For grant writers & SBIR consultants
The named engineer your budget justification needs.
You see software-heavy proposals months before anyone is funded. When the deliverable is software and the PI is a scientist, the technical volume needs someone credible attached to it — and the budget needs a consultant line with a justification that a reviewer accepts. I am that line, and I do not compete with you for a minute of the work.
First, the thing that makes this safe
I do not write proposals. Not the technical volume, not the commercialisation plan, not the compliance review, not the budget narrative. That is your practice and I have no interest in any part of it. I build the software the proposal describes, and I am willing to be named for it. If a client of yours asks me about proposal work, I send them back to you.
Bring me in on
- A proposal whose deliverable is software, a data pipeline, or a model — not an instrument with a small software layer
- A principal investigator who is a scientist or clinician and will be signing off on architecture they cannot personally evaluate
- Health, clinical, or human-subjects data anywhere in the work plan
- A Phase II application where the Phase I prototype has to be shown to extend rather than restart
- A budget that needs a named consultant line with a defensible justification
- A technical volume where the reviewer will ask how the software claims were validated
Don't
- Proposal writing, editing, or compliance review — that is your work and I do not do it
- Instrumentation, optics, materials, or wet-lab work; my lane is the software around it
- A team that already has senior software leadership and needs hands rather than judgment
- Anything requiring an active clearance or on-site work in a secure facility
- A budget with no room for outside technical assistance and no intention of creating one
Paste-ready budget justification
Written to drop into a proposal without being rewritten. Every claim in it resolves to a public record — the NSF award and the MIT award are both verifiable by a reviewer. Edit freely; email me if you need a version scoped to a specific solicitation, or a CV in the agency's format.
Consultant: Eric P. Hassey, IN2Labs, LLC (Boston, MA) Mr. Hassey will provide software architecture and technical oversight for the computational components of this project. He served as Principal Investigator on NSF SBIR Phase I award #1941226 ($249,251, Preventa Medical Corporation), where he authored the work plan, directed the technical effort, and filed the project outcomes report. His background includes research and development at MIT, where he was a named recipient of the 2018 Best Paper Award for work on convolutional neural networks, and he holds an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Iowa. He currently serves as fractional CTO of a preventive-health platform performing machine-learning analysis of medical imaging, with responsibility for health-data boundary design, access control, and audit logging. His role on this project is limited to software architecture, data pipeline design, and machine-learning implementation. Because the principal investigator's expertise is domain-specific rather than software-specific, this consultant role provides the engineering judgment required to ensure the technical deliverables are reproducible, extensible into Phase II, and defensible under technical review.
What I commit to
A free read of the technical volume, before you submit
Thirty minutes on whether the technical objectives describe buildable work and whether the software claims are ones the proposed effort can actually support. Objectives that read well and describe no testable artifact are cheap to catch now and expensive at the annual report. No charge, whether or not I end up in the budget.
I flag the funding mechanics you may not have used
SBIR and STTR awards carry a technical and business assistance allowance outside the main budget — commonly up to $6,500 at Phase I and up to $50,000 at Phase II — and mechanisms differ by agency. Separately, consultant and subaward lines generally have to be in the submitted budget, and at NSF the small business must perform at least two-thirds of Phase I by budget. If your client wants outside engineering after the award, it is usually too late. I would rather say that early than be added to a budget that cannot carry me.
No referral fees, in either direction
I don't pay for intros and I don't expect to be paid for mine. Fees change what gets recommended, and on a proposal where a reviewer is weighing whether a consultant is genuinely necessary, a bought recommendation is the last thing either of us wants attached to it.
You hear what happened
Within a week of talking to anyone you send, I'll tell you whether it was a fit and what I recommended — enough to know your intro landed, nothing that breaches their confidence.
If this is you
Grant-writing firms and SBIR consultancies, most of all — same client, same calendar, and the scopes never touch. Also: university technology-transfer offices, SBDC government-sales advisors, and accelerators whose companies keep submitting software proposals without a software person on them.
The useful thing to forward is the Phase I → Phase II readiness worksheet — it is free, it is not a pitch, and a PI who works through it arrives at the conversation already knowing what is weak.
Send me a message or grab 30 minutes. Happy to do the reciprocal version of this page for what you do.