Lucy Deckard is the President of Academic Research Funding Strategies, LLC, a consulting firm she founded in 2010 that provides services to help academic institutions, faculty and staff develop the expertise in-house to identify funding opportunities, understand funding agencies, and develop successful research grant proposals. Previously, Ms. Deckard served as Associate Director of the Texas A&M University’s Office of Proposal Development.

She has helped to develop and write successful proposals to NSF, NIH, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, and other agencies and foundations, including proposals for large institutional and center-level grants. Over the last 15 years, she has worked with scores of faculty across the country on their NSF CAREER proposals. In the course of that work, she has learned what reviewers and program officers are looking for, observed strategies that work well, and identified common mistakes to avoid.

Before joining Texas A&M, she worked for 16 years as a research engineer in industry at companies including Lockheed Martin and Hughes Research Labs, obtaining funding from DoD, DARPA and the Department of Energy. She has a B.S. in Materials Science from Rice University and an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University.