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human
Faculty co-author stole my (PhD student) idea/project. What should I do?

I started working with a junior, tenure-track faculty member in my school from a related department (we are both in social sciences).  We came up with an idea together, and jointly decided I would be first-author on the project and we would aim to publish in a journal in my field (hers is close, but people care which journals you publish in).  We were meeting weekly and everything was going well.  I then ran a pilot study, which didn't work, but the results were still promising.

She stopped responding to my emails, and after a few attempts at emailing her, she sent me this response: *"Hi! Thanks for checking in. Really sorry for being unresponsive. Could we pause this for now? I’m pretty stretched with upcoming teaching and a new phd student."*

I though working with another phd student was a weird excuse to be busy, but didn't think much of it because I figured she might be the primary advisor for that student (she isn't mine).  I emailed her back that is was no problem and to just let me know when she was ready to pick our project back up.

Fast-forward 7 months later (to last week), she emails me a question, and I email her back a response and ask if she is ready to pick back up our project together.  Her response was: *"On the [research topic] stuff, I’m actually pursuing a related set of questions with a [her field] graduate student, geared for a [her field] journal, so I worry there would be too much overlap."*

I send her back a nice response trying to gauge how much her project is overlapping with my ideas and whether it is okay to still pursue my own ideas.  She responds to my email with one word *"Sure"*.

I then tried to set up a meeting to *"make sure I am on the correct page with everything"*.  It has been over a week and she hasn't responded.

She does not seem like a malicious person at all, but I find it hard to believe that she is completely oblivious to the situation.  Also, there is a small possibility that her related project may not be that related, and she is just bad at making up excuses not to work with people. 

What should I do?  If I try to force myself onto the paper (which I have no idea what stage it is in) there will be two problems: 1) it's targeted for a journal that I don't get credit for, 2) schools that might try to recruit me in the future will see her as a coauthor and probably will reach out to her to ask what my contribution was on the paper.

On a related note, I am much closer than her to the senior/administrative faculty in our school.  She has only been here for two years (I have been here for 3), and my primary advisor (who I am very close to) is the director of research for our entire school.

**tl;dr: Faculty coauthor told me to pause our project together because she was too busy, and then proceeded to do the project on her own without telling me.**
gpt
I doubt there would be so much overlap that you couldn't continue to pursue your project and publish it in a journal in your own field. She likely wanted to have her own student and publish it in a journal in her field. It's kind of shitty on her part, but it *doesn't* impact in you any way except that you can't get her help.

Go ahead with your work, ask her to send you any grant proposal draft etc, and don't work with her again - she's unreliable if anyone asks.

tldr Unless you happen to be Kahneman your idea isn't big or original enough that it matters that two possibly similar studies get published in unrelated journals.