It is worth knowing at a high level how a research group operates since it may provide insight into why some decisions are made (or not made). In many ways, a research group operates like a small startup company within the university.
There are several aspects of running a research group that rely on funding:
- Personnel — mainly graduate students and postdocs. This is where most of our funding goes towards. Except for the first year of graduate study and university-sponsored graduate fellowships, the university generally does not fund graduate students directly. Instead, funding for graduate students comes from the PI's research funds. Faculty can also use research funds to cover their own summer salary, which is not provided by the university (weird university accounting).
- Equipment — mainly computing resources and software licenses. The group occasionally will contribute funds to purchase new compute hardware for Princeton Research Computing, which benefits both our group and the broader Princeton community. For instance, the group put $200,000 to support the purchase of 13 CPU nodes on the Tiger cluster. Supercomputing time at national computing facilities is free but involves an application process.
- Travel — mainly to support group members in attending conferences.
- Miscellaneous expenses — pretty much anything else, like office supplies.
Most research groups on campus are supported by grants from federal funding agencies (e.g. NSF, DOE), the university, foundations, and/or private companies. As a new research group, we are initially supported by "startup funds" that the university provides to new faculty members upon being hired.
The table below shows the funds needed to support a graduate student in the group (using FY26 numbers) depending on whether the funds come from the university (e.g. startup funds, Princeton fellowships, Princeton-administered grants) or externally (e.g. from federal grants). While graduate students do not pay tuition themselves, the university does charge full tuition when the student is supported by internal funds. When the graduate student is supported by external funds, the tuition is waived, but the university also takes a cut of the funding (known as overhead). If a graduate student were to receive independent funding through a fellowship like the NSF GRFP or NDSEG, then they are typically mostly or fully funded.
TBD.