Research funding & communications
The science is sound.
The case for it should be too.
Always Already Labs helps neuroscience labs win funding, sharpen their public case, and reach the people who decide what gets supported.
The gap
Labs are funded on narrative they were never trained to write.
Study sections, program officers, foundation boards and individual donors all read before they fund. The work is rigorous. The case for it is usually assembled in the last seventy-two hours by someone who would rather be at the bench — and who has read the aims so many times they can no longer tell what a stranger will take from them.
That is not a science problem. It is a communications problem, and it is the kind that responds to treatment.
Services
Four places where good research loses ground it should not lose.
Grant narrative & positioning
Specific aims, significance, broader impacts. Not writing your science — making a reviewer feel its weight on the first read, and making the second reviewer agree.
Philanthropic & donor strategy
Foundations, institutional advancement and individual giving. Translating a research program into a case for support that a non-specialist board can actually act on.
Lab identity & web presence
Most lab sites are a faculty directory page last touched in 2011. Recruitment, collaboration and philanthropy all begin there, and all of them stall there.
Research communication
Press, plain-language summaries, conference and recruitment material. Getting a finding past the paywall and into the conversation it belongs in.
Approach
Start from the science
No templates and no house voice imposed over your work. The first engagement is reading your papers and listening to you explain what you are actually chasing.
Write for the reader who decides
A study section, a program officer and a donor are three different audiences with three different fears. Most lab materials are written for a fourth reader who does not exist.
Build capability, not dependency
You should finish an engagement with language your lab can reuse on the next submission without calling me. That is the point.
About
An uncommon pair of credentials, on purpose.
Twenty years in strategic marketing and communications, most recently as Senior Vice President, Director of Integrated Marketing at M&T Bank, after College Board and Razorfish — building and defending briefs, budgets and campaigns in a regulated industry, where a claim that cannot be supported does not ship.
And now inside the research world rather than adjacent to it: research assistant at Portland State's Child Language Learning Center, running data collection under an IRB-approved protocol; volunteer laboratory assistant at OHSU's Casey Eye Institute; plain-language clinical materials for OHSU Doernbecher's NICH program; post-baccalaureate coursework in behavioral neuroscience, statistics, chemistry and Python; and doctoral applications in progress. The vocabulary is not borrowed.
Academic grounding in philosophy — M.Phil, University College London; Fulbright Scholar in phenomenology and hermeneutics, University of Freiburg; B.A. magna cum laude, Colgate. Which is to say: a long-standing professional interest in how a thing is made legible to someone who does not yet see it.
I am not a vendor who learned to pronounce “neuroplasticity.” I work in labs.
The name
Always already is Heidegger's phrase for what is true before you go looking for it — the conditions already in place by the time you think to ask. The significance of good research is always already there. The work is making it legible to the people who decide whether it continues.
Contact
Tell me about your lab.
A resubmission that keeps coming back on significance. A site untouched since your K99. A donor conversation you cannot quite frame. Start anywhere.
hello@alwaysalreadylabs.com