Reinventing your research mid-career
Curious to hear if anyone has successfully revitalized/reinvented your research program mid career. I'm not referencing a moderate pivot from an existing line - we've all seen things like that. More a dramatic overhaul.
I'm a reasonably successful psychologist in a medical school by most metrics. Associate Prof w/tenure at an R1. Two active R01s as PI + 4-5 other significant grants at Co-I. Despite this, I am struggling like hell, unhappy with the work I'm doing and very unsatisfied with my performance. My projects are failing miserably. Largely because I do in-person laboratory research and recruitment has become a nightmare since COVID. I've had over 2,500 leads to get 20 completers on one project that is already in NCE. I feel like we've tried everything to get people in the door. We flyer, post online, pay a bajillion dollars in digital marketing fees. No-shows and dropouts are what kill us and I've done everything I can to try and fix it without success. So I have one basically failed R01 to underpowered to do anything, another in the process of failing and no conceivable path forward for this research area as I wouldn't give me money for an R21 to again fail to enroll - not to mention I can't even afford to enroll on an R21 budget. Almost all my pubs now come from collaboration with very few first/last papers in recent history. All my budget gets sucked up by staff costs for projects like this and I've honestly gotten so overburdened by the bureaucracy that I feel like ive lost a lot of my technical skills to actually complete the work and have mostly low-level staff who aren't really prepared to learn. My colleagues have seemingly better quality of life doing comparatively simple work. It is frustrating as hell to see someone put 40% effort on a heavily automated longitudinal survey study because they have budget room for it, when I'm writing grants with 5-10% PI effort on an insanely complex mechanistic rct with imaging, biospecimens, drug costs, etc because even the budget is stretched so thin. Part of my success has come from brute force and now with a young child I can't put in the hours I used to or I'll be looking at either a divorce or just living dangerously sleep-deprived at all times.
I need a BIG pivot. New population. Different style of work. My heart is on the lab side. My favorite times have always been crunching through complex/novel analyses, torturing the data to make sure it's real and writing up long and complicated papers. I love innovative discovery science, hate boring iterative studies. I've got 3 staff with limited skills but a fair bit of time. Almost half a million in discretionary I can burn over the next couple years. We don't get sabbaticals (medical dept) otherwise now would be the time. Content domain isn't that critical to me as long as it's fundable and I can justify it to my center - which basically just means some kind of health behavior/chronic disease population. Really it's the scientific process I love anyways and can get interested in almost any topic if I get to do a deep dive (hence the reason I have generally preferred complex projects).
How would you approach doing something like this? Any success stories? I don't expect anyone to have answers but would love to hear thoughts.