from barnaby - she could apply, but she should know that there are only a few grants in each round; most projects proposed don't get funding. It is like rolling the dice. what people don't understand is that many grants are not funded not because they are defective in any way, but simply because there is not enough funding to cover even a part of what comes in (there are thousands of applications and hundreds of millions of dollars of requests that go all through different kinds of review; it is hard to know what will make it through because different people make the priority decisions at different stages of review; and it depends what other applications are in the pool in a given cycle). There is no "direct" route anymore.