and managed? Rather than giving millions to one lab or group, funding agencies should make it more dispensed establishing a clear way for microfunding in science. Traditional funding system has its own problems, it has created big stars, at the same time it has also forced a person like Douglas Prasher to end up driving a courtesy van for some car dealer. Why there is so much uncertainty in this system? I am asking these questions because I feel these are major issues which I am going to face once I am done with my PhD. Current status of the funding system does not encourage anyone to follow a path in academia. Currently more and more fresh-minted Ph.Ds are looking for alternative careers, not because there are no jobs in academia but cause they don’t want to fall in a circus of uncertainty where majority of funding is staked for minority of people. But things are changing, success of open access and emergence of open science give us certain clues that this may be a problem of generation gap in science. We have already updated our publishing systems by making it open accessible, now we are changing the way we do science by making it more open, shared and transparent, sooner or later funding systems will also evolve to deal with these changes.

More about NextBio Student Travel Grant
Believe me this is far easier than any other travel grant application on this earth, and again I entail it. To just let you know my last travel grant application was for a conference and I submitted anything to everything (cv, transcripts, recommendations and countless other documents). A simple two step process and all done-learn more about this travel grant.