Finally some good news on the funding front! After our ERC proposal was rejected on the grounds of lacking pilot data, we applied for so-called kick-off funding from the research committee of our university. This grant would provide us with enough funding to get the pilot data in order to apply for the full grant at the ERC or any other large funding agency. Just today I heard that our application was reviewed positively and only needed to be signed off by the president of the university. Finally some good news after a slew of grant applications was rejected. This has been the project I've been most enthusiastic about for the past year or two and now finally we could start working on it. If it wasn't for the bad news.

As is so often the case, along with the good news, came the bad news: the highly qualified postdoc I had planned with for these experiments and who was also mentioned in the ERC grant proposal, just got a new job somewhere outside of science today (of course he was looking, after the ERC grant was rejected). This means I have the money but nobody to do the experiments anymore. Ah, you gotta love how doing science works these days!