Grant writing...again

It's been awhile since I sent out an update, and I apologize. There's a reason--I have been super busy. Also, this note will be super short. Because I am super busy.

Back in October I submitted a grant proposal to Wenner Gren Foundation requesting funds to cover the cost of analyzing the saliva samples we collected last summer and for travel money to begin a new phase of research. The new phase I'd like to begin examines the roles of prestige and horizontal transmission in tattooing knowledge among Samoan tufuga (master tattooists) in benefiting Samoan culture in the Islands and diaspora community. In November I gave a presentation on tattooing as a biocultural case study of an evolutionary adaptation at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association as part of an invited session. The session organizers have asked us to contribute an article based on that talk for a special issue of American Journal of Human Biology they are assembling.

In December I was asked to write a review of Mallon and Galliot's new book Tatau: A History of Samoan Tattooing for Journal of Anthropological Research. While I haven't started that yet, I stumbled upon Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans in the NFL by Rob Ruck and read that (and interviewed him for an upcoming episode of the podcast "Sausage of Science" that I co-host with Cara Ocobock). I find the two books related to the research idea I'd like to pursue above and wrote a separate review of the two of them together that I sent to This View of Life. I'm still waiting to hear back from the appropriate editor on that one.

This month I am working on another grant proposal to the National Science Foundation. With the government shutdown, I hope they will even review it and give out funding. Yoinks. This proposal also seeks funding to cover the costs of analyzing the saliva samples (I won't hear back from Wenner Gren until April or so, so I have to hedge my bets by applying to multiple agencies for slightly different but overlapping aspects of the study), as well as for collecting more data so we can dig deeper into the mechanisms of immune and endocrine function that interact with tattooing.

Wish me luck!