Dear PI,

Your LDRD Preliminary Proposal

Tianlai Data Analysis Center	

has been reviewed by the LDRD Selection Committee. We received 33 Preliminary Proposals and they were ranked in three groups. The Committee identified a middle grouping, including yours, that we recommend reconsidering or resubmitting at the next call for proposals. However, we do not exclude you from preparing a Full Proposal and if you do, it will receive full consideration. We expect about 1/2 in this middle grouping to wait until the next opportunity.

If you decide to proceed, instructions are found on the ldrd.fnal.gov web page. The Full Proposal includes a full budget table, to be filled out in consultation with your Division's Field Financial Manager. You and any Co-I's will also be asked to appear before the Selection Committee on Aug 20 (or Aug 18) to briefly describe your proposal and perhaps address a few questions. Your full proposal will be evaluated on the basis of LDRD selection criteria also on the web site. As the Preliminary Proposal ranked below several others, you should consider whether your Full Proposal will be competitive in such areas as significance, novelty, mission relevance, strategic fit. You should also make sure your planned work is outside of current or near-term programmatic activities.

Finally, we append below a mixture of comments on your Preliminary Proposal. Some positive and some constructive that reflect the diversity of the selection committee and their evaluation of your proposal. Please use these comments to guide your decision on how to next proceed.

Thank you very much for participating in Fermilab's LDRD Program!

William Wester
LDRD Coordinator

Here are the comments from the review panel.  I touched up some typos.  We can address some of the criticisms in a full proposal.

All is good, but it will be important to discuss the strategic fit of the project in the FCPA. Also, need to focus on the new unique technology that will be developed.

FCPA is the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics which is the umbrella organization for all astrophysics at Fermilab

small cost high impact, nice and straight forward

Participation in collaboration as a data analysis center for an experiment does not seem a good use of LDRD funds.

Proposal is for data reduction and analysis. How much research is actually involved? It says the data reduction is simple. Modest investment ($75K/year?)

Looks like a very good investment of $150k ($75k/yr for 2 years).  Could well lead to FNAL involvement in a large scale survey experiment using 21cm.

To me, it seems that there is no lasting role for Fermilab.  While the data management might need Fermilab's data farms, what does Fermilab get out of it?