Can you sort of outline for us what early career funding mechanisms you used to establish yourself as an independent investigator? And then I'm wondering if you have an example of a grant or a funding mechanism that didn't go well.

Yeah, absolutely.

So for the first 14, 13 years of my career or so, I was what we call in the UK soft funded, which means that if there wasn't research money, I didn't have a job.

And I'd obviously, being an epidemiologist, I didn't have a plan B to fall back on.

I didn't have a medical career or a nursing career or anything else I could switch back to.

It's quite a intense and pressurized place to be and it's quite typical that researchers and epidemiologists like me spend a large part of their career in this way until at some point they manage to get a big enough grant or something to convince their university that it's time to make their contract a little bit more permanent but probably for the first 14 years or so I was on this kind of soft money which you know great in some ways because you get the opportunity to put in research grants about anything you want because no one really controls your agenda But also terrifying because, as we all know, probably 90, 95% of research grants are rejected is the actual reality of the landscape that we're dealing with.

So I was really I was I was fortunate with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work that I had three fellowships in my early career and fellowships in the UK.

And I was wondering, you know, are there any other particular perhaps lessons learned as you dealt with this and maybe this attack that it was on your professional identity that you think better informed your next shot at this grant?