Why you might be writing funding bids with the wrong readers in mind

As Funding Insight eases into its summer break, we spare a thought for all our readers who won’t be able to spend as much time away from a computer screen as they might have liked because they have grant application deadlines looming in the coming months.

To help focus your minds, we republish this reflection from May 2021 on who you will be writing for as you work up your bid. As the article makes plain, you won’t be writing for a panel of fearsome, omniscient mega-minds but rather inquisitive, intelligent but time-limited and pressured researchers (and others), much like you. And that requires a different mindset…

When you’re writing a research grant application, who are you writing for? And who should you be writing for? Considering these questions matters because tailoring your bid to suit the needs of its key audience (peer reviewers and panel members) will raise its chances of getting funded. But before you focus on who you are writing for, you might have to admit that a mixture of education and wishful thinking has led you to write for the wrong people.

You are not writing for teacher 

For most of our time in formal education, we write for an audience of one: for a teacher at school, a tutor at university and external examiners at crunch moments. We would write about a topic that our sole reader knew more about than we did, with the purpose of convincing her to grade our knowledge of one of her specialist areas as highly as possible.

This starts to change through masters or PhD theses and into early career and academic publications and grant proposals. You’re no longer writing for the all-knowing, functionally omniscient reader: the locus of expertise has started to shift. As a grant applicants you are still writing for highly skilled and knowledgeable people, but their expertise is not the same as yours. The chances are that you—not teacher, not reviewer—are now the expert in the topic you are writing about.

To quote Darth Vader as he battles his former mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi: “The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now, I am the master.” Now you are the master, you need to write like the master, not for the master.

You are not writing for your ideal reviewer

Because even if she exists, she’s probably too busy. Or conflicted. Or the funder’s review scheme doesn’t know who she is. Ask anyone who has—like me—served on a funding panel, and you’ll find decisions are taken on each application relatively quicky, especially compared to the time they take to write. There will not be a special one-day conference convened to discuss the merits of your proposal, and the scrutiny it will be subjected to will be less ‘fine-toothed comb’ and more ‘quick onceover with the clippers’ until a broadly defensible result is achieved.

Now we can return to our original question: who are you writing for?

You are writing for busy, best-available-reviewers

Your reviewers are mostly researchers too. And as researchers they’re under much the same pressures you are, only they’ve also got one or a whole bunch of proposals to review. It’s not that different from having a pile of marking to do, only they’re not the expert. They’re an expert, just not on every subject contained in that pile of work. As an applicant, you’d be well advised to make life as easy as possible for them by expressing your ideas as clearly and unambiguously as possible.

But to what end? Now you know your audience a bit better it’s worth considering the effect you want your text to have on them, or in existential terms…

What are you trying to achieve?

In your grant application, you’re trying to achieve three things—explain, inspire and reassure—in order to persuade.

1. Explain

Remember, you’re the master now, you can’t assume the reviewer knows the field as well as you do. So you need to explain what you propose to do: what are your research questions/hypothesis and methods, why are these the right methods, and how does the whole thing hang together as a coherent package? 

I don’t know who first said this, but a really well-written application flatters the reader into thinking she understands it, while a poorly written one beats her over the head with her own ignorance. As a non-academic, I don’t expect to understand how a technical proposal works, but I expect to understand what it’s for.

This is one of the hardest things for researchers new to grant writing to get right. Many drafts I see start at the wrong level of focus—they’ve zoomed in much too closely onto the key details that are most exercising the applicant but lack any kind of broader context or overview and end up functionally incomprehensible. Reviewers won’t recommend funding they can’t understand.

2. Inspire

Many early draft applications I see don’t adequately explain the novelty of what’s proposed, what the contribution of the programme of work will be, nor why it matters. When I ask, applicants will often look confused because to them, it’s obvious. It’s not, because it’s implicit. It needs to be explicit. Don’t leave your busy, best-available-reviewer to puzzle it out for herself.  Don’t overclaim, don’t overhype, but don’t undersell your work either. If you’re unable to clearly articulate the significance, novelty and contribution of your proposal, it’s too soon to apply for funding.

3. Reassure

Don’t submit research applications, submit research plans. You’re asking a funder to take a punt on your proposal ahead of others, so you need to make the funding panel feel confident about that decision. You do this by concisely and efficiently citing the right literature, by having the right research team with appropriate track records, and by producing robust, high-quality responses to the more administrative parts of the form. You can also reassure with your risk management plans, especially your plan Bs for if an experiment doesn’t produce the finding you predict. How might you recalibrate or refocus the project?

4. Persuade

Funding is competitive. There are more good ideas than there is funding for good ideas. It’s not like an A grade at school or a driving licence, or even a PhD, where there is an unlimited number available and where everyone who deserves one can have one. It’s not enough to be good, you need to finish in the top tier to get funding. You need to be more persuasive about the excellence of your proposal than the competition.

You can’t control what other applications will go to the same panel for funding, nor their respective merits. But you can give yourself the best possible chance by making sure your application is pitched at your actual audience, the best-available-reviewer—not the all-knowing teacher, your PhD supervisor or Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

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Lessons from a Danish research institute’s funding engagement scheme

The funding world is a jungle of possibilities. For classic research funding, it might be top-down or bottom-up; in innovation, dilutive or non-dilutive; and then there is the overload of abbreviations: RIAs, IAs and CSAs…

Truly, guiding researchers to suitable funding opportunities is no easy task.

To help researchers find and engage with the right schemes for them, many research managers and administrators organise awareness-raising activities. But they face well-known issues: researchers are busy, emails can be overlooked, central events rarely fit everyone’s schedules and targeted listings are resource-intensive. All too often, research support offices risk becoming passive rather than actively building a pipeline of future proposals.

Our journey

At the Danish Technological Institute, the research managers and administrators in our international centre have developed an awareness-raising process that works well for the nearly 1,100 specialists employed by the institute. This effort has increased both the number of proposals we submit and the number of projects we win. While every institution is different, we believe a well-thought-out awareness-raising initiative can bear fruit. Here, we outline our initiative, known as Outreach.

DTI is a research technology organisation, conducting applied research that bridges the gap between academia and commercial R&D. We’re an independent non-profit that operates test and demonstration facilities, so our researchers also perform commercial contracting for both Danish and international customers, and many clients become partners in our research projects.

It was the launch of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme in 2021 that prompted us to think strategically about our awareness raising. We decided to reinvent our approach based on the challenges we faced during previous framework programmes and put the user experience of our researchers at the heart of our work.

In particular, we knew that it was in sprawling top-down programmes such as Horizon’s second pillar, on global challenges and industrial competitiveness, that awareness raising could have the greatest return on investment. So while our centralised team of seven full-time research managers and administrators also supports proposals in a range of other programmes, our proactive efforts are focused firmly on pillar two and its associated joint undertakings.

Intense knowledge

When we redesigned our awareness-raising initiative, we set out to promote internal collaboration between departments and encourage our researchers to coordinate proposals themselves. We knew we’d be facing challenges along the way—particularly the workload that proactive awareness raising would bring to our small research support office.

Our Outreach initiative, scalable by design, has grown and evolved since its 2021 rollout but the core remains the same: we start by analysing the pillar two work programmes, which outline hundreds of funding opportunities for specific challenges. Our team reads all 1,500+ pages of those programmes—sometimes multiple times as drafts develop—to build intense knowledge of the opportunities available. We refresh our knowledge annually and hold office-wide workshops whenever new work programmes are published.

We also conduct ‘interest-mapping meetings’ with DTI’s 20+ R&D departments to stay updated on their interests, capabilities and priorities. These meetings, held at least twice a year, involve two research managers and administrators and a handful of senior researchers from each department. We’ve found that a mixture of shared note-taking and regular conversations keeps us up to date on various departments’ interests and ensures we always know which research managers and administrators will have the latest information.

Armed with detailed knowledge, our team matches researchers with funding opportunities, producing longlists at departmental level. These lists include details like expected project budgets and technology readiness levels, helping researchers make informed choices. We review these longlists in targeting meetings with departmental researchers, helping them select a shortlist of target calls.

We’ve found that well-informed research managers and administrators can really help researchers in prioritising multiple attractive opportunities due at the same time and understanding the funding programmes’ technicalities. Even experienced applicants can benefit from our knowledge of the political thinking behind specific ‘destinations’ within Horizon Europe, or our inside track knowledge on what’s coming.

Building capacity

In parallel, we conduct capacity-building initiatives including an institute-wide network focused on Horizon Europe, fostering peer-to-peer learning and expert insights through regular meetings, workshops and newsletters. We also run workshops and training courses to improve proposal-writing skills and build internal networks between departments.

This process puts our researchers in a strong position as they start engaging with their networks and forming consortia. While not every effort results in a proposal, this approach feeds a steady stream of engagement into our proposal-writing pipeline. More proposals entering the pipeline leads to more submissions, more projects won and more top-notch research.

Of course, the Outreach initiative is labour-intensive, so in late 2022 we started a concerted effort to develop tools to reduce the workload and automate tasks such as compiling lists of funding opportunities. Thanks to this, we created the Outreach Table, a digital platform on DTI’s intranet, which helps researchers see which of their peers are considering bids to similar opportunities.

Our Outreach work has certainly improved collaboration within DTI, and our Outreach Table has enabled early proposal collaborations to happen. The systematic approach has demystified Horizon Europe for our researchers, lowering barriers and increasing engagement in international projects. This has driven up interest and success rates in the programme and had wider positive impacts across DTI.

Pro tips

Our Outreach programme was designed specifically for DTI and will not be universally applicable. However, we firmly believe that a proactive approach to awareness raising is worth the effort. Here are some key takeaways from our experience:

• Decide which programmes to target—focus on those offering the greatest return on investment (which may not necessarily be financial).
• Adapt processes to your specific case—tailor your approach to your researchers and institution.
• Review and revise your process—be flexible to meet colleagues’ needs.
• It’s a team effort—collaborate with other research managers and administrators for greater effectiveness.
• Embrace digital tools—use technology to ease the workload.
• Accept that it takes time to save time—invest upfront in developing tools and processes for long-term benefits.

What’s next?

While we’re proud of our Outreach initiative, it’s still very much a work in progress. This year, we’ve begun developing tools that incorporate generative artificial intelligence to help us in our work while also keeping our eyes open for commercial tools that can directly help or inspire us.

We’re also now focusing on how to support researchers’ participation in external partnership activities earlier on in the process.

And we keep our ears open to ideas from outside DTI, and that certainly includes other research managers, research administrators and research support offices, so if you’d like to discuss any of the ideas presented here or maybe your own awareness efforts, please do get in touch.

Luke John Murphy is a consultant, Paula Andrea Páez is a senior consultant, and John Stian Haukeland is EU funding manager at DTI.

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European Research Council seeks to allay fears as Advanced Grants deadline nears

The EU’s rollout of a lump-sum funding model across more of its Horizon Europe research and innovation programme reached an important milestone with the opening of the European Research Council’s 2024 Advanced Grants competition.

This year’s competition—the deadline for which is 29 August—will use the lump-sum model instead of the ERC’s traditional actual-costs model. This has understandably provoked some trepidation among applicants and their institutions, which the ERC sought to allay during a recent webinar presented by Josefina Enfedaque, chair of the European Research Council Executive Agency (Ercea) taskforce on lump sums. Here are the main points that, considering the ongoing rollout of the new model, potential applicants to other Horizon Europe instruments may also be minded to consider.

1. Most elements of Advanced Grant applications are unchanged

The ERC has done much to publicise its adoption of the lump-sum model to help prepare applicants for its implementation. However, this has arguably had the effect of leading some researchers and support staff to expect wide-reaching ramifications on how proposals should be prepared and submitted, and how they will be assessed. The webinar was peppered with reassurances that such fears were unfounded.

For example, Angela Wittelsberger, head of sector in the life sciences unit at the Ercea Scientific Department, said that, while the new system does indeed bundle up all the financial aspects of an Advanced Grant proposal into one lump sum—very much like one work package—this does not mean that proposals should now be structured that way.

Wittelsberger said: “Applicants should not change the way they think about or develop their proposals, and they should not change the way they think about structuring their project. They can structure it how they see fit, with or without scientific work packages.”

Similarly, when the question of assessment and evaluation was addressed, she stressed: “The focus of the evaluation remains on the scientific merits of the proposal; it is scientific excellence only—there’s no change there.”

And although most ERC grants have only a single beneficiary, the principal investigator—which Mila Bas, head of the grant management department at Ercea, acknowledged—that is not always so. In such cases the ERC will award a lump sum per beneficiary.

Furthermore, while the use of the term lump sum may lead some applicants to expect the designation of an unalterable fixed amount once a proposal has been approved, Wittelsberger assured attendees that the ERC’s principles of “serendipity and flexibility” would not change for this competition.

She said: “We know that frontier research does not always go exactly as planned, and we will continue to be as flexible as we were in the past with deviations to the original work plan. The principle of portability—the right of the principal investigator to transfer their grant to a different host institution—also remains valid.”

2. For applicants, changes mostly concern the budget forms

With the lump-sum model, instead of grant-winners tracking their costs and claiming them back after carrying out their research, applicants submit extra detail on budget in their grant proposal and receive payment when they reach agreed milestones. In the case of Advanced Grants, this will happen in two instalments: at the beginning and at the end of the project.

The changes to application requirements, therefore, mostly hinge on providing that extra detail. In particular there are changes to how both personnel and equipment costs are submitted.

For personnel costs, the budget table now has an additional column to be filled in with the number of person-months—a measurement taking into account the number of people working on the project and the amount of time each person spends on it—per staff category. (There is a further additional column in which the average monthly cost is automatically calculated.)

For equipment, an extra table—the ‘equipment depreciation table’—has been added to the list of mandatory documents, which also requires some input from applicants, with some columns calculated automatically. Bas stressed that, for the 2024 round, even applicants with projects that do not include any equipment costs must complete this table.

3. Assessment panels will pay closer attention to the budget

The lump-sum model sets the overall amount that beneficiaries are entitled to receive during the evaluation of proposals (although this can be adjusted as the project advances—see below). Logically then, there is greater scrutiny of proposal budgets than under the actual-costs model.

This is particularly true regarding assessment of personnel costs, Wittelsberger said, as the panel will not only assess whether the number of personnel is appropriate for the project but also consider the related costs. Both panellists and applicants have access to historical ERC personnel cost data via a dashboard on the ERC website to guide them, Wittelsberger continued. The data provided is granular, with costs broken down by staff category and country.

The ERC provided this purely for benchmarking, she said: “The idea is not that you have to align with the historical data when you plan for your personnel costs [but that] you should plan and request what you think you will incur…If you find you are not aligned, that [should encourage] you to provide an explanation of why this is.”

Bas agreed, adding that while applicants do not have to follow the historical data, they should make sure they align with their institutions’ accounting practices and personnel costs grid.

One attendee mentioned that postdocs in their institution are typically paid 80 per cent more than the rates for their country in the Advanced Grants dashboard. They asked what kind of justification the ERC would expect beyond “those are our actual current salary rates”.

Bas replied: “In most cases, that’s a very good justification [if] you have that salary grid in your institution.” She reminded applicants in similar situations to put such a justification “very clearly in the proposal”.

Another attendee asked what the outcome would be if the panel concludes that the proposal fulfils the scientific excellence criterion but its budget is not well-dimensioned. Bas replied that even if the budget would receive closer attention with the lump-sum system, scientific excellence remains of paramount importance. Such a bid “will be in the same place in the ranking list” as it would have been in the actual-cost model, she said.

Wittelsberger added: “The first thing [the panel] would do is ask a question about it in the interview. And based on the explanations and justifications provided, they might, or might not, consider a cut in a particular cost, as they do now.”

Wittelsberger advised applicants not to worry that the assessment panels would be overbearing. “Our panels will not start to micromanage the budget or the personnel costs just because we have moved to a lump-sum model,” she said. “Mostly, the details of the budget will be looked at by experts once the rank list has been established, but our panels do this already. Under the lump-sum model, this step of the assessment has an increased importance because, remember, there’s no additional checks on costs anymore during the lifetime of the project.”

4. Post-award grant management should be easier

Ease of post-award management is one of the major drivers of the EU’s move towards the lump-sum model. No timesheets are required to be submitted, and there will be “no financial audits, no certificate of financial payments”, according to Bas, who then laid out how financing will proceed.

The ERC will pay 80 per cent of the budget as pre-financing, she said, a maximum of 30 days after the grant agreement is signed. As with the existing model, there will be a scientific mid-term report to assess project progress and whether any deviations from the project plan have taken place, requiring amendments to the budget, but the mid-term report “will not be associated with a payment”, Bas specified.

Payment of the remaining 20 per cent, or the appropriate amount in the case of modifications, will be made following a final report and a scientific assessment. As Wittelsberger stressed at the start, payment is dependent entirely on the work having been completed, not on the outcome or results.

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Tips on partnership-building when time and budgetary pressures are paramount

Collaboration—and this is not a novel observation—is the lifeblood of science. And when scientists collaborate in pursuit of funding, their institutions will have to do so as well. Much has been written about how to make scientific partnerships work, but much of it fails to take into account the rushed and cash-strapped circumstances of most partnership-building exercises.

In this article, published in September 2018, Alison Lundbeck, research and innovation development manager at the University of Leeds, refers to the difficult contemporaneous context for universities and their researchers, but the picture she paints is remarkably similar to that existing now. Thanks to that, her six tips for practical partnership-building should still be relevant, too.

Recently in Funding Insight, Ross McLennan at the University of South Australia wrote about partnership building. He said it was essential that academics stop pushing their own agendas, listen actively to others and commit to making their partnerships work. This is certainly true, but this week I want to expand on these points and look at what we need to do in practice to make this happen.

Do more with less

We all know that UK research and higher education is continuing to change. There is austerity, the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, and changes to the Research Excellence Framework after Nicolas Stern’s review and Brexit. Many of these imply that we need to do more with less: there’s less funding available and more competition for it, and if successful there’s a demand for more auditable results. 

Expectations are growing, while confidence in the value of universities and research to society are at a low ebb.

The pressure is overwhelming, and it could be difficult for universities to deliver on all fronts. They must provide excellent teaching, world-leading research, societal impact, national productivity and more. They need cracking sustainable development and must deliver overseas development assistance. Value for money is important, as is interdisciplinarity for everything. We need to partner and collaborate to do bigger and better things that have practical outcomes, not just esoteric explorations that will sit on a shelf and gather dust.

Plus ça change

But so what? Is this really new? The mood music may have changed, but the fundamental purpose of a university hasn’t. The intrinsic value of research is the same as ever, and I think the values and motivations of researchers are too. Collaboration isn’t more important now; it’s just more lauded.

But isn’t it hard? Not really. Not if you want to do it. And I think most academics are intrinsically motivated to seek new knowledge, to quest and to make the world a better place. What better way to do that than by joining with other people? Inspiration doesn’t come by sitting alone in a room. The hardest problems probably won’t be solved by a lone genius. Others will have different perspectives, different skills and different experience that can help shine new light on an issue.

Collaboration in practice

So how do you go about it? There’s no single way, but there are certain things that can help.

1. Think about your motivation. What do you care about? What interests you about your research? What questions are you asking? What problems do you want to solve? Who could benefit from your research? You won’t be the only person in the world interested in these things. More importantly, you won’t have all the insight. Consider who else might be thinking about the same issues and start a conversation.
2. Don’t prejudge what you expect from a collaboration. Other perspectives, other tacit knowledge and other experience can bring insights you probably can’t conceive. You might have an ‘offer’. You might have an ‘ask’. But the best value isn’t transactional, it comes from open dialogue.
3. Pique the interest of others. That said, in starting a conversation don’t underestimate the value of “what’s in it for me?” Getting the ball rolling can be the biggest hurdle, and it’s important to pique the interest of a potential partner. If you’re making contact out of the blue (rather than, say, seeking an introduction from a mutual acquaintance or going to an open forum where attendees would expect to meet people around a shared issue), you can’t assume that other people have the same perspective on the situation, or will be able to see the possible value. Most people you might want to collaborate with don’t have the time to spend on something of no relevance.
4. Manage expectations and watch your language. Whether it’s a different discipline or a different sector, the acronyms and assumptions of a shared understanding of the same language can set your relationship back. Avoid (or at least explain) acronyms. Don’t get lost in irrelevant details. Even more of a pitfall is promising everything and delivering nothing. Set out early an understanding of how each partner works as much as possible, especially when working with those outside of universities. Timescales, processes, red tape, and even the type, scale or speed of deliverables expected can vary drastically between sectors. It’s important to tackle these types of issues upfront.
5. Build trust and collegiality. You might be an expert, but you don’t know everything. Develop a healthy respect for what colleagues can bring. Partners are your colleagues too. You’re coming together for mutual benefit, not because you have to, so make the effort.
6. If you have to negotiate, be as open as possible. It all comes back to trust, and understanding each other’s worlds. Can’t get authorisation yesterday? A certain cost isn’t eligible under a particular research funder? Need deliverable A, as well as pragmatic outcome B? Explain. Don’t assume your potential partners understand your sticking points. A fixed position can be misinterpreted as a strength in negotiation, but this isn’t a game of chicken. Leaving no room for manoeuvre has the potential to sink any collaboration. And you can’t be sure you’re not undermining the chance of an innovative solution. The underlying reason why a particular outcome is needed might not be the same as the thing itself: there could be a better outcome for all concerned. 

Is it worth it?

So is it all worth it? Hopefully, yes. We’re all pressured for time, but a stimulating conversation about an issue you’re passionate about can do the world of good for your motivation and enthusiasm back in the day job. Many hands can make light work when you’re trying to solve a complex challenge. In fact, many hands can make the work possible.

Reality is complex at the best of times: we’re all partial, subjective and limited in our own individual understanding. Take every opportunity you can to get a better view of the world, of the challenge you’re trying to tackle. You can’t understand the context, or how possible solutions may sink or swim in practice, without seeking the views of others.

Value the working relationships you already have, but don’t shut off from new opportunities. At worst, you might gain some valuable experience. At best, you might kick-start a brilliantly productive partnership and do some good in the world. Cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral partnerships really are the key to meeting the big, global, integrated problems the world is facing. If a problem isn’t small, neat and standalone, it can’t be solved by a lone person. And aren’t those the sort of problems we really need to solve?

The post From the archive: Six practical steps for successful partnerships appeared first on Research Professional News.

US-based Kenneth Rainin Foundation is on the lookout for new ways to tackle unmet needs

Foundations in the US have a reputation for welcoming the kinds of high-risk, high-gain research ideas that national funders might be inclined to shy away from. The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, which focuses on supporting biomedical research on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), is certainly one of them.

The foundation’s Innovator Awards support individual research projects with grants of up to $150,000 and collaborative projects involving multiple investigators with grants of up to $300,000. Usually it awards between 15-25 grants each annual round. For the current round, the deadline for initial applications (via a letter of inquiry) is 30 September, and 3 February for invited full applications.

In this interview published in July 2022, Laura Wilson, director, health strategy and ventures, at the foundation, explained that a strong idea was key to a successful bid, and that the foundation accepted that researchers with truly daring ideas “may be starting from scratch”.

Top tips

• Bids from those from outside inflammatory bowel disease or gastroenterology are welcome
• The foundation funds both basic and translational research
• Preliminary data may not be necessary; the foundation is happy to provide funding that will lead to preliminary data
• Do not be afraid of tackling any of the major questions around IBD; the charity likes high-risk, high-gain research

If you’ve worked in a lab, there’s a good chance you’ll have used the ergonomic pipettes designed by the late American businessman and philanthropist Kenneth Rainin.

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, based in Oakland, California, awards grants for the arts and education, and also research into inflammatory bowel disease—the condition that ultimately led to Rainin’s death in 2007.

The foundation’s director of health, Laura Wilson, says that the funding is squarely focused on biomedical research for IBD, and not healthcare or patient education. She says that the Kenneth Rainin Foundation is one of just a handful of US-based funders that focus on the disease, though of course the National Institutes of Health is also a big player in the field.

High risk

“What sets us apart is we really do support high-risk, potentially high-reward grants,” Wilson says.

The funder’s Innovator Awards offer up to $150,000 for projects by individual researchers and up to $300,000 for collaborative projects involving multiple investigators. Funding is initially available for just one year, but there is the potential for projects to be extended for up to an additional two years.

The 2023 round of the Innovator Awards is now open. Wilson says the foundation usually receives 150-200 letters, which are whittled down to 40-50 applicants invited to submit a full application.

Wilson says she has roughly $6 million (£5 million) per year to spend on grants, and that on average 15-25 grants are awarded; of these about 80 per cent are in the US, however the funding is open to researchers around the world and the foundation is keen to have a global reach.

The foundation supports a mixture of basic biomedical research and more translational work, Wilson says. On its website it lists a number of focus areas, including cell biology, complementary therapies, diet and nutrition, immunity and inflammation, microbiome and new technologies.

“In a nutshell, bench to bedside, potentially having some benefits for the IBD patients within the lifetime of a grant,” she explains. While the foundation isn’t large enough to fund clinical trials, it does look for studies that could open the door to a larger trial, such as human-sample studies.

Preliminary data

While other funders of IBD research often require preliminary data, Wilson says that’s not necessary for Innovator Awards. “We don’t require that because sometimes when you do have that idea…you may not have that preliminary data, you may be starting from scratch. We do not require you to have solved the problem before you come to us with an application.”

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation doesn’t prioritise gastroenterologists or people with pre-existing expertise in inflammatory bowel disease. “Some of our most successful work has come from parasitologists,” Wilson says. “Taking knowledge from somewhere else and applying it and asking a question for an unmet need in IBD is highly attractive.”

As a mininum, applicants must have a lab of their own, but they don’t need to have a permanent academic position. This means that postdoctoral researchers are not eligible to apply for Innovator Awards, but Wilson says that the people supported by the foundation are as much of a focus as the research, and this includes junior researchers.

“We really encourage, in our programmes, for PIs to apply in a way that allows their postdocs and younger trainees to be lifted up and do work and [be] included on the grants.”

This support also extends beyond the lifetime of the grant, as Wilson says that the Kenneth Rainin Foundation sees itself as a “pump-priming funder so that, beyond our funding, you don’t fall off a cliff”.

While a year is a relatively short lifespan for any research project, Wilson says that in reality many of the foundation’s applicants end up being funded for longer.

“I would say 80 per cent of our current Innovator Awards, if they’re seeking a year’s renewal, they get renewed,” she says. Grantees are given plenty of opportunities to demonstrate their progress, including through progress reports and an opportunity to give a presentation to Wilson and her scientific advisory board.

In addition, there is the option of no-cost extensions if grantees have not used all their funding after a year but are making good progress.

Application process

Wilson clearly wants to make applying to the foundation a good experience. She says that, compared to other funders, the application process is “quite quick and painless” and the foundation encourages applicants to contact its health programme staff to discuss potential research ideas.

In terms of what the Kenneth Rainin Foundation is looking for in applications, Wilson says it comes down to “a novel idea that has a solid hypothesis” and a researcher with the capacity to answer the research question.

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A cost-benefit analysis is advised before starting a bid

The European Research Council is arguably Europe’s most prestigious funder of individual research grants and inarguably a vital pillar of blue-sky research funding in Europe.

The ERC’s three core grants are all valid over five years and track researchers across career stages, with Starting Grants worth up to €1.5 million, Consolidator Grants worth up to €2m and Advanced Grants worth up to €2.5m.

The funder sets a high bar for applicants to clear and for their bids to be accepted. According to its president Maria Leptin, “research funded by the ERC is expected to lead to advances at the frontiers of knowledge and to set a clear and inspirational target for frontier research across Europe”.

Accordingly, success rates are low, ranging from 8 to 15 per cent depending on the grant. But even so, some applicants manage to clear the bar more than once.

We caught up with three of these multiple winners to get their view of the funding landscape from the enviable vantage point of generous five-year funding awards.

Cost-benefit analysis

Anja Groth leads a research group at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and is a three-time ERC grant winner. She won a Starting Grant in 2011, a Consolidator Grant in 2016 and an Advanced Grant in 2023.

Groth says: “These grants have been instrumental for the success of my lab. I mean, it has really been a core component of the lab and very, very important for maintenance.”

She says that science for many can risk becoming “a constant chase for funding” and so it is important for researchers to think carefully about whether they are really competitive for any grants they put in for.

Before each bid, Groth says that she asks herself: “How competitive am I?” That will set the balance “of how many grant [applications] you need to write and how much you can focus your time on science”.

And then, she adds, other elements should come into play: in particular, the general rule that the smaller the grants are, both in terms of money and timeframe, the more effort will be spent on applying for them relative to the award.

“Of course we need to compete for grants,” Groth says, “but we should take care that we do not waste too much of our researchers’ time on them compared to how much they can invest in actually doing science and coming up with new discoveries.”

Because of this fine balance, Groth says that “the major, major importance of the ERC grants has been the relatively long-term vision that you can have over five years compared to many other grants that, at least in Denmark, will mostly last three years, which is relatively short”.

William Martin, head of the Institute of Molecular Evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany, has also won three ERC grants—in his case, all Advanced Grants (in 2009, 2015 and 2021). Martin agrees that national grants are underfunded in comparison to ERC grants.

He says that with an ERC grant, “the same amount of writing work, the same amount of text, will get you almost 10 times more if you are good”.

Building a team

Most applicants apply for a full or almost full ERC grant. The awards have the same upper funding limits regardless of discipline, with occasional additional allowances for equipment.

For Martin, one of the most important resources that an ERC grant provides is the ability to hire an adequate team of PhD students and postdocs. Some of his former researchers have gone on to win ERC grants themselves.

One of them is Tal Dagan, a professor of microbiology at the Christian Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany. She went on to win an ERC Starting Grant in 2012 and currently holds an ERC Consolidator Grant that started in 2023.

Most of her spending is on personnel, and the grant enabled her to fund full four-year positions. She says that “the fourth year is typically the most productive as the students become ‘grown-up scientists’ and working with them becomes a true collaboration”.

This would have been impossible with a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany’s largest public funder, which until recently only funded three-year PhD studies. Dagan says this “is much too short in my opinion”.

Furthermore, she says: “The DFG is quite reluctant to fund postdocs and it’s quite tricky to have them funded via standard grants as one must justify a higher level of expertise required for the project.”

Equipment

The equipment allowance was also highly valuable, Dagan says. She was able to spend €20,000 on high-performance computing in her Starting Grant and €130,000 on a droplet digital PCR machine during her Consolidator Grant.

She says that similarly to the situation with staff costs, “there is almost no funding scheme in Germany that enables scientists to buy ‘medium tier’ equipment besides large-scale collaborative consortia”.

And yet, even though the time spent on ERC applications can be justified by their size, the fact that so many bids get knocked back will still put off many excellent researchers from applying.

And while it seems unlikely that success rates will rise sharply any time soon, the ERC is taking steps to make the application process less burdensome. From next year, Advanced Grants will move to lump-sum funding, meaning less restrictive budgeting and less paperwork.

“This is absolutely great news,” Dagan says. She hopes the move to lump-sum funding will be replicated in other ERC grants. Groth agrees, saying that easing the burden on applicants will hopefully serve as a “very good incentive” to apply.

The post Our winning proposals: On being a repeat ERC winner appeared first on Research Professional News.

Suggestions for a smoother, happier process

Following on from Adam Golberg’s call to make internal peer review a more positive experience for all concerned, republished last week, we revisit his follow-on article on how that might be achieved—and a potential “spectacular own goal” to be avoided.

Most universities now have internal peer review processes for grant applications. How can we make them work better for all involved? There are several questions that follow from this initial one, and I’ll try to answer them here.

Who should do the reviewing?

The ideal reviewer is a senior academic with a track record of success with major research funding applications and some insight into the subject area. Even at research-intensive institutions, there is a limited supply of these people and their time is valuable. So our instinct is to ask senior professors, but I wonder if a closer review by someone less senior might be more useful at times. We should certainly think beyond the usual suspects, as reviewing can be a developmental exercise.

Should reviews be anonymous?

This is tricky. In my view, ideally, no. Being able to put feedback in the context of the reviewer’s background can be valuable. I also think that people should be willing to stand behind their comments.

However, because internal peer review has a filtering role, one could argue that the protection of anonymity is required for reviewers to be willing to say that proposals shouldn’t go forward. Or perhaps even so that academics will be willing to criticise colleagues’ work at all.

That said, I would expect the rationale for soft-filtering out an application to be one that most applicants would accept and understand. For a hard filter (when only a certain number of applications can go forward from the institution), there would usually be a committee decision bound by collective responsibility. I’m not aware of any research or internal survey work done on internal peer reviewers and their attitudes to anonymisation, and I’d be interested to see if anyone has looked at this.

How should reviewers approach applications?

It’s not obvious how to review a grant application. Those without much experience may be reluctant to trust their instincts or judgment because ‘it’s not really my area’. A small number go the other way and become power-crazy at the opportunity to judge others. They end up judging the proposal from their own personal, partisan perspective and completely write off entire academic disciplines and subdisciplines.

One option to try to reduce such responses is to ask reviewers to use the same form that the funder in question gives to referees or panel members. It’s a great idea in principle, but academics typically have a loathe-hate relationship with forms. Nonetheless, there are some specific questions we could ask reviewers in a structured way or use as prompts. Fewer questions will get better answers.

• What isn’t clear in the bid?
• What are the potential weaknesses?
• What’s missing?
• How could the application be improved?

But if I were to ask a single question, it would be the pre-mortem: if I could see into the future and tell you now that this application is not going to be funded, what will be the main reason?

It helps home in on key weaknesses: it might be fit-to-call, it might be unclear methodology, it might be weak impact pathways, it might be the composition of the research team. It’s a good question for applicants to ask themselves.

How should reviewers give feedback?

It’s not enough for feedback to be correct—it must be presented in a way that maximises the chances that the principal investigator will listen.

Ideally, I’d like a face-to-face meeting involving the internal reviewers, the research development manager, the principal and possibly the co-investigators. The meeting would be a discussion of a full draft in which reviewers can offer their views and advice and the principal investigator can respond and ask questions about their impressions of the proposal.

I like face-to-face meetings because of the feedback multiplier effect: one reviewer makes an observation, which triggers another in the second reviewer. A principal’s response to a particular point triggers a further observation or suggestion. If approached in the right spirit (and if well chaired), this should be a constructive and supportive meeting aimed at maximising the applicant’s chances of success. It must not be a Dragons’ Den-style ordeal.

In reality, with packed diaries and short-notice calls, it’s going to be difficult to arrange such meetings. So we often have to default to email, which needs a lot of care, as nuance of tone and meaning can be lost. I would advise that feedback is sent through an intermediary—another task for your friendly neighbourhood research development manager—who can think about how to pass it on: whether to forward it verbatim, add context or comments or smooth off some abrasive edges. I’ve had a reviewer email me to say that she’s really busy and ask whether I could repackage her comments for forwarding. I’m happy to.

A good approach is to depersonalise the applicant: that is, address the feedback to the draft application, not its authors. But I think depersonalising the reviewers and their comments is a mistake. Impersonal, formal language can come over as officious, high-handed and passive-aggressive. It will make applicants less likely to engage, even if the advice is solid. Using (even rhetorical) questions rather than blunt statements invites engagement. In other words…

Which would you respond to best?

• The panel’s view is that your summary section is poor and is an introduction to the topic, not a proper summary of your whole project. You should rewrite before submitting.
• Could the summary be strengthened? We thought the draft version read more like an introduction to the topic, and we think reviewers are looking for a summary of the complete proposal in a nutshell. Is there time to revisit this section so it better summarises the project as a whole?

Institutions invest time and money in having arrangements that provide prospective principal investigators with detailed feedback from senior academic colleagues to improve their chances of success. They ought to be glad of the support. It’s a spectacular own goal if the resulting advice is ineffective because of the way the feedback is communicated or the way the whole process is presented or perceived by researchers.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

The post From the archive: How to improve internal peer review appeared first on Research Professional News.

If research managers can lessen aversion to internal peer review, everyone benefits

Republished to coincide with the Association of Research Managers and Administrators’ 2024 annual conference, this article from May 2019 asks whether research managers should do more to make putting a bid through a peer review process a positive experience.

In the follow-up article, to be republished next week, Adam Golberg, now strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham, adds some suggestions as to how that might be achieved.

Internal peer review of research grant applications has two distinct functions that can easily become blurred.

The first function is to filter—to select which applications go forward and which do not. This has two variants:

• A ‘hard filter’ for a scheme or funder with formal limits on the number of applications that one institution can submit.
• A ‘soft filter’ where there are no formal limits on application numbers, but where there’s a steer from the funder to submit only the most competitive applications or there’s limited research development capacity.

The second function aims to improve the quality of the application, producing concrete suggestions to increase the chance of success. In a previous article I explained how research development staff could bring a fresh perspective to an application. Similarly, comments from a senior academic with experience as an expert reviewer or funding panel member can be helpful, but with the added benefit of academic expertise.

Both functions of peer review—filtering and improving—are often rolled together into one process. This may cause confusion for both reviewers and the reviewed. Do we over-emphasise the role of the filter at the expense of the improvement? Does fear of the filter reduce the efficacy of the suggestions for improvement?

How internal peer review comes across

When discussing internal peer review with academic colleagues, I’ve seen wildly different reactions. Some are very enthusiastic and hungry for comments and feedback. Others are a bit more…Gollum and don’t want anyone to gaze upon their precious.

Most are somewhere in the middle: they welcome useful comments and insights but are wary about being forced to make changes against their better judgment—or being prevented from applying at all.

There’s no denying that the ‘filter’ role exists. However, I try to reassure academics that in my experience it’s rare for a bid to be soft-filtered out because of internal reviewers’ comments and for the applicant to disagree with the rationale.

The reviewer has usually spotted something that the applicant missed, either related to the application or the underpinning idea. Perhaps it needs another co-investigator or stronger engagement with partners or the public.

The application may need to engage with a particular body of literature or requires more time to develop. Perhaps there is a poor fit to funder or too little time to work up the idea into a competitive application by the deadline.

When we send out details of calls with our internal timetables and internal deadlines for the various stages, are potential applicants seeing peer review (and associated deadlines) as a supportive process or a barrier to be overcome or even evaded?

Wires crossed

I sometimes worry that in our desire to set out processes to try to prevent and preempt disruptive last-minute applications, we end up sending the wrong message about peer review and about the broader support available.

If we’re dictating terms and timetables for peer review, do we make it look as if grant applicants must fit around reviewer and research support requirements and timescales? And is that the right way around?

To be clear, I’m certainly not arguing against having a structured process with indicative milestones with some level of enforcement. Last-minute applications are disruptive and stressful, forcing people to drop everything to provide support with no notice. Worst of all, rushed applications are seldom competitive. We absolutely should try to save people from this kind of folly.

And, of course, we need to allow time for senior (and therefore busy) academics to undertake internal peer review. I suspect that most institutions rely on a relatively small pool of reviewers who are asked to read and comment on multiple applications per year, and that few get any formal workload allocation.

While we should certainly give applicants plenty of time to write their applications, we need to treat our reviewers with consideration and value their time.

Putting peer review in a positive light

I’m not arguing that we disguise or minimise the ‘filter’ element of internal peer review in favour of an unqualified upbeat presentation of internal peer review being entirely about improving the quality of the application. But perhaps we could look at ways to present internal peer review in a more positive, supportive and developmental light.

The most important part of peer review positivity—and the subject of the second article of this series—is how internal peer review happens in practice: who reviews, how and when; and how and in what spirit reviewer comments are communicated to applicants.

If internal peer review as a process helps to strengthen applications, word will get round and support and buy-in will grow, one positive experience at a time.

But even before that stage, I think it’s worth thinking about how we communicate our internal peer review processes and timetables. Could we be more positive in our framing and communication? Could we present internal peer review more as a helping hand to climb higher, and less as a hurdle to overcome?

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

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Faraday Discovery Fellowships will nourish group leaders en route to the promised land of seniority

The Faraday Discovery Fellowships, which are among the most keenly anticipated new grant schemes scheduled for launch in 2024, will open to applications on 14 August.

The Royal Society’s showcase awards for mid-career researchers were first pitched to the government for funding in 2019, but without success.

They then became part of the government’s plans for a UK alternative to the EU’s research and innovation programme Horizon Europe—but when the UK gained access to the EU programme, they were no longer needed to fill that hole.

However, as participants of a Royal Society webinar on 12 June were told, by then the Faraday Discovery Fellowships had already gained favour in Westminster. In the 2023 autumn statement, chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced £250 million for the scheme.  

The fellowships offer science, technology, engineering and maths researchers up to £8m over a 10-year period to support them in carrying out high-quality research.

They aim to provide mid-career academics with the time and freedom to focus on their research. The Royal Society hopes that the long-term and stable funding the awards offer will allow researchers to tackle “difficult and intractable” problems. 

At the webinar, Francesca Stokesmore, senior manager of international grants at the Royal Society, set out the fundamentals of the scheme for those considering a bid. Here are the main points.

1. These grants are strictly for the mid-career cohort

Stokesmore explained that mid-career researchers had “long been” recognised as lacking dedicated support, not just from the Royal Society but across the UK. She added that the Royal Society has been hoping to offer mid-career support for quite some time.

While she acknowledged that the term ‘mid-career’ is unpopular with some, she said the society decided to “stick with it” so it could draw a line from early to mid to senior.

She said the society wanted to divide its portfolio up in a way that would help with signposting but would also “protect” mid-career funding. She highlighted that there is often competition between mid-career and senior researchers for the same award, and that the society hopes to minimise such competition with this grant scheme.

According to Stokesmore, the “most talked about” element of the scheme is how the term ‘mid-career researcher’ will be defined.

The society settled on the broad definition of researchers with 10 to 20 years of post-PhD or equivalent research experience. While exceptional candidates with fewer years of experience will be considered, the upper cut-off of 20 years will be kept as a harder limit, she said, in order to protect the funding for mid-career researchers specifically.

Career breaks and non-linear career paths will be taken into account when calculating the number of years of research experience, Stokesmore said, and applicants who have switched discipline and consider themselves mid-career in their current field can get in touch with the society to discuss their eligibility.

Job titles or employment status (whether in a permanent position or not) are not relevant to eligibility, she continued, but the society does expect applicants to be established as a group leader, have an established international network and to have made significant original research contributions.

Reviewers will also be keen to see that applicants have made wider contributions to research, perhaps via public engagement, knowledge exchange and peer review.

2. Don’t rush your bid

Unlike funding for its other awards, the Royal Society has received an endowment from the government for the Faraday Discovery Fellowships. The society has 20 years to spend £250m via the scheme, plus any investment gains it makes on it.

With other schemes, the society often receives funding for shorter periods of time, typically three years.

Stokesmore said that the different funding model for the Faraday Discovery Fellowships will bring benefits for applicants. For example, the greater certainty of funding will mean people can spend time on their applications knowing they can always wait and apply next year.

There will also be greater flexibility on things like start dates, she added, and reduced bureaucracy in terms of reporting. She said the funding model frees the society from having to show early indicators of impact and allows it to focus on longer-term impacts.

3. The society has a rough idea of the number of fellowships it will award

In the Royal Society’s deal with the government, it agreed to make 30 awards within the 20-year period. But Stokesmore said it is expecting to make closer to 50—an estimate based on its modelling around the expected investment gains and the fact that some researchers may not want the full £8m.

Considering the long duration of awards—which means that the final grants under the £250m allocation would mostly be awarded within the next 10 years—the society’s current prediction is that it will award around seven fellowships a year via the scheme.

4. Applicants should build up their teams

Although the awards are handed to one principal investigator, Stokesmore said that team building is expected to be a “significant part” of the programme.

She pointed out that they are large awards and the Royal Society would like to see the funding supporting the creation of world-leading research groups.

She added that the society is also looking for the fellowships to train the next generation of researchers.

It expects that teams will have early career researchers, PhD students and technicians on board. Training should be provided to these people, she said.

5. Anything within the Royal Society’s disciplinary remit is eligible

As with all Royal Society funding, the programme will fund research across science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This will include collaborations outside Stem, although lead applicants must have a track record in Stem.

Stokesmore highlighted that the society does not fund translational medicine, clinical trials or the development of new treatments. Research with a health outcome also tends to fall outside its remit, she said.

The post Opportunity profile: The Royal Society’s mid-career manna appeared first on Research Professional News.

The Leo Foundation launches a Research Networking Grant scheme

Top tips

• The international element is very important in this scheme.
• These grants should not be used for meetings to support ongoing research projects or potential research bids.
• Encourage participation across career stages at events.
• Meetings can be open beyond the research community where appropriate.

The Leo Foundation is the world’s largest private funder dedicated to skin and skin disease research. It granted 217 million Danish Kroner in 2023 and aims to award half a billion Danish Kroner a year by 2030. 

The Foundation’s best-known grants are its Research Grants, profiled in Funding Insight in February 2023. These open to applications three times a year, with the next deadline on 12 September.

This year, the foundation added two schemes to its portfolio, the Visiting Researchers programme, which supports international visits from Danish research institutions and vice versa, and the Research Networking Grants, which supports international knowledge-sharing within dermatology. Both schemes will open for their second round on 15 August and close on 2 October.

The Research Networking Grant can be worth up to 500,000 Danish Kroner (€67,000) and is open worldwide. It encourages participation from researchers at any career stage, including students, and money can be allocated for travel costs. 

Anne-Marie Engel, the chief scientific officer at the Leo Foundation, discusses what the foundation hopes for from its new schemes, focusing on the networking grant.

Why did the foundation launch its new calls in 2024? 

We are in the process of implementing our 2025 grant strategy, which directs our philanthropic activities into two main tracks: one supporting world-class skin research in different programmes, such as the long-standing Research Grants in Open Competition, and the Leo Foundation Dr Abildgaard Fellowships programme and Serendipity Grants, which were introduced last year. These programmes all support research projects.

The other track is to catalyse a strong and coherent global skin and skin disease research ecosystem.

Research Grants are of course an important instrument, but another important way of supporting the ecosystem is making sure people eager to meet and exchange ideas and challenge each other can do so. This is why we have introduced the networking grants.

We know from experience that new ideas come up when researchers meet in different settings, or when they visit people from another research tribe, so to speak. When researchers challenge each other in physical meetings, new and maybe important collaborations can emerge. 

What are the eligibility criteria for the networking grant? 

There are specific criteria for this instrument, and one is that it should be open to an international public. You cannot say that at this hospital we are having an internal educational session of some kind, and then apply for money. That will not work.

The call is also not open to researchers who would for instance like to get together to write an application for a large grant, for example to the Horizon Europe programme, together. 

The idea is for people who have a common interest in setting up a meeting or a network event of some kind to develop what they are already doing.

Should these groups also be open to the general public? 

Whether you invite people from the public will depend on those who make the agenda and what kind of meeting they would like to have. If it is relevant for a meeting to invite patients or representative organisations to discuss relevant topics, designing trials for example, that will be fine. We would not exclude anything like that.  

The meeting must have a starting point in a shared scientific question or topic, but who they invite to give input or inspiration is up to applicants.

What errors were made on bids to the first round? 

We had some applicants who saw the scheme as an opportunity to obtain funding for project meetings, for people to travel and meet to discuss a project funded elsewhere—and that was too narrow a mission. 

We also had a couple of applicants who saw this as a research project grant involving travel and meetings. They scoped a research project for us which we have other instruments for. The Research Networking Grants are specifically for meetings, for conferences, for symposia. It is important that applicants distinguish between our different programmes and their purposes. 

Does that point to a more general error that you might see on bids to other schemes?

Yes, a general pitfall is that people read the guidelines, but they read the guidelines through a lens to see what they would really like funding for. Quite a few applicants give us a call, or send us an email saying, “You’ve got this scheme, I’ve got this project, does it fit? What would it take to make it fit?”. We have a lot of good dialogue through which we can also learn about how people read the guidelines that we put out. This helps us to improve and adjust them.

Is this a pilot scheme or can it be considered as a permanent one now? 

When we introduce a new instrument, we introduce two deadlines that year. We like to run a few rounds just to gather experience. Even though we have done our best to design the instrument so it answers all the questions we can think of, we will not know them all. 

After a few rounds, we can stop and say “Okay, are there questions popping up or are people disregarding what we think is very clear guidance? Should we adjust anything? Do we get too many of some and too few of others? Should we try to invite some more people in with specific kinds of applications?”. But it is still too early to say about that for this year’s new instruments.

Were there many bids to the first round?

We didn’t get that many applications, but we did not announce it long ago. In our experience, it takes time to build up awareness in the scientific community, even though there is always a lack of money for good projects or good meetings. It takes maybe a year or so, depending on how frequent your application deadlines are, for the community to be aware that there is this option. 

There will be a build-up of interest, that is for sure. We know the need is there, it just takes a bit of patience from our side as well.

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Tips on justifying your proposal’s importance and methods

Research is all about asking questions. But in order to do that, researchers must often answer other questions on funding application forms first.

In a recent webinar organised by the Worldwide Universities Network of 23 research-intensive institutions, Taryn Bell, research development adviser at the University of Leeds, boiled these questions down to three essential ones where applicants frequently go awry.

In her words, they are: “What do you want to investigate, why is this important and how are you going to do it?”

Our first article about the webinar, published last week, reported on Bell’s suggestions for responding to the first question via a proposal’s aims and objectives. This second part deals with the other two questions.

Reach

To write a competitive funding bid, Bell said, applicants first need to reframe the central ‘why’ question. “When we write in a funding proposal about why our research is important, the people reviewing funding applications, and the funders themselves, are essentially asking a different question. They’re asking: ‘Why should I care?’”

A few funders—for example, the Leverhulme Trust in the UK—are willing to fund projects just because they are intellectually interesting, she said, but most funders don’t do this. The case therefore has to be made for a proposal’s impact beyond personal intellectual curiosity.

This could be done, Bell said, by considering the reach of the proposed research, meaning “the extent or range of its application, effect or influence”.

Identification

Bell proposed three steps to integrate reach into research proposals in order to tell the funder why they should care.

The first is to identify people within that reach, which is similar to identifying those who could benefit from the research. Bell advised applicants, especially those applying to fellowships, not to neglect an obvious answer to this question. She said: “In the very narrowest sense, it could be you. You can benefit from your research; it might benefit your own professional practice or confidence; it might be good for your career.”

Of course, even with fellowships, it is important to consider potential spheres of influence beyond that, Bell continued. The identification phase might start with institutional or disciplinary colleagues and move further out, perhaps into government, the private sector or a section of the general public, she said.

Bell emphasised honesty being key during the identification phase. She said that for many projects, the reach—which is closely related to the project’s impact—would be quite restricted.

“As an early career researcher, it wouldn’t be very usual for your research to have tons of societal impact, so don’t feel like you have to promise that you are going to change society.”

During the identification phase, it is also worth considering what benefits those audiences will derive from the research, Bell said. Again, something quite limited like “improved understanding” might be an acceptable answer there, but applicants should check that the funder is not keen for wider impact.

Planning

Bell’s second step is to plot out when the identified people within reach of the project could be involved in it. She stressed that an important cohort would need to be contacted before the bid is submitted and often before any writing has begun.

This is particularly true in biomedical research, she said, where patient participation and involvement is an increasingly vital component. But in most fields, the strongest proposals arise from consultation with others.

Early on, most applicants need to “start initiating collaborations, networks and co-production, and build the proposal together with some of those beneficiaries”. This does not have to happen in any formal way, she added. “Just bouncing ideas off people who might want to be involved can help you see your idea from a fresh perspective.”

Some people will only be strongly involved once the research has started, Bell said, and might come on board as project partners or to sit on a project’s advisory board, while others may be included after the project has concluded, possibly once results have been published or during follow-up research.

Engagement

The final step, Bell said, is an obvious one but needs to be stressed: researchers should actually contact some of the identified people within a project’s reach.

She said: “It’s really common for researchers to feel like they can’t get in touch until they have a finished proposal, but I would say do it now…People can take a long time to respond.”

As Bell had previously said, research ideas always benefit from being discussed with others, but there are other benefits to plucking up the courage to make early contact. “Reviewers love it when you’ve already got potential collaborators on board, or you’ve already had discussions with those audiences. It gives the reviewers confidence that you’re asking the right people and you’re developing that research idea.”

She also stressed the importance of identifying and contacting an institutional or department expert on impact early, as this person could give further ideas on evidencing an answer to that all-important question: why should the funder care?

Method

Finally, Bell turned to the question of how the research would be done. This is a question, she stressed, that needs to be answered in detail in the methods section.

Researchers should always strive to be specific—and that includes detailing the theories and frameworks underlying the methods themselves. This is too often omitted, she said, which plays badly with funders.

Spelling out a well-grounded theoretical basis for the research and the methods “ensures that the proposal doesn’t sound like you’re on a fishing expedition where you’re just throwing some ideas out there, trying to catch some data, but are unsure of how you’ll analyse it”.

Detailing the methods themselves means answering a plethora of questions. Bell listed some major ones: “What kind of information are you collecting? How are you going to collect it? How are you going to analyse it? When is it going to be done during the lifetime of the project? Where will it be done—at your host institution or do you need to go somewhere else? Who’s going to do it—you or a PhD student or a technician?”

And there is one final question that should not be neglected, she added. “You need to be able to answer: ‘Why not another method?’ Reviewers ask this all the time and for funding that involves an interview, that question will often come up then.”

Finding the right answer can be tricky, she warned: “Every method has limitations and risk—there is no such thing as a perfect method…but you must make a strong argument that you’ve picked your method for a good reason.”

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Nailing a vital section of any grant application

Guidance for grant calls will often spread over several web pages and online documents, which may often reference yet more web pages and online documents. Application forms, meanwhile, may require costed, itemised breakdowns of everything that will be needed to undertake a project, requiring projection years into the future.

For those new to grant applications, it may seem overwhelming. And it can be helpful to distil requirements down to their essential components.

At the start of a recent webinar organised by the Worldwide Universities Network of 26 research universities, Taryn Bell, research development adviser at the University of Leeds, did this by focusing on three elements.

In her words, “Every research proposal must answer three questions: what do you want to investigate, why is this important, and how are you going to do it?”

The what, she continued, centres on developing robust aims and objectives; the why, on “how you can maximise the reach of your research”, and how relates to methods and planning ahead.

Bell said that after reading “dozens, if not hundreds, of funding applications” she came to the conclusion that “these are the things that researchers most often think they can do but get wrong”.

“They are the fundamentals to any research project,” she said, and would be the focus of the two-part webinar, with the first part focusing on the first question—what do you want to investigate?—and how to answer it in a proposal’s aims and objectives. The second part dealt with the other two questions and will be covered in Funding Insight next week.

Aims or objectives?

Well-written aims and objectives are essential to any competitive funding application, Bell stressed. They are often used by funders during initial checks that bids are in scope and will provide an immediate first impression of a bid. Poorly written aims and objectives risked inspiring a lack of confidence on the part of reviewers in the researcher’s ability to complete that project, she added.

Not understanding the difference between aims and objectives often led researchers astray, she warned.

The aim, Bell said, is the project’s “main goal or purpose” and should be communicated by a “concise general statement—and you generally only have one aim per project”. Objectives, Bell said, “are how you’ll achieve that aim; you focus on specific steps, [their description] consists of longer specific statements and you’ll generally have three to four per project”.

Refining the aim

Ideally, a project’s aim—its overall goal—should be no more than one sentence long and the touchstone phrase for those composing one is ‘keep it simple’, she said. “One of the most common misconceptions I see is people thinking they need to use complicated terms and jargon that is specific to their discipline to explain their ideas. This is particularly untrue for the aim.”

Readers of bids are often not specialist in the proposer’s niche subject, she related—in the case of patient and public members of panels, they may not be academics at all. “When it gets to the methods section, you absolutely need to go into [a specialist’s] level of detail,” Bell said, but that was never appropriate for the aim.

How could researchers achieve a high level of accessibility? In two ways, Bell said. First, it helped to have a particular reader in mind when drafting the aim: “Imagine you’re speaking to an undergraduate student, they’re not an expert in your area but they’re interested to learn more. How would you explain in one sentence what your overall goal was, avoiding scientific jargon as much as possible?”

Second, by asking around. “Go and speak to someone who is a non-expert and read them your aim. Ask them honestly, ‘Do you understand what it is I’m trying to do?’”

She said that getting down to the required level of clarity and simplicity may result in some of the apparent novelty of the proposal being lost, but applicants should accept that. “The rest of the proposal will allow you to back [the aim] up with evidence and bring that novelty out. The aim will always be quite generalised and simplified.”

Measurable objectives

Discussing objectives, Bell stressed the need for measurability, which she defined loosely as “whether you can tell at the end of the project if you’ve achieved them or not”. Precise figures did not necessarily have to be used (for example, the number of subjects in a study), she said, although they could be.

The language—particularly the verbs—used in objectives is crucial to their credibility, she stressed. She warned against using phrases like, ‘As part of this project I will consider…’ or ‘I will explore…’ “Those vague terms are not helpful because it’s very difficult for anyone to measure whether you’ve considered something or not, or whether you’ve explored it.”

Instead, Bell advised the use of “measurable action verbs” and offered a handful of examples: assess, calculate, compare, contrast, identify, verify. Such words “actually tell the reviewer how I’m going to do the research”, she said.

Bell said that using these kinds of verbs was often easier for researchers who rely on quantitative rather than qualitative methods, but that these measurable verbs were almost always preferable to vaguer terms. She offered a few verbs and phrases that might help qualitative researchers: “You can say that you’ll develop a framework, or you might talk about describing something, or explaining or demonstrating it. If you’re looking at different arguments, you might talk about critiquing or appraising; you might be interpreting.”

But reading the aims and objectives of other research proposals in your field was often the best way for early career researchers to get a feel for the kind of language that is appropriate. That went for those favouring both qualitative and quantitative, she stressed.

The post Targeting your aims and objectives appeared first on Research Professional News.

The Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg supports researchers in a variety of situations—including political exiles

Top tips

• Even though yours may be a personal project, consider where collaboration would be beneficial.
• Reach out to academics in local universities and former fellows for advice.
• Remember to keep your application accessible to non-specialists in your field.

The Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), one of Germany’s Institutes for Advanced Study, is run as a not-for-profit foundation of the states of Bremen and Lower Saxony and the city of Delmenhorst in north-west Germany.

It has ties with universities in Bremen and Oldenburg and other scientific institutions in the north-west, and it focuses its activity on four research fields: brain and mind; earth; technology and science; and arts and literature.

HWK fellowships, which give scholars of any nationality the opportunity to study at the HWK for between 3 and 10 months, are its lifeblood. Regular Fellowships are offered to researchers with more than five years’ post-PhD experience, while Junior Fellowships are for those who completed their PhD within the past five years. Proposed projects must fit in with one of the HWK’s research fields.

All fellows are granted rent-free accommodation on the HWK campus, with provision for families also available but limited. Regular Fellowships are supported by a personal stipend of up to €5,000 a month, while the stipend for Junior Fellowships is up to €2,000 a month. Fellows can also apply for a one-off payment to cover personal travel costs, but funding of research expenditure is not provided.

Applications should be submitted between one and two years before the desired start date. The call for fellowships opens once a year: the 2024 round is open now, with a deadline of 15 July.

The fellowships are open to scholars in a variety of professional situations—including exiles. Andrei Yakovlev had to leave Russia when the country declared war on Ukraine. He needed not only financial support for his research but also a place to stay and a welcoming environment to work in. He has found it at the HWK, as he relates here. His fellowship runs until October.

Can you give a brief overview of your project? 

I am trying to understand how the degradation of Russian political and social institutions that led to the country’s declaration of war in 2022 could have happened. I would like to determine what actions internal and external actors could take to prevent similar developments in other countries. 

I focus on a political-economic analysis of the relationships between the main groups in the Russian elites and society over the past 30 years, as well as some of their interactions with external actors represented by international organisations, transnational companies and foreign governments. 

One of the goals of the project is to find out who and how—after the collapse of Putin’s regime—could build a Russian state that would be accountable to its citizens and capable of constructive cooperation with other countries. 

How did your personal situation play into your decision to apply for the fellowship?  

I left Russia after the war started and left my position at my home university in Moscow. I needed any kind of financial support. While I was a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, I’d started to think about a book on this topic to help understand a longer history of economic and political development in Russia.

The idea to apply for a fellowship was proposed to me by my German colleagues and friends, who I’ve had for many years. Although I thought about different opportunities, this fellowship was a great opportunity because it provided not only financial support for the project but also an apartment to live in and an overall very friendly environment. 

Are you collaborating with colleagues in Germany? 

Yes. While my project proposal for the HWK was about preparing a book based on my research, it’s not just about me but other colleagues as well. I have two partners on this project at the University of Bremen: Heiko Pleines from the research centre for eastern European studies and Michael Rochlitz from the department of economics. 

Both are colleagues and collaborators of long standing, and during my stay at the HWK I have also extended my local contacts to colleagues at Constructor University [a private university in Bremen]. 

What feedback did you get on your application and how did it alter the bid?

I actually got most of the feedback from my project partners, as the HWK did not provide formal feedback during the application process.

In particular, there was a comment about the structure and composition of my proposal. Initially, I tried to provide more specific details about Russian cases. But I was told that there was not enough general information about the economic and political development in Russia for readers who have not specialised in Russian studies. So they recommended I formulate some specific points shortly and clearly, while adding links to theories in a broader spectrum of literature. This was very useful. 

What advice would you give to potential applicants? 

It’s important to have counterparts in local universities or local research institutions who are interested in your research and in collaborating with you. In this case, you can expect more detailed feedback on your project. At the application stage, you will only get responses on technical questions about timing and formal conditions. It’s your partners who can really help you improve your proposal. 

I didn’t do this, but I would still advise contacting previous HWK fellows in your field. The HWK supports a very broad spectrum of research; there are only a few people in the social sciences but there are still scholars you can find online who you may be able to contact.

How has the fellowship been so far? 

The HWK is a very good place to do research. I’ve been in many different places in my long academic career. I would stress that this is a very friendly environment, which you need when you’re moving to a new place and a new country. 

Through the scholarship, I was given a nice, fully furnished apartment. It is excellent in terms of administrative support to manage all necessary formalities such as getting a bank account in the country. Compared with the US, where it took me four to six weeks to rent an apartment, find the furniture for it and obtain a social security number, it took me only two or three days here. Here, you have more time for your project.

The post My winning proposal: Finding a new home for research appeared first on Research Professional News.

Cost Action groups can be time-consuming to set up—but the payoff is worth it

Cost Actions—networks enabled by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology initiative—have a reputation for being tricky and time-consuming to establish.

That reputation is not entirely unjustified, says Karim Benabdellah, a senior scientist at the University of Granada, Spain, and leader of a Cost Action network awarded funding in 2022. However, Benabdellah added in this interview first published in July that year, the payoff from all that work is worth it when the network is up and running.

The deadline for this year’s competition for new networks is 23 October. As part of the networks, researchers can take part in short-term scientific missions, which are exchange visits lasting anywhere from five days to six months, at any time. Elwin Reimink, data and impact analysis officer at Cost, discussed how to take part in a previous Funding Insight article.

The European Cooperation in Science and Technology, or Cost, is an EU funding organisation that sets up research networks across Europe, known as Cost Actions. These groups bring people from academia and industry together to explore an idea in science and technology.

The groups work together for four years. Unlike many other EU-funded projects, Cost Actions are open throughout the lifespan of the project, meaning new members can join at any time.

In May, the Cost governing board announced funding for 70 new Cost Action groups. One of those was called Genome Editing to Treat Human Diseases. Karim Benabdellah, the main proposer for the group, discusses the best ways to set up a Cost Action group.

What is the aim of your Cost Action group?

What we want to do with this Cost Action is to bring together the different actors that are involved in gene editing in Europe. We have basic researchers, but there are others such as clinicians and those working in regulation who are not contacting each other with the frequency that they should do.

Scientists doing basic research should be in contact with clinicians more to improve gene-editing technology, as it is a new tool with a lot of gaps. Researchers often think that after carrying out experiments, publishing a paper is the end of the work, but it’s not true. The end of the work will be bringing new tools or medications to society.

So it’s about creating real-world outcomes from gene-editing research?

Exactly. But not only that—we would like also to communicate our work to wider society. We would like to go to schools—even to bars, maybe—to explain what we are doing with public money in science. When I talk to normal people about gene editing, they don’t know what’s going on with this new technology. Gene editing sounds like science fiction. So we want to explain what it is and what we are doing clearly. This is what one of our eight working groups will be exploring.

There are some risks with gene editing. How will you address them?

There is another working group specialising in safety. At the end of this project, it hopes to prove to funding agencies and wider society that there is no potential risk using this gene-editing approach.

How did you go about creating the group?

When I was setting up this Cost Action group, I tried to contact people all over Europe who had expertise in the right areas and persuade them to join. Some people were very positive, while others felt that it would be a lot of work for little income. In the end, we got many people from different areas with strong expertise, and so we were able to build this network.

Once I had these people on board, I sent in the application. Now that the Cost Action group has been approved, I am starting to contact those people again to set up the first meeting, which will probably be in September in Brussels. We will explore how we will distribute the budget and we will decide leadership positions for the group.

When you contacted people to join the group, did you only contact those you already knew?

It’s hard to contact people who you don’t know and ask them to spend their time on this group. Most of us knew each other already because we’d had contact through different scientific meetings, but we encouraged each other to contact other people with expertise in different areas.

I also contacted some people I didn’t know through LinkedIn. The Cost Action call is an inclusive call, and they push you to contact people from countries that produce less science and research than more established countries. The EU encourages you to contact people who are from neighbouring countries as well. I’m not from Europe, I’m from Morocco, and I have some colleagues there who I contacted. We also have members from Israel and Qatar. Hopefully we will have our meetings in some of these countries over the next few years.

Did you consider gender balance when setting up your group?

Absolutely. There are rules for the Cost Action groups on the gender balance of your members, as well as offering opportunities for early career researchers. It gives people a chance to grow their scientific careers.

Had you applied for funding for a Cost Action group in the past?

Yes. We applied last year, but it was rejected. This year is the successful year. [For us, it worked] like this: you apply once and your application is denied funding. Then you apply again, trying to solve the problems that came up in the past.

What did you change for your second application?

Mostly we updated it to reflect the advances in science. Gene editing as the central idea was much the same, but we needed to update it with different papers and new discoveries that had come out after we submitted the first application.

How can other people join Cost Action groups?

We will have several working groups, and anyone who is interested in joining them can apply to the management committee or working group. They can then work with us and receive benefits like short-term stays in different laboratories, meeting attendance and so on.

How long will this group last?

The project will take four years, from 2022 to 2026. We will have up to €600,000 that will be divided between the four years of the project.

And what does that funding cover?

This will give us money for networking, money for people to come to our labs to work for two to four months, money for travel to international conferences. Europe should catch up to what people are doing in the US and in China, because gene editing is a very competitive area. We will also have money to organise a spring school or summer school in the areas of the different working groups, specifically for young people and those from low- and middle-income countries.

Are some people sceptical of joining?

When I first started talking to people about our idea for a Cost Action group on gene editing, some of them told me that it would be a lot of work with a limited outcome. For some European Research Council calls, the amount of funding you win can be millions of euros. So, if the Cost Action funding is just over half a million euros, they think they don’t want to do that. But they forget that joining a Cost Action group can be a first step towards winning funding through the ERC.

What would you say to others who want to set up a Cost Action?

If you have an idea, if you have a network, you can apply. Don’t despair if your action has been rejected first time around. This is a good opportunity for scientists to broaden their work and promote it to the public and other stakeholders. This gives you the opportunity to go out from your lab and show the public what you are doing with their money.

The post From the archive: Building networks in Europe and beyond appeared first on Research Professional News.

Long-term thinking, embracing ambition and rigorous interview preparation helped bag a European Research Council prize

Top tips

• Keeping notes of evidence gaps and methodologies in an area of interest is a good way of building up to a bid before the bid is even formulated.
• Keep an eye on training courses that can help you get to grips with relevant topics in your field that you are not expert on.
• European Research Council grants present an opportunity to display ambition—take it.
• Even if you have never held a major grant before, consider what other projects you have worked on that display project management and leadership ability.

When James Reynolds won a Starting Grant from the European Research Council in 2022, it marked a significant step up in his grant-winning record.

“Up until that point the only grant I’d won was £6,000 and this was a €1.5 million grant,” Reynolds said, addressing attendees at an event on the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme held at the University of Birmingham in March.

ERC Starting Grants are open to researchers with between two and seven years of experience since completing their PhD, based in EU member states or countries associated to Horizon Europe. The awards are worth up to €1.5m over five years, with an additional €1m for start-up costs, and the next funding call is expected to open in July this year with a deadline likely in October.

Reynolds, a lecturer in psychology at Aston University in the UK, successfully applied to the ERC for a Starting Grant project on maximising public support for health policies.

He won the grant in 2022 while the UK was frozen out of Horizon Europe, so had to claim funding for the project from the British government rather than the EU. Nonetheless, he went through the same evaluation process as every other applicant.

Start early

His top advice for applying to the ERC is to start early.

Before taking his position at Aston he was a research associate at the University of Cambridge, focusing on the question of why the public supports or opposes health policies.

“I spent four years working on this topic, which gave me an amazing opportunity to immerse myself in this research, to become completely familiarised with all the different methodologies, the research domains, the leading researchers in the field,” he said.

“Over this time, I started developing my ideas for when I eventually knew I would leave Cambridge and I would have to apply for funding of my own—I was starting to pull together ideas of what I wanted to focus on.”

He said that each time he noticed a flawed methodology, an evidence gap or a big unanswered question he would make a note of it.

“My document of study ideas started growing and eventually coalesced into these themes of similar ideas that ultimately became various different grant applications,” Reynolds said.

By starting early, he said that “rather than some panicked, month-long sprint to the end” when he applied to the ERC, he was ready to submit “in a relatively unpanicked way when the deadline loomed”.

Despite still being in the early stages of the project—which has largely involved building his research team—he has taken his own advice and begun to think about his next big grant. He has his eye on the ERC’s Consolidator Grant, worth up to €2m over five years, with an additional €1m for start-up costs.

“I’ve got several ideas, depending on how the research goes, as to what are going to be the next big questions,” Reynolds said. He has identified important methodologies that he doesn’t yet know about, but for which he is getting training, to prepare for a future grant application. “I’m thinking long-term,” he said.

Go big

Another key message from Reynolds’ experience of applying to the ERC is to go big. “This piece of advice was given to me multiple times by people at my university,” he said.

He initially thought he would apply to the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council for a grant worth around £350,000, but then “was convinced by a colleague of mine at Aston to go bigger, to apply for the ERC Starter Grant, which was worth about four times as much money.

“Instead of having some small ideas about reforming methodology, I planned to do an entire revamp of all the areas of methodology in the field that I thought needed improving and set out how I was going to fix them,” he explained.

Reynolds was aware that, having only previously won a £6,000 grant, there would be questions about whether he was up to the task of running a much bigger project. “To demonstrate that I could actually do that was a big part of it,” he said.

Having read through the ERC’s reviewer notes, he realised that he would need to demonstrate to the reviewers that he had the necessary skills.

“One of the reasons they ultimately decided to award it is because of one of the field projects that I had run on behaviour change had demonstrated that I had run a longitudinal, long-term project with hundreds of stakeholders, collaborators and other people involved,” he said.

Interview boot camp

With such an ambitious proposal, Reynolds said it was important to get feedback from his colleagues at every stage of the process. After getting shortlisted and invited for an interview, he rigorously prepared for what he might face.

“I had my university set up three mock panels in the same format it was going to be, where very senior and scary professors sat me down and interrogated every little detail of my proposal,” he said, adding that this process “made huge progress in making me ready”.

Reynolds admitted that one of the mistakes he made in his first practice interview was not being bullish enough when questioned about the choices he had made in his proposal.

“The feedback I got was: you wrote this, you know what you’re doing, defend your position,” he said. The preparation paid off as he was asked the same question when facing the ERC evaluation panel.

“In the interview, I was prepped, I was ready, I defended, and I stuck to my guns.”

The post My winning proposal: Start early for a Starting Grant appeared first on Research Professional News.

Pointers for essential groundwork that may be useful in other disciplines too

Digging deep into the Funding Insight archive unearthed this article from nine years ago that looks almost as fresh as the day it was published.

In it, David Gauntlett, now Canada research chair in creativity at Toronto Metropolitan University, drops his eight top tips to win arts and humanities funding.

In fact, that description is a little misleading on two counts. First, his advice is less prosaic than the ‘top tips’ tag might imply; and second, much of it will apply to researchers outside the humanities.

Competition for research funding in the arts and humanities is fierce. The Arts and Humanities Research Council’s statistics for 2013-14 show that only 3 out of every 10 applications for a standard research grant or fellowship were successful. This can seem depressing: all these talented researchers being turned down. You might wonder what hope there is for you.

Well, the good news is that not all of the rejected applications were masterpieces anyway. I’ve been a member of the AHRC Peer Review College for 11 years and have both chaired and participated in AHRC panel meetings at which applications have been ranked based on the peer reviews—and I can assure you that some applicants still make basic errors.

This article will help you to avoid falling into that trap yourself. I’ll assume you’ve got a great and original idea—that’s really important. Now here’s what to do, and what not to do, in your application.

1. Make sure everything is consistent

Some application forms can be repetitive and seem to ask for more or less the same thing more than once. And as an applicant, you don’t want to bore your reader. That’s good. But this can lead to the tragically common problem of an applicant promising different things in different places, which makes the application appear incoherent.

It might seem a bit dull to keep expressing how you wish to answer your research questions, often using the same words. But at least that’s logical. If you seek to stir in some variety by writing rather different things in the different boxes, you introduce minor inconsistencies. Then, before you know it, an impatient reviewer has dismissed the whole thing as contradictory nonsense.

2. Imply that you had terrible trouble fitting it all in

Quite a few applications leave blank space at the end of a section. Some people fill four and a half pages out of a possible six. How can this be? Every application should look like the outcome of a nightmare situation in which the applicants had to cut, cut and cut to fit their incredible ideas, powerful justifications and detailed plans into such a limited space.

3. Be innovative with your research methods

There’s a reason why most people think that ‘research methods’ is a boring topic: it’s often the most staid and unchanging aspect of a discipline. But research methods are incredibly important: they are the basis for how anyone knows anything about any subject. You can surprise and delight your reviewers—and have an extra, interesting thing to write about—by being innovative with your research methods as well as having an original research question (for these are not, of course, the same thing). Don’t go crazy, naturally. But if you can propose a new way for us to know stuff about the world and its cultures, what could be more exciting?

4. Don’t forget project management

Nobody ever won a research grant on their organisational abilities alone. You do need a great idea and an interesting, meaningful, timely set of questions. But I don’t think anyone ever won a grant on the basis of an idea alone, either: you always need to show that you can make it happen. So it’s important to allow enough space for details of project management, an advisory committee and a neat Gantt chart showing clear milestones.

5. Remember that a track record is good but complacency is death

It’s definitely good to be able to show that you have done interesting and innovative work before and that you could be expected to do so again. But perhaps surprisingly, reviewers and ranking panels reel with dismay when they read an application from a well-regarded research group that says: ‘We did this and it went well, then we did this and it went well, and now we want to do another one.’ Everyone hates this. You can see that the applicants quite reasonably thought they were on to a winner and that the funder would be pleased to support another project by them in the same vein. But no. A track record is really valuable, but it must lead to new and cutting-edge ideas, not just more of the same.

6. Don’t ask for silly costs

Overall value for money is vital. The whole project needs to add up to a number that doesn’t make people laugh or weep. But this is well known. Just as important is the message conveyed by your requests for equipment, services and weird computer peripherals. This may seem trivial compared with the power of your Great Idea, but reviewers get really irritated by the vague and rather-too-high costs that frequently show up, such as ‘Laptop: £2,000’ or ‘Website: £5,000’.

Such costs are disconcerting in themselves—on what planet does an ordinary laptop for the composition of humanities articles cost £2,000?—but these claims also point to something worse: they suggest that a general sloppiness or can’t-be-bothered attitude might underpin the whole thing. Don’t spoil an otherwise perfect application by requesting an unnecessarily fancy £1,000 camera that your department probably has already.

7. Talk about impact realistically

It is, of course, the case that a project can lead to all kinds of unexpected impact and that these cannot be known in advance. Some people seem to think that this is a reason not to consider impact in advance at all. But that’s not quite a rational argument. You still need to propose impacts that could potentially occur and write down some ideas about how they might be encouraged to happen. It’s OK to stir in some imaginative dissemination plans, but remember that dissemination is not the same as impact. Impact is where we can see that you’ve brought about some change in the world. And yes, we do want to know that you’ve thought about that.

8. When asked for a principal investigator response, be robust but polite, not defensive or complacent

The principal investigator response, where the PI can respond to reviews before a final judgment is made, can be incredibly important. I’ve seen borderline cases leap confidently into the winning zone because of a strong PI response. And the opposite, where an application that seemed promising was sunk by an uninterested, self-satisfied or bullying PI response. The secret is to deal with all points respectfully while firmly rebutting the wrong ones, helpfully explaining the misunderstood ones and graciously accepting one or two minor adjustments.

Overall, professionalism is vital. Funders want your brilliance and your professionalism together, not brilliance alone. And they can only assess an application on the basis of what you have submitted, so making it as clear, neat and readable as possible is far from trivial: it’s essential.

The post From the archive: Eight tips for a rock-solid arts and humanities bid appeared first on Research Professional News.

A new fellowship scheme supports postdoctoral researchers looking to advance global health—and their careers

Top tips

• This is an Official Development Assistance scheme, so all projects must primarily benefit people in low- and middle-income countries.
• The community engagement and involvement plan should be embedded in the proposal, not an add-on.
• All partnerships with those in low- and middle-income countries should be authentic and preferably pre-existing.
• The training plan should be tailored to your career development but also to the research project needs.

The National Institute for Health and Care Research, a funder that is increasingly active in the field of global health, has launched a fellowship to support the independence and leadership of postdoctoral researchers in that field.

The NIHR has committed £34 million for up to three annual rounds of the Global Advanced Fellowship. The scheme is open to researchers in both the UK and low- and middle-income countries (as designated by the OECD).

The fellowship offers a £750,000 award to fund research projects, training and development and institutional capacity strengthening. The deadline for applications is 11 July. 

Kara Hanson, the NIHR’s programme director for global health research, tells us more about why the funder decided to launch the scheme and how to be a successful applicant.

Why did the NIHR decide to launch these fellowships?

We feel that there is a big gap in the global health landscape, particularly for postdoctoral researchers. We already have a Global Research Professorships scheme that is really targeted at the top end of people’s careers. We really wanted to fill this gap for researchers that are mid-career and particularly for those who are based in low- and middle-income countries.  

What do you hope to achieve with this fellowship and who can apply?

Its aim is to create a pathway to research leadership for postdoctoral researchers in global health. It is open to applicants in both the UK and LMICs. People are eligible if they are just about to be awarded their PhD—but they need to have submitted their PhD by the deadline—right through to people who have several years of postdoctoral experience. They are not eligible if they have ever been appointed to professorships. So it’s a big range.

Do you have any quotas for how many applicants you would like to fund from the UK versus LMICs?

No, we do not have quotas, although researchers who are based in LMICs will be given priority at the final stage if the number of fundable applications exceeds the maximum that we can fund. But we are looking for a mix.

How many fellowships do you foresee in the first round?

We are aiming to award 10 and we anticipate that this will increase in subsequent rounds.

How should researchers in the UK go about including partners in LMICs?

If you are based in the UK, you must have a partner in an LMIC that can support the delivery of your research. That’s really important. Even if we are funding researchers from the UK, the funding comes from our Official Development Assistance budget. So the research needs to be primarily for the benefit of those in LMICs. At the postdoctoral level, we kind of expect people to have existing collaborations. It is hard to pull one together at the last minute while making it an authentic collaboration—and these collaborations must be authentic.

Is this reflected in the evaluation criteria?

One of the criteria is that the project is developed with an LMIC research need in mind. That need should be at the centre of the application. An applicant should have engaged in a process of thinking about what the need for their research is. To do that, it takes some time. You are more likely to be successful if you are building on an existing relationship, whether that be one of your own or one from your research supervisor or mentor.

Do you have any tips for UK-based applicants in finding the right partners for future rounds?

The first thing would be to make sure that at conferences, you are networking with potential collaborators. You should be on top of the research in your area and which LMIC researchers and institutions are active in your field in global health. If it were me, I might be pestering my PhD supervisor and my mentors for introductions to relevant groups.

Do the LMIC partners need to be academic institutions?

They need to be higher education institutions, research institutions, non-governmental organisations or charity organisations that can help you with the delivery of your research.

What would make a proposal stand out in this call?

We are interested in the person, their achievements to date and the trajectory that this fellowship will enable them to achieve. We are also interested in the project. It has got to be a high-quality project that is highly relevant.

So on the one hand, the real standout proposals will be the ones that really do address health needs in LMICs and look at the priorities that emerge from those settings. They must answer the question of why the research topic is a priority area and how your research is going to address it.

At the same time, a good proposal will clearly demonstrate how the funding will enable the fellow to build their career trajectory. A strong statement of support from your host institution can help with that. The statement should show how they are going to be able to provide you with academic support throughout the fellowship and that they are able to manage the funding for this research.

What common mistakes do you see on global health calls that applicants should avoid?

There are the classic things: applications must be within remit; they must be Official Development Assistance-eligible; they must demonstrate that their research is primarily for the benefit of people in LMICs; clarity is important in all sections, including for the training plan, which should be tailored to their own needs and their career development but also to their project.

Another element of NIHR-supported global health research calls that should not be overlooked is the need for a strong community engagement element. That community engagement and involvement plan needs to be embedded in the proposal. Applicants who see it as an add-on or a throw-away element at the end of proposal development will give a very poor signal to reviewers.

The post Opportunity profile: NIHR expands global health offering appeared first on Research Professional News.

Is relocation always advisable for a postdoctoral fellowship, and what if it’s not possible?

Postdoctoral fellowships are usually viewed as vital early stepping stones on the way to an independent research career. The idea that candidates could—in fact should—relocate for each stone is often taken for granted.

That idea has become less axiomatic over recent years as funders have accommodated the understanding that the best candidates for fellowships may have caring responsibilities or other reasons that preclude them from moving.

But still the questions remain—should early career researchers move for postdoctoral fellowships if they can? And if they can’t, how can they write compelling applications to funders who prefer mobility? In April 2022, Funding Insight columnist Adam Golberg gave his answers to those questions.

Most postdoctoral fellowship programmes encourage potential applicants to move institutions, though the strength of that steer and the importance placed on researcher mobility varies from scheme to scheme. At the extreme end, in Europe, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship programme—arguably not exclusively a postdoc scheme—requires international mobility for eligibility.

Many schemes have softened their steer over recent years. Where once staying at your current institution required ‘exceptional justification’ or some similar phrasing, there’s now an increasing awareness that researcher mobility doesn’t make sense for everyone and that enforcing it has negative ramifications for equality, diversity and inclusion. 

It’s much harder and more disruptive for researchers with family commitments to move institutions, and harder for those with partners who are tied to a particular location for family or job reasons. There will be other researchers who are already in the best environment for their research and so any move would be a step down. It’s now common for application forms to allow space for both personal and EDI reasons why moving institutions is not possible, and intellectual and research reasons for not wanting to move.

However, there is still a fear that whatever the guidance notes may say, the reality is that reviewers still expect researchers to move for a postdoc fellowship. Or that competitive pressures and limited funds may make it harder for non-mobile proposals to be scored high enough to cross the threshold. 

It’s not obvious that an exceptional researcher with an exceptional project in a mediocre environment—for whatever reason—could be competitive against rivals who were judged exceptional across all three categories. Even if that researcher had very sound EDI-related reasons for not moving institution. It’s a tricky issue and there’s no obvious solution, other than a lot more money for fellowships.

Why do funders want researcher mobility? Funders will say it’s a good thing, but the reasons are rarely fully articulated. I think there are at least four reasons to look to move:

1. It will grow your network. You already have your contacts and collaborators at your current institution, and any from any previous institutions. Moving institution will lead to an introduction to new research groups with different facilities. You can grow your network from one place, but it’s hard to replicate the dramatic network expansion from moving.

2. It will expose you to a different culture and way of working. Even if some things will be better, some worse, it all contributes to intellectual and professional enrichment. If you’ve not moved, it’s easy to think that there are no alternative ways of working when a problem arises.

3. It will allow you to reinvent yourself. If you’re working with researchers who remember you as a PhD student, or even an undergraduate, it’s difficult for colleagues not to continue to see you that way. I know of a few people who’ve been ‘lifers’ at a single institution and experienced a huge rise in their status in the new institution after moving, because their new colleagues have only ever seen them as a dynamic young researcher.

4. It will boost your progression towards independence. Sitting in the same lab with the same people, it’ll be very hard to move out of their shadow. Especially if they’re very senior.

Should I move?

Probably, yes, unless you have personal reasons that make moving difficult or impossible, or you’re confident that you’re already in the best place to undertake your research. One factor to consider is how mobile you’ve already been between undergraduate studies and now. The less you’ve moved, the greater the benefits to moving now.

Don’t feel disloyal about moving. Good researchers and mentors know that mobility is a good thing for your development and that your move could potentially strengthen their links with your target institution and boost collaboration. What’s more, your institution is talking to PhDs and postdocs from other institutions about fellowships. This is how things work.

Hopefully you’ll already know people who work at your target institution and they’ll be able to point you in the right direction. If you don’t, that makes life harder. You could ask colleagues for an introduction and a recommendation or send your CV and a proposal to the research group you’d like to work with. Copy in a research manager or administrator. They can only say no. Or not reply at all. But good research groups will be delighted to hear from talented researchers who work in a relevant area and are willing to apply for a fellowship.

It’s important to make contact early. You’re not going to get a warm reception if you contact the institution a few weeks before the deadline. They will want to help you shape and improve your proposal, and there will be costings and approvals to agree. Your current host institution can’t help you apply elsewhere; the responsibility is all with the new host.

What if I can’t—or justifiably don’t want to—move?

A few Google searches might tell you how many successful candidates in the fellowship scheme’s last round moved and how many stayed where they were. If not, you could ask a friendly neighbourhood research development manager if anyone has looked at this before.

If there are at least some successes, you should attempt to address the non-mobility question throughout the application, not just in the boxes where you’re specifically asked about it. If there’s a presumption in favour of moving and you’re not moving, you need to show that you’ve got a solid plan to achieve as many of the benefits of mobility as possible.

• Have you moved already? If so, look for a way to stress this and explain how you’ve benefited. Don’t just rely on reviewers seeing it in your career history—that’s often a section that’s skim-read.
• Can you be mobile within an institution? If you’re moving to a new research group or your work bridges your old group and new one, you can present that as both a form of mobility and evidence of your pathway towards independence. On that note, no one is saying you’re never allowed to speak to your old mentor or supervisor again. But can you put some—physical, intellectual, organisational—distance between the two of you in the application? Can you foreground the collaborations you’ve built, the talented researchers who’ve worked specifically with you?
• Make a positive case for your current research environment. If it has the right equipment, resources, facilities, collaborators, say so. Don’t merely make the ‘negative’ case for why mobility is difficult or impossible for you. Reviewers don’t need persuading that you’re telling the truth there. Instead, persuade them that your current research environment is outstanding.
• Can you visit other institutions as part of your fellowship? The factors that make moving institutions difficult presumably also make extended visits difficult too. But could you spend a month (or longer) at another research group (maybe even internationally) to, for example, learn a new technique or expand a new collaboration? Even micro-visits can be useful.
• Have a plan to expand your (academic and non-academic) networks. This could be conference attendance (real or virtual), it could be greater visibility on social media or other channels of communication. It could be volunteering to organise your school’s seminar series. These are all ways of ensuring that you get at least some of the network-expanding benefits of changing institution without actually changing institution.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

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What to pay attention to when consulting call documentation

As the first and last piece of advice most funders will give, ‘read the call spec’ may seem to require no more explanation than that. Not so, Funding Insight columnist Adam Golberg retorted in this article from July 2021: how you read the call spec and what you look out for are crucial to giving your bid the best chance of succeeding. Poring over call documents may be painful, Golberg admitted, but this is an instance where the adage ‘no pain, no gain’ will often be proved correct.

‘Make sure you read the call spec’ is one of the most frequently dispensed pieces of advice from grants managers and research offices alike. It might sound mind-numbingly obvious, but a not insignificant proportion of applicants to most funding schemes—especially the smaller ones—won’t have followed it and their chances of success will be slim to none.

While most applicants won’t make such an elementary error, it can still pay to unpack what this apparently self-evident advice actually entails. Knowing how call literature is usually written and presented, what to look out for and how to read it can, in the final analysis, make the difference between your bid sinking or swimming.

Three elements

A typical research funding call will have three core elements: a strategic overview of the call, with aims and objectives; a practical guide to applying; and the application form (or online portal) itself.

The overview will outline the aims of the call, what the funder hopes to achieve and why, and explain what’s in and what’s out of scope. These documents have varying degrees of clarity and precision. Sometimes they will be very clear: we want x, y or z and nothing else. Sometimes they will be more open and feature a core area and then some ‘including but not limited to’ examples. Sometimes calls are more confusing and have a matrix of cross-cutting themes and topics.

The application guide will tell you how to actually go about applying. It should include all of the practicalities and may go into further detail about what’s expected in each section of the application form. It will explain costing rules, the call timeline and how to log in to the online system. Sometimes there’s an online FAQ document, too, and if there is, bookmark it and return to it, as some funders will update it as they’re AQWIF (asked questions with increasing frequency).

These days, most application forms are either online submission systems, downloadable and uploadable templates or a set of guidance notes to configure your own Word document. The application form may be standard for the funder or bespoke to the scheme, or a tweaked version of a standard form.

For almost all calls, you should be able to locate text with these three distinct purposes even if they’re configured differently. If you can’t, you’re probably missing a document. Some schemes combine the overview and the application guide, while others put the whole lot on one sprawling page.

Read closely

My primary piece of advice is to actually read the documents. All of them. Even the dull bits. Slowly. Read them out loud, or out loud in your head. It’s so easy for researchers to skim through, only looking for the bits that interest them and perhaps misunderstanding the call. It’s crucial to understand what the funders are trying to achieve with the call. Its existence is not an accident. One or more organisations is trying to achieve some very specific aims.

If you don’t understand what those aims are, you can’t help them spend their money to achieve them. The more complex the remit, the more important it is that you locate your proposal clearly within it. Remember, for complex calls, the reviewers may be confused, too. Quote their framing language back at them.

The application guide will contain important insights into what exactly reviewers will be looking for in individual sections of the form. Sometimes questions on the form will just contain a short title while leaving the detailed explanation to the guide, where it can easily be missed. This is poor practice on the part of the funder, but it happens all the time.

Study the form

If you’re seriously considering a bid, you should engage with the application form or online submission system as early as possible. You need to get a sense of what information is needed and how much of it, in order to plan your workload and to enlist the support of colleagues where needed on specialist sections. This could be intellectual property, public engagement, data management and so on.

Some funders will provide a PDF printout as a sample form. That’s helpful, but it’s no substitute for exploring the submission portal itself. Sometimes questions that appear to be binary ‘yes/no’ responses on a printout will turn out to have hidden supplementary questions or ask for further details.

The balance and focus of the application form may tell you a lot about the priorities of the call. If you’re asked about it, it matters. If you’re looking at applying for a networking grant and they ask for a lot of detail about legacy and much less about the specifics of your topic, that will tell you what’s important to them. If they ask a lot about impact, you should have a lot to say about it. Sometimes an application form will tell you almost as much as an overview about what the call’s aims really are.

This is also crucial: when you forward your draft for internal review, make sure it’s on the official form. You’ll get much more useful feedback on an application that’s presented in its natural habitat.

You should enlist the support of your friendly neighbourhood research development professional as soon as possible to help you interpret the call. He or she will likely have seen many similar calls before and will be able to help you frame the project you’d ideally like to do to suit the projects the funder would ideally like to support, or find you a more appropriate call to consider instead.

Nuts and bolts

There are key elements of information you need to locate in any funding call. When is the deadline? Is this a single-stage application or is there an outline stage? If an indicative timetable is provided for the full call, make a note in your diary of the later stages of the process, too, especially if there’s a full application stage. You don’t want to be surprised by an invitation to submit a full application that you hadn’t factored into your workload after the success of an outline that you’d forgotten all about.

How much funding is available? How long can projects last for? What are the costing rules? All of this will constrain the size of your project. You need to find out how far the budget will go as early as possible—there’s no point designing a project that’s unaffordable.

Minesweeping

I mentioned ‘minesweeping’ in a previous piece about last-minute applications, and it’s a key part of reading the funding call. Minesweeping is the detailed study of the call documentation (including the submission portal) for anything that might explode and sink your bid if it’s not dealt with early.

You need to read all the call documents because you need to be aware of any particular or unusual requirements of the call. If it’s an international collaboration scheme, it might have rules about numbers of partners from named countries or categories of country. If it’s an industrial collaboration, it might require small business participation or perhaps industrial leadership. If there’s an emphasis on career development, perhaps the funder wants to see an early career researcher as co-investigator. Perhaps there are very particular requirements for the principal investigator. Unusual call requirements are not at all unusual and generally make perfect sense in the context of the call aims. You need to be aware of them early, as they may require you to identify new partners.

I know it’s easy to get swept away with the excitement and possibilities of a new research funding call that looks like a great fit with your research ambitions. But it’s important to take a breath and to invest that extra bit of time at the start of your process to make sure you’ve got the best possible understanding of the call, its motivations and the application process. Only then can you ensure that your bid will give the panel the feeling of ‘good fit’ that leads to a project being greenlit.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

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Going over the European Research Council’s rationale for its recent modifications

When arguably the most prestigious pan-European research funder changes its assessment strategy and requirements, that will not go unnoticed.

And so it was when the European Research Council detailed the changes to its evaluation procedures, which have now come into effect.

ERC president Maria Leptin set out some of the factors pushing the council to make its changes when they were first floated in December 2022, and also spoke about them since. But on 21 February she presented them more formally in a report detailing some of the cogitations of the ERC’s Scientific Council that brought about the alterations.

Certain sections of that report will only be of interest to those looking to attain the most intimately detailed understanding of the ERC’s workings (there’s a section in which various dictionary definitions of “excellence” are evoked). But other sections may be helpful to those preparing ERC applications, or those helping others to do so.

For those people, here are five takeaways.

1. Tighter focus on scientific excellence, broader acceptance of context

The summary of the ERC evaluation changes does a good job outlining the top-level considerations that underpin them, and which all applicants should keep in mind.

First, there is a renewed focus on ‘scientific excellence’ as the ultimate criterion by which all applications are judged, and this plays out in the removal of assessment elements that may bias assessors against applicants from “less well-known institutions or isolated locations”, among other things. As the report states, “the panels will primarily evaluate the ground-breaking nature, ambition and feasibility of the research project”.

To reinforce this, later on in the report we learn that the Scientific Council considered but rejected incorporating economic or societal impact as explicit evaluation criteria. This would, it said “disfavour fundamental, curiosity driven research that may not have an immediate or obvious economic or societal impact but is nevertheless important for scientific progress”.

Second, there is the acknowledgement “that current research assessment systems often use inappropriate and narrow methods to assess the quality, performance and impact of research and researchers”. This is particularly important with regard to the latter—the assessment of researchers.

As such, the evaluation changes allow applicants more leeway in how they present their research experience—by use of a narrative CV, for example—and also accept additional information that will “provide a more holistic and fuller account of [applicants’] research career and contributions for the panels to consider”.

2. Forget ‘high risk, high gain’

The ERC has long been associated with the phrase ‘high risk, high gain’ but no longer—it has been dropped from guidance (as it should be from applicants’ minds, the report implies).

The report states: “The possibility that a project will not fulfil its aims is inherent in frontier research, but this possibility means precisely that the results cannot be predicted.”

Preliminary data is important, the report continues, and where it suggests that there is a high probability that the larger project will succeed, it can only be beneficial to an application.

Instead of aiming towards ‘high-risk, high-gain’ research, the report suggests that “ambitious, creative and original” are three better watchwords that applicants should keep in mind.

3. Method matters, but not more than anything else

The report contains a brief but illuminating discussion of whether the development of novel methodologies might be an intrinsic feature of an excellent proposal. It concludes not, which is why this element has been removed from evaluators’ guidance.

Nonetheless, those working at the frontiers of methodological innovation should not lose heart. The ERC remains alive to the fact that: “New methodologies can allow long-standing problems or questions to be tackled, and developing them is therefore crucial for advancing knowledge.”

4. Academic leadership is not a central concern

The fact that the ERC, unlike other mechanisms of Horizon Europe, awards grants for individual researchers may lead some to assume that it will reward those who could demonstrate some degree of professional or academic—rather than scientific—leadership. But this is not so—the report dismisses “academic leadership roles” as not vitally relevant to assessments for ERC grants (although it later states they may be peripherally relevant—see below).

Indeed, it may serve applicants well to keep this statement from the Scientific Council at the forefront of their minds: “Overall, we agreed that the emphasis of the assessment of the principal investigator should continue to be on whether they had demonstrated the ability to carry out ambitious and challenging research and had thereby contributed to advancing knowledge in their field.”

5. Make use of your best outputs

Regarding assessment of the applicant, the report provides a useful summary of the sections of the new application template.

This summary reiterates the broadening of assessment criteria for individuals, as noted above, including the council’s acknowledgement that “ground-breaking discoveries may only have been posted on pre-print servers, been published in niche or specialist journals, while others may be in entirely different formats or platforms, and in some disciplines national publications may be the most relevant and important”.

While the report does not say so directly, it would be hard to reach any other conclusion than that applicants should make full use of this greater leeway, and not continue to focus solely on classic peer-reviewed publications in big-name journals.

A similar logic would apply to other elements of personal presentation in the updated template. The report says that, after deliberation, the Scientific Council came out in favour of allowing applicants to include “engagement in peer review, teaching, academic leadership and other contributions” in their narrative CV, and it would therefore make sense for applicants to include these elements where appropriate.

But they should be aware of a later reminder to applicants not to oversell their accomplishments: “Experience at the ERC shows that panels are wary of boastful applications.”

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Six tips for getting the most out of conferences

Most of us are put off by the thought of entering a professional environment and engaging with total strangers or, worse, people we haven’t previously met but know who they are and who might have a bearing on our future career. Most of us are equally ill at ease asking questions of experts in a field when we are not totally sure we are on solid ground with those questions. And most of us do not appreciate compulsory consumption of thin, bitter coffee.

And yet many of us keep turning up at conferences where all of these situations are likely to occur. So, how to handle them? Phil Ward tackled this perennial question in this article, published in June 2017.

Conference coffee is unique. It lures you in with the promise of a sensory jump-start for the post-lunch plenary, but it delivers nothing but empty heat and the memory of something better. And yet you’ll be awash with it. Like Kate and Leonardo endlessly running down corridors in Titanic pursued by dark and mysterious water—innocuous but deadly—that will be you and the coffee. Surviving it is the first and most important rule of thriving at a conference.

You could just abstain for the duration, or favour tea instead. The tea’s usually fine. You could ration yourself, safe in the knowledge that less is definitely more. You could find a wonderful little hipster coffee shop close by, and nip out a couple of times a day for a shot of caffeine and sanity. Whatever you do, once you’ve beaten the conference coffee, the rest is a breeze.

In addition to a foolproof coffee strategy there are six simple steps to getting the most out of a conference. And not one of them involves checking the lifeboat-to-delegate ratio.

1. Plan well

You might have had to choose your sessions before arriving, but don’t let that stop you from thinking again once you’ve got the full programme in your hands. The programme, like the coffee, often promises more than it delivers. It is by turns alarming and alluring, offering impossible insights and riches. But look beyond the titles. Get a sense of both the speakers and the format. For me, these are more important than the topic. An interesting, honest, and questioning speaker can make the most mundane subject insightful and enriching. Similarly, a format that allows you to engage with others is always more useful than one at which you just have to pin your ears back.

2. Talk to people

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the most fruitful parts of a conference are the bits in between. It’s the networking, talking to colleagues doing similar work in other universities. It’s making connections, learning from others, and sharing your knowledge. I’m not a natural at this, but it’s worth forcing yourself to overcome your shyness. Generally, people are open to being randomly approached. After all, they’re probably desperate to be distracted from the coffee. And talking to them makes you realise that you’re not alone, that many of your frustrations and issues are shared by others, and they might have found ways of solving or minimising them. Learn from them. Alternatively, they might just be an interesting person with a love of good coffee and the films of James Cameron. There’s worth in that too, and you can enjoy a little light relief from the main business of the day.

3. Question the speakers

Once again, this didn’t come naturally to me, and I had to overcome the dizziness and sweating before accepting the frightening roving microphone. However, it does make for a more interesting and engaging experience when you say what’s on your mind and see how the speakers respond. Of course, don’t do the opposite and just question for the sake of it (we’ve all had experience of that), but if something is niggling you, if you feel the speakers have skirted around an issue or you would be genuinely interested in their thoughts, pipe up.

4. Take notes

You don’t have to stenograph everything you hear, but do try to capture interesting points. Your institution might expect you to feedback to others when you return, but even if they don’t, it’s incredibly useful to have something to look back on and remind yourself about what you’ve heard. Better still, write it up as a blog post (I’m always on the lookout for guest posts on mine) or maybe use the conference as an opportunity to launch your own.

5. Use Twitter

There’s a shadow world, a secondary conference that is taking place alongside the real one. Twitter is a wonderful cascading cavalcade of commentary on what’s going on around you. Make sure you use the hashtag for the event and tune in to what others are asking, thinking, or joking about. It makes you realise that you are not alone, and others share the same interests, fears, and humour as you.

6. Look around the city

I know, I know: your hard-pressed institution has paid for you to soak up knowledge, and you feel duty-bound to take in every word. But actually, you’re most likely in a new city and you owe it to yourself to go beyond the conference venue and take it in a little. It might just be nipping out to that hipster coffee shop, but you will enjoy the conference much more if you venture further afield. Cut yourself a little slack and nip out at lunch, or in the evening—or even in that deathly plenary.

For me these six points are the essentials of conference-going.

Anything else is a bonus. Looking at the posters, picking up freebies, winning the quiz are all well and good, but it’s getting access to the insights that are useful for you that will really make your trip worthwhile. And only you can do that, by planning, talking, questioning, and networking. Oh, and by being resolute in the face of so much bad coffee.

Be strong, dear reader, be strong.

Phil Ward is the director of the Eastern Arc regional research consortium.

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Eligibility to the Humboldt Foundation’s residency programme is not limited by geography or discipline

Top tips

• This year, the programme has a social science theme but welcomes applications from scientists in all fields
• Enthusiasm to engage with researchers far beyond your own intellectual comfort zone is essential
• Applicants must be motivated to communicate their knowledge beyond academia

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) is well known around the world for its prestigious professorships and fellowships that attract leading international scientists and scholars to Germany.

Now, with its six-week residency programme, the AvH also seeks to be a catalyst for new ideas on sharing knowledge internationally. This is the first year for which the programme is open to external applicants and six places are available: three for AvH alumni and three for early career researchers with no previous connection to the AvH. These will join further participants from outside of academia, alongside a creative lead.

The programme runs from June to November 2024, with the residency itself taking place in August and September (participants finalise their joint outputs in the remaining weeks). The deadline for applications is 4 March.

Researchers from any country except Germany may apply. This year’s topic is “power and knowledge”, with particular focus on the exchange of knowledge between the Global North and South.

The AvH seeks applicants from any discipline, and no history of publications on knowledge exchange is necessary.

A key part of the programme will be communicating the ideas developed through the residency with a public audience, as Tonja Klausmann from the AvH explains.

How long has the Humboldt Residency Programme been running?

This is actually one of the newest programmes of the foundation and we are in our third year. So it is still very young and there’s still a lot of experimentation going on.

Is there anything new about this year’s programme compared with previous years?

This is the first year that people can apply to participate. The first two years were our official pilot period and we invited participants. It’s our goal to have a really diverse group, and this is achieved better through an open application. 

What are the key elements you are looking for in applications?

First and foremost, we want people to convince us that they are keen to engage in this cohort. Of course, we also want them to be qualified in terms of having a perspective that’s relevant to the field and being outstanding in their work. But, really, we want people who ultimately are motivated to be part of this experiment. A key aspect of that is the video—we ask applicants to submit a one-minute video of themselves, and that is a really good opportunity for them to show us that they are motivated and also have the communication skills to be part of this programme.

Can you tell me a bit more about the researchers you are looking for?

Three will be alumni of the Humboldt Foundation who have either received a research grant or prize from the foundation in the past. Then the other three—we call them junior researchers—don’t have to have any prior association with their foundation and are either pursuing their PhD or have finished a PhD within the last four years.

The reason for that time limit is that we’re interested in including younger perspectives into the cohort, but also we want to introduce the foundation to outstanding junior researchers. If they are within four years of finishing their PhD, they can still apply for regular funding from the foundation after participating.

So the aim is to have a spread of career stages?

Exactly. For example, in our first year our age range was between around 22 and 60—we had somebody who was in their second year of their PhD and several professors who were already quite established.

It is very much our goal for all the participants to have an equal say in participation. It is also an interesting opportunity for PhD candidates to get a lot of time to work together with professors, and also non-academics, to really go in-depth and be an equal member of the group.

What are the main outcomes that the Humboldt Foundation hopes for from the programme?

There are two main goals that run parallel to one another. The first is to provide a fairly unique opportunity for researchers to learn how to understand each other across disciplines and to create new ideas, and take those back into their regular work. Goal number two is for participants to share the knowledge that they already have—and the knowledge that they gained from working with each other—with the public.

What kind of public communication does the foundation envisage?

Who the public audience is depends on what the participants decide that they have to say. The process is: what do we want to say, as a group? Who has to hear that? And how can we reach those people?

In the past, we’ve had conversations with stakeholders who are in the public administration in Germany, but we’ve also just gone to a park and talked to people who are hanging out. We’ve recorded podcast episodes, published articles, so there’s a lot of room for creativity and we encourage the participants to experiment with new formats.

How important is it for the research participants to have experience of public communication?

We balance that based on where they are in their career. So, naturally, a professor who has been in their job for 20 years, we would expect to have more experience than a PhD candidate. If an applicant can show their enthusiasm for science communication and why it is important for their career, then we will see that as an opportunity to include them in the programme and develop those skills.

What is the monthly allowance and what does it cover?

The monthly allowance depends on the career stage. In comparison to other residences, it’s quite generous.

The call says it is open to all disciplines, but are there any research fields which you would hope to see applicants from?

We really do mean all disciplines. There are some disciplines that are the more obvious choice, generally in the social sciences. But at the same time, the research of the participants doesn’t necessarily have to be on the topic of the residency.

As an example, we have received an application from a mathematician who has a longstanding career of being active in science councils across Africa, and has engaged in science policy, so we consider him to be an excellent potential candidate. Applicants just have to be willing to engage in conversations that might be quite far from what they are used to at their research institutes, but that can be very enriching.

Do they need to have experience of working with partners in the Global South?

No. But it would be an advantage to show that they have experience of working with people outside of their immediate fields; that could be other countries, it could be other disciplines or it could be outside of academia. 

Can you explain what is meant by creating ‘synergies out of existing knowledge’, which is listed as an overriding aim in the call guidance? Are there any examples?

With this topic specifically, anyone who works in international fields has existing knowledge because we all have experience in establishing working relationships across countries and cultures. So by bringing together this really diverse cohort, they will be able to learn from each other.

The most impressive conversation I witnessed during the residency was in 2022, when our topic was social cohesion. We had a lawyer, a psychologist and a mathematician sitting together and talking about what they understood inclusion to mean. It started out with social inclusion, but then maths has a different concept of what inclusion means. That conversation, for all three of them, was a real challenge, but also broadened their understanding of their own work. Those are the kind of synergies that we hope to create between the participants.

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Or how the study of medieval elephant husbandry can open unforeseen possibilities

On 30 November 2022, ChatGPT was launched. It was met with equal measures of wonder and horror, like it was some kind of real-life Jumanji, but without the promise of a return to normality once the game was over. Great as a quirky toy, not so great when it’s a vehicle for the destruction of the human race. 

Inevitably, commentators were quick to see that our working lives would change forever. Goldman Sachs predicted that two-thirds of occupations in the United States would be affected by AI automation, with between a quarter and a half of workloads replaced.

Question time

And research support? Might research office staff find themselves in that category? There’s been a fair amount of conjecture about this of late, particularly in relation to project development. But such talk often veers into the abstract. I wanted to know: how would ChatGPT handle the type of question I used to be asked quite frequently as a funding officer? 

“Where can I get funding to do this amazing research on medieval elephant husbandry?” I typed. “It has the potential to offer a step change in our understanding of the field.”

It replied in seconds: “Funding for research projects, especially niche topics like medieval elephant husbandry, can come from various sources.”

I felt a little bruised by its tone. It came across as rather brusque and dismissive. However, it did offer me an impressively broad (albeit vague) list of avenues to explore, from internal funds to government grants, fellowships, crowdfunding and, most ambitiously, industry partnerships. “This could include companies involved in historical reenactments, animal care or related fields.” Hmm. Well, possibly. 

I pushed it further. “So what grants could I go for in the UK?” Unnervingly, it provided just the kind of list that I would have produced, and in the same order, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Heritage Lottery Fund and the Wellcome Trust. It also suggested funders I wouldn’t have thought of, like the Pilgrim Trust—although it might be a bit of work to tack the project’s focus onto Pilgrim’s remit of “preserving the UK’s heritage or bringing about social change”.

But that was in fact covered by its concluding, unsought, but sage advice, once again given almost exactly as I would have: “Carefully review the eligibility criteria and guidelines [and] tailor your proposal to align with the goals and priorities of the specific organization.”

Detailed feedback

Okay. Given these, I asked: “what makes for a successful grant application?” It gave me 12 key points to consider, including writing a “clear and concise” summary, and making sure I include the background and significance, a realistic timeline, and a rigorous and appropriate methodology. It added six further suggestions, such as writing clearly and in a “jargon-free manner”, getting feedback and proofreading it. 

So far, so generic. I decided to take it a step further. “Please provide feedback on this funding proposal,” I asked, before cutting and pasting a six-page case for support.

It responded immediately. “Overall the proposal is comprehensive and well structured,” it began, before highlighting six positive aspects, seven areas for improvement and four “additional thoughts”. They were all valid. 

“So do you think it will be funded?” I asked, cheekily. 

It played a very straight bat: “Predicting whether a grant proposal will be funded is challenging and depends on various factors, including the specific criteria of the funding organization, the competitiveness of the proposal landscape, and the alignment of your proposal with the priorities and goals of the funding body.”

“True. But yes or no: do you think it will be funded?” I replied. “I’m submitting it to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.”

It refused to be drawn. “As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to predict the future or make definitive judgments about specific funding outcomes.” I couldn’t really argue with that, and we bid farewell to each other, with my machine-learning friend offering me “good luck with your proposal to the EPSRC!”

Return to normal

I’d been fully Jumanjied. Things would not return to normal when the game ended, and I could see the end of research development as a profession in the not-too-distant future. As universities seek to tighten their belts, the kind of advice and insights given by us could well be outsourced for free to AI models. 

Other areas of research management may hold out longer, but I think the prognosis is no better. From costings to contracts, from ethics to assessment, I worry that, as AI improves and the models are adapted to fit specific tasks, the need for human interaction, beyond data entry or sense checking (does the study of medieval elephant husbandry really hold such transformative potential for society?) will be limited.  

However, such role redundancy and change has long been a natural part of the working environment. The Goldman Sachs report noted that “60 per cent of today’s workers are employed in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940”. Indeed, the word ‘grantsmanship’—in essence, research development—was only coined in 1961. We will evolve and adapt to new ways of working, and we will discover new areas where there is no substitute for human reasoning and interaction. We just need to be open and ready for them. Brush up on your elephant-husbandry skills, I’d say.

Phil Ward is the director of the Eastern Arc regional research consortium.

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An appendix to the two-part series on spotting and sharing info on research funding calls

Having discussed how to and who should find funding in part one and sharing funding info in part two, I’m going to conclude with this appendix—not part three of two, my editor insists—on how to summarise an individual funding opportunity.

As a primer it’s probably worth reading through this article from the archive on how to read a funding call. In that piece I cover what elements you should expect to see in a funding call, what to look for, where to look for key elements, and what I called “minesweeping”. This is the detailed study of a funding call to identify anything that might explode and sink a bid if not spotted and dealt with early. Summarising a funding call isn’t so much about defusing the mines as much as identifying them and drawing attention to them as part of the summary.

One size doesn’t fit all

You might think that a good approach to summarising funding opportunities would be to use a standard template or pro forma. While I have hit on a  rough structure that generally works, I’ve never yet found a simple template that’s suitable for summarising all calls. They’re just too varied, too diverse, and different researchers will need different elements highlighted for them.

I’ve drawn inspiration from the five W’s and H: who, what, when, where, why and how. Most news reports will answer all those questions—or the ones that are not irrelevant—in the first paragraph, before pulling back for more context and detail. I’ve written about this in more detail in an earlier article on attacking the summary section of application form.

It’s not an exact read-across for research call summaries, but these questions focus the mind on only the most important information from the busy researcher’s perspective. And that’s key. We’re writing for an audience—a busy audience who (as discussed in part two) are probably only skim reading our summary.

Unlike journalists, our aim is not to draw readers in, but to allow them to self-filter out. If there’s a reason why this funding opportunity isn’t for them, I want to tell them as soon as possible. A good order is to lead with the biggest filter… what’s the single biggest reason why this call might not be suitable. And then what’s the second biggest, and the third, and so on.

Rough structure

I normally lead with a sentence or two covering: call title; deadline (specifying if it’s an outline); amount of money available; project duration. Some readers can filter themselves out on title alone, others on deadline (if it’s too soon), others on amount of money (not enough, or more than they need or are ready to apply for).

Next, I’ll try to say something about why this might be a good call to apply to, based on what I know about the researchers’ interests. I’d probably try to pick out a key detail from the call (perhaps it’s a short application) or refer to a previous conversation or topic or research question that they’d mentioned to me.

Then, the opposite—why it might not be a good fit or why it might be difficult to apply. This is where it’s worth mentioning that they need partners from industry, or from specific countries, or that they can’t cost in their overseas partners. Or if there’s only a small number of awards, or career stage eligibility restrictions, either stringent or vague.

Sometimes those negative elements might be so important as to deserve promoting to the opening paragraph. Sometimes the negative elements are so negative that it warrants placing the negative paragraph before the positive one—especially if I think it’s a long shot and/or I want to steer researchers away from applying unless they’re really keen.

Finally, I try and pick out the essential elements of the call remit and scope. I’ll try to very briefly summarise this in a few key words in the opening section and perhaps expand in either the positive or negative paragraphs.

In the call documentation, there’s usually a couple of paragraphs that outline the remit or call aims or themes. Sometimes the assessment criteria are the best guide to what they’re after, but other times those are bland and generic and best omitted at this stage. I’m usually looking for a section I can cut and paste, either with no or minimal editing for clarity and brevity. With practice and experience, it’s possible to reliably identify the key section or sections (which may or may not be consecutive) that get to the heart of what the call is all about. Finding and including that section and putting that at the end of your summary rounds it off nicely.

Keep it lean

Once you’ve done all that, it’s tempting to add in all the less important details. Resist that temptation. A competently written funding call will have a lot of moving parts and a lot of rules, and regular calls tend to build up lengthy FAQ documents. Although you could in principle put these less important rules at the very end of your summary to be read last, I think that, at this stage, mostly just eats up everyone’s time and probably a fair amount of space.

Remember that you don’t need to re-write the full call. It’s already been written. Certainly, details of complex equipment cost-sharing rules are important, as are rules about whether you can cost in PhD studentships, but they’re rarely go/no-go call elements. Call context and rationale is useful, but it’s rarely vital information. Most funding calls have elements of blurb and blah, and EU funding is the worst for it. It is the key elements that are the dealbreakers. Everything else can be read by curious researchers in the full call. Thanks to your summary, they’ll already know that this is a good use of their time.

Finishing touches

A well written summary should conclude with two further pieces of information. First, it should include details of the full call, emphasising again that this is merely a summary. That could come via a link to the call page and/or by attaching the full call document(s) to the email. It’s worth remembering that funders don’t always do a great job of making it clear that the document(s) they link to do have more information than is on the call webpage.

Second, there needs to be what comms folks call a ‘call to action’. What does the researcher interested in this opportunity do? Again, sometimes that’s obvious (email the person who sent it to you), but sometimes you might be planning an internal briefing event or a networking and idea generation event, perhaps depending on levels of interest.

There’s no substitute for practice when it comes to summarising funding calls. But it’s also worth working with colleagues… this is something that research development professionals often don’t do often enough, largely because of time pressures.

I would argue that there is value in making time with a colleague to hone summary writing skills. Identify a few calls to summarise independently and then come together to compare notes and learn from each other. This will be instructive as to what details you each pick out as most significant, and how you structure your respective summaries.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk

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International partnership looks to make impact with its final call

Top tips

• Pay close attention to remit and submission guidelines, which are complex
• The UK component of applications can be in any discipline in UK Research and Innovation’s remit
• Cross-disciplinary applications will be welcomed
• Although this is the final call from this iteration of the funding collaboration, similar calls are forthcoming

The Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance is an international funding collaboration involving 29 nations, the European Commission and UK Research and Innovation, to tackle what is widely considered an existential threat to humanity.

The final call in its current format has two stands. Topic one is focused on novel interventions to prevent, mitigate or treat fungal infections that are resistant to existing treatments or are at risk of developing resistance. Topic two covers a range of research activities aimed at preventing or reducing the emergence or spread of antibacterial and/or antifungal resistance, or to treat infections caused by resistant bacteria and/or fungi.

Bids must involve consortia with a minimum of three project partners, requesting funding from three different eligible countries. A maximum of seven project partners is permitted, and a maximum of two partners from the same country per proposal.

UK applicants can apply for up to £437,500 for their contribution to projects (funded at 80 per cent of the full economic cost). The deadline for applications is March 14. All applications should be submitted via the JPIAMR website, but there are also submission requirements from UKRI which should be adhered to.

Danielle Sagar, a programme manager at the Medical Research Council who is representing UKRI, gives a rundown of what applicants should consider.

How would you summarise the call? 

The primary aim of the call is to act against the growing global threat and increased rate of antimicrobial resistance through international collaboration. The long title of the call—interventions moving forward to promote action to counteract the emergence and spread of bacterial and fungal resistance and to improve treatments—has been shortened to one word: impact. That summarises exactly what we are looking for. As this is the JPIAMR’s last call in its current format, what we are looking for are those real-world impacts to tie it all together. 

How can researchers go about establishing an international team for a proposal? 

The JPIAMR presents an opportunity for international collaboration that might be hard to pull off without it. It brings different funders together who want to collaborate but do not necessarily have the format and admin support to do so. It also enables connections to be made between researchers.

On the JPIAMR website, there is a partner search tool. Maybe you already have one partner in Spain, say, but you’re looking for that third partner since you need three different funding organisations to be involved. You can use that like a matchmaking tool to find someone who’s also looking for a partner in your space.  

How many projects is UKRI planning to support? 

We don’t know specifically how many, it is hard to predict. Numbers can be quite high. Last year, we funded 10 proposals, but that required us to double our commitment budget. We were highly oversubscribed. This year, we’ve committed £2m again—the money has come from a strategic pot of money that covers all the council’s remits, because JPIAMR aligns with UKRI’s strategic theme of ‘tackling infection’. That also increases the remit, and I am sure we will get a lot more applications than normal.

What do you expect as the balance between the two streams? 

Since topic two includes bacterial as well as fungal infection research, it will probably get slightly more applications. Also, proposals to that stream might address both fungal and bacterial infections within one project, which goes back to that cross-disciplinary nature of working. They might consider behavioural interventions that could apply to both fungal and bacterial pathogens. Whereas more medically focused research would probably be more specific to a particular type of pathogen. 

Does the focus on fungal infections in stream one represent a development in antimicrobial research?

There is certainly a growing awareness of the impact of fungal infections on human populations. Because fungal infections have been largely restricted in the past to resource-limited settings, they may have been overlooked. Meanwhile, bacterial infections happen everywhere and are a high cause of mortality in many countries. But now that we’re gaining a greater understanding of fungal pathogens, we are realising they also deserve to be a priority.

Probably more people are infected with, and die from, fungal pathogens than we realise. In fact, those who are slightly immunocompromised might be patients that are living with them. Also we need to consider that when many people die of old age, we haven’t really determined what the cause of death is and we don’t have a lot of fungal diagnostics. There have also been a few fungal outbreaks, especially aspergillus infections in care homes in the US, which are starting to ring bells from a policy and government perspective.

JPIAMR projects must adopt the collaborative, transdisciplinary ‘one health’ approach championed by the World Health Organisation, what does that mean in practice?  

JPIAMR is one of the few global collaborative research funding platforms that has adopted the ‘one health’ approach and all proposals must integrate it. It also means that all projects must have a human health focus. For example, an application to develop a novel fungal therapeutic against only fungal diseases in plants would not fly here. You could, however, research fungal infections in plants with the goal to derive a novel therapeutic for use in humans.

What is the assessment process and what should applicants pay attention to? 

The assessment process is managed completely by JPIAMR. UKRI does not contribute directly but does have some oversight. However, I know there are some things that can lead to a straight rejection, which is always sad to see. One of the big issues is remit. You must make sure that the UK component of the work is within the UKRI or research council remit. This should not be as much of an issue this year because all the research councils are participating.

Also, be aware that it can be quite a confusing system. Although you’re applying to JPIAMR, because UKRI are funding part, there are certain documents that UKRI needs to see as well. This is further complicated by the fact that JPIAMR is working in euros, and we fund in British pounds. Check the UKRI website, which clearly labels all documents that must be sent to us at the application stage. Also check the JPIAMR website and see what they need from you and make sure you’re submitting to the right person. 

What is the future for JPIAMR? 

A new partnership is being developed called One Health AMR. This is likely to be a continuation but also a bit of an expansion on JPIAMR in its current format. What’s more, thanks to the UK’s association to Horizon Europe, UKRI will be participating. So researchers can expect to see the kinds of research calls that the JPIAMR has been running, but with a change of focus based on the work being done as part of that partnership. There could be a wider range of different funding, or workshopping, or networking opportunities associated with the new partnership as it looks to build capacity in the AMR space. There could also be new funding partners involved as well. 

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Lisa Jardine Grants allow researchers valuable access to Royal Society and nearby collections

Six years on from its creation, the Royal Society’s Lisa Jardine Grants scheme returns for another competition. The aim is the same as for previous rounds: to help humanities and arts researchers, especially those at the start of their careers, expand their interests in history of science and related fields through access to archival resources and relationship building with the Royal Society and nearby scholarly institutions. The current round’s deadline is 5 March and there will be a further round this year, with a deadline on 10 October.

Two kinds of grants are on offer and applicants can apply for both. Research subsistence grants are worth up to £2,000 per month for a maximum of three months, for travel and living expenses while visiting the collections. Travel Grants are also worth up to £2,000 and cover international travel to any relevant research destination, for exploratory research trips of less than one month, or one-off event attendance. UK-based applicants can use Travel Grants to travel abroad while those linked to non-UK organisations may only apply to travel to the UK. They are also required to incorporate research at the Royal Society as part of their Travel Grant proposal.

In this article from February 2020, Meghan Doherty, an art historian who is now director of the Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University in the US, explained how being specific in her application was crucial to its success.

Top tips

• The application system for the scheme is more robust than humanities scholars may expect for such a relatively small amount of money but Royal Society staff will help navigate it.
• Be clear about why you need direct access to the archives you plan to visit, particularly as institutions are increasingly digitising their holdings.
• Remember that the grant would give you access to a host of other libraries and archives, allowing you to follow up leads gleaned from your target institution.
• Highlight how your research relates to the scholarly interests of Lisa Jardine.

Established in 2018 in memory of the renowned author, broadcaster and historian, the Royal Society’s Lisa Jardine Grants scheme allows early-career researchers in the history of science to access collections in the UK, including the society’s own (the scheme was profiled in Funding Insight ahead of its second round in 2018).

The scheme is open to researchers from the second year of their PhD to those with 10 years’ experience following the award of their PhD. Researchers can apply from anywhere in the world but must hold a permanent or fixed-term contract in an eligible organisation for the duration of the award.

Researchers can apply for awards to attend the Royal Society Library and nearby scholarly collections which are tenable for up to three months and are worth up to £2,000 per month and/or awards for international travel, worth up to £2,000 each.

Meghan Doherty, the director and curator of the Doris Ulmann Galleries and associate professor of art history at Berea College in Kentucky, United States, won a Lisa Jardine Grant in February 2019.

What project did this grant help support?

My project was looking at the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the journal published by the learned society. From 1665 to 1700, the journal had many different editors and changed printers and location from London to Oxford and back again. My project combines a close examination of the changes in the images in the issues with careful research of the archives to better understand how the journal was produced and how they ensured a correspondence between text and image. 

How did you become interested in the Philosophical Transactions?

I first came across the journals while working on my PhD on the visual culture of the early Royal Society. The first time I saw the Philosophical Transactions, I was struck by how strange the illustrations seemed and by how you would often have all the illustrations for one issue on the same plate. 

What do you mean by strange?

For example, in the fifth issue of the journal, the plate includes two images related to improvements in mining as well as a third of a monstrous calf that the famous chemist Robert Boyle presented a report about at a meeting. I really wanted to understand why these very different images were on the same plate in the same journal.

How did you find out about the fellowship?

I saw a posting on a history of science Listserv about it and thought it sounded perfect for me.

How so?

I think it was the fact that the scheme allows you to travel—in my case from the United States—and to visit more than one institution. Many archival grants are based in a specific library, and you are expected to be in that one place for the duration of the funding. My project looks at the ways in which the Philosophical Transactions are a product of London print circles and are really tied to a larger group of individuals. Fortunately, the fellowship allowed me to go to the Royal Society, the British Library, the Stationers’ Company and the Royal College of Physicians archive.

How did you find the application process?

I am a humanities scholar who often deals with smaller institutions—so it look a little bit of getting used to the big institutional framework that the Royal Society works with, which is typical for large science grants.

What in particular did you find challenging?

The application process was clearly aimed at larger grants and people working in labs. And I was asking for just £2,000. It was therefore challenging to figure out the institutional logistics from a small US-based college. For example, in the humanities, a grant is often given directly to you. In this case, however, the grant was given to my institution.

What elements did you bring to the fore in your application?

Two things. First, I wanted to emphasise the way in which the project has repercussions for the study of the history of science more broadly—not just for the study of England in the 1660s. I also made a strong case for the importance of first-hand access to archival materials. The materials I required were simply not available to me anywhere other than London.

Do you have any tips for applicants?

The staff at the Royal Society were very helpful—always willing to answer questions when I needed clarification on the administrative aspect of the application process. They really do want people to come and use their materials so don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for help. Also, be clear about why you need to travel to a place. This is particularly important as institutions are increasingly digitising their holdings and materials. Be clear about the benefit of direct access to archival and early printed material. Finally, as the grant is in honour of Lisa Jardine, it is helpful to make clear how your research relates to her scholarly interests, particularly the 17th century.

What was the benefit of being there in person?

There are endless materials from the Royal Society archive that still need to be digitised, including sketches tucked in with the journals. So it gave a sense of completeness. By being there in person, I was also able to follow up on references in the archive that led me to holdings at the British Library that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

What do you think made your application stand out?

I think it was that last point—I was very clear about the importance of access to archival materials; I needed to go to London to do the research. Of course, the fact that the project was tied to the history of the Royal Society wouldn’t have hurt.

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Part two of two on how to spot and share info on research funding calls

In part one of this two-parter, I looked at direct funder-to-university or funder-to-researcher communication of research funding calls. That is, how to source funding opportunities and who should be doing it. In this second part, I’ll look at how to effectively share and disseminate opportunities within a university or academic unit. I’ll weigh up the pros and cons of some possible methods to do this, but first, I want to set out five key considerations to help guide the choice of approach.

1. Busy people rarely read their emails properly 

This is partly due to a lack of time, partly due to reduced attention spans, and partly due to people reading on phones. If you’re anything like me, you skim read your emails and then assign a priority level for reading them properly. Maybe. Lowest priority gets Instant Deletion. Slightly higher priority is Read Later. Only… later may never come, and messages mentally categorised this way can just sink without trace into the email quicksand.

2. Research calls are difficult to summarise effectively

Calls contains lots of variables: value; duration; deadline; (in)eligible applicants; (in)eligible partners; costing rules; application documentation; application process. And that’s before we’ve even started thinking about topics and scope and remit, which can be anything from very open to very niche. And the funder’s own information can run the gamut from very clear to ‘call designed by international committee’ levels of baffling.

3. Research calls are full of jargon

If I were to tell you that the BBSRC sLoLa call pays 80 per cent fEC for projects costing £2 million and £20 million, some of you would nod your heads sagely. Others wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. Do you know the difference between Wellcome Trust and Wellcome Leap? Between NIHR and NIH? Between the European Innovation Council and the European Innovation Ecosystems? Go to the top of the class if you do, but remember that many—probably most—researchers will not. Like all jargon, it’s a great shorthand for those who understand it, but it’s largely impenetrable for those who don’t.

4. The common law of business balance applies

One formulation of this law goes: “Good, fast, cheap. Choose two.” As for ‘good’, as I suggested above, it takes experience and insight to properly summarise and de-jargonise a call. But ‘fast’ matters because some calls are launched with very little notice. Start just a few days behind rivals and you may find that the best spots on the most promising consortia are already taken. So if you’re attempting to do funding comms on the cheap, then it’s a question of working out which you prefer: good or fast?

5. Messengers matter

Who sends emails, to whom, and how they’re framed determines a lot about how (and whether) they’re read and received. A message from a trusted colleague of the type “saw this and thought of you because of [good reason]” sent to you and your regular collaborators will get more attention than something fired to the whole school without context by someone whose name invokes a certain sinking feeling.

With these elements taken into account, let’s now examine the possibilities for informing others. There are three main ones.

1. Everything to everyone all at once

Years ago, I asked why we were copying the research director in the arts faculty into an email about a breathtakingly niche biosciences call. The answer was along the lines of… well, you never know. No, sometimes we do know. The value to the university of some ridiculously lucky outcome from poorly targeted emails is less than the cost of spamming senior university research leaders. Partly, they’re busy, but also, they’re going to stop reading your emails. Every duff email you send lowers your credibility and damages the reception of your more accomplished efforts.

Even with more selective distribution lists, just forwarding funder emails or newsletters has limited utility. In a UK context, UK Research and Innovation funding call emails aren’t bad but are often missing key details or important context, so just forwarding them will only get you so far. It adds to the volume of email, and people will stop reading. This strategy may be cheap and fast, but it’s not good.

2. School or faculty funding newsletters 

I prefer this to the previous strategy, because it consolidates all those emails that no one reads into a single email or newsletter… that no one reads.

There’s a place for newsletters, but only if they’re regular and are more than just a dumping ground for poorly ordered information. They’re good for calls with broad eligibility criteria and likely cross-school appeal, and where there’s enough time to apply so that a delay until the next newsletter doesn’t matter too much. I have also used the newsletter strategy for opportunities that might be of interest to someone, but I wasn’t sure who. Newsletters are less good for time-sensitive calls, for calls that are narrow or niche, or calls which are especially hard to summarise that might benefit more from a conversation.

Remember that a newsletter could be usefully expanded to become an annual call timetable for those funders and calls with predictable funding cycles. If you don’t have a bespoke funding calendar for your research area, talk to someone about getting one produced and shared.

When I last worked for a specific school, my newsletter was weekly, and my headings went  something like this:

(i) New calls

(ii) Still open (featured in the last newsletter)

(iii) Niche calls and longshots

I’d also structure the newsletter with one-line summaries of each opportunity at the top, longer summaries (three paragraphs max) and then a link to the full call below.

This was good, (fairly) fast, but far from cheap if you costed my time putting it together. A more occasional newsletter would obviously score better on cheap, could be good, but suffer on fast. A more regular newsletter that wasn’t properly edited or curated would be fast and cheap, but not good.

3. Tailored targeting

This is the gold standard. Having a friendly neighbourhood research development manager looking out for funding opportunities across a specific remit, and then sending those to individual researchers or research groups along with a summary, commentary, and next steps for anyone interested. Such bespoke emails can still be backed up with newsletters for broader or more generic opportunities. This is good, it’s fast… but it’s not cheap. But this is what’s needed to be competitive across a broad range of funders.

Tailored targeting and high-quality newsletters also serve to enhance research culture and the research environment. They’re a regular reminder about the availability of external research funding and the support available. I’ve lost count of the number of replies I’d get to my newsletter emails asking me about something completely different—obviously that email was the prompt.

All of which leaves one unanswered question: how best to summarise calls for maximum effectiveness and impact? I think a third part of this two-parter—which my editor insists will have to be called an ‘appendix’—may be necessary.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk

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Part one of two on how to spot and share info on research funding calls

You can’t be what you can’t see, and you can’t win research funding that you didn’t know was available. You also can’t win research funding that you ‘sort of’ knew about, but not in the right way or in the right format, or at the right time. And, worse, if you’ve misunderstood a research funding call or had it miscommunicated to you, you risk wasting a lot of your precious time barking up the wrong tree.

Every research funder and institution should have clear and timely communication of research funding opportunities as a priority. As a funder, you want your opportunity under the nose of every eligible researcher with suitable ideas, and you absolutely don’t want to have to receive, review and reject applications which aren’t competitive or aren’t in scope. As an institution, you want your researchers to know exactly where to go to advance their research ideas.

And yet… this doesn’t happen as smoothly as it should, so what to do? This first article will focus on direct funder-to-university or funder-to-researcher communication—how to source funding opportunities and who should be doing it. In part two, next week, I’ll look at internal comms—how to effectively share and disseminate opportunities within a university or academic unit.

Get the basics right

The obvious place to start is to identify the most important research funders for you and your academic unit and sign up for their newsletters. This is straightforward for most major funders, though for some charities you can end up accidentally signing up for their fundraising newsletter.

However, funding environments can be complex. This is certainly true of the UK, which is so complex it took me two long-ish articles to summarise it. There’s variation globally, but even so, running an international funding opportunities database such as that offered by Pivot-RP (formerly known as Research Professional) is a viable business. If you’re reading this, your institution has a Pivot-RP subscription, which you can use to search for opportunities and to set up regular funding summary emails. The parameters both for the funding search and for the summary emails can be tailored to your interests.

I’ve used Research Professional/Pivot-RP for most of my career, and I’ve curated searches for every school I’ve supported, as well as a more general search for charity funders over a certain value when I moved to a central role. At the same time, I’ve tried to sign up for every funder newsletter that I can, but Research Professional still finds opportunities (especially international opportunities) that I’d otherwise miss.

It’s worth making sure you’re using Pivot-RP as effectively as possible, and it might be worth tweaking your filter settings if you’ve not looked at them for a long time. It’s possible to have them too broad—bringing up too many false positives—as well as too narrow.

Whose job is it?

How involved should individual researchers be, and how much should they instead just rely on their friendly neighbourhood research development manager to find and filter opportunities? I think the answer depends on researchers’ institutional context and how much researchers need funding.

To what extent can you, as a researcher, rely upon your institution to do the finding and filtering for you? Research development managers or equivalent are good at reading and understanding funding calls and distilling the essence of them. This article about their contribution says more about why they’re typically better at reading calls than researchers and can do it much more efficiently. However, they’re usually not researchers, and they’re also not you. They’ll be looking for opportunities for a much broader group of researchers. They can and do miss things or miss people out.

How much time, realistically, do you have spare to spend? Yes, you can sign up for a lot of email alerts but, realistically, will you be reading all those emails you’re opting into? Or are you just signing up for more clutter for your inbox? It’s very easy to spend a lot of time looking for funding opportunities, and the less experienced you are, the longer it takes.

If your support is brilliant, you can probably delegate funding searches. If it’s inadequate or even non-existent, you’ll need to do it all yourself, or find some other solution within your research group. Though if that’s the case, I’d question how serious about research your institution really is. If you’re somewhere in between (the case for the vast majority of researchers in the UK, at least), my advice would be to sign up for newsletters and alerts only from your key funders. Beyond this, returns start to diminish quite quickly.

I’ll say more about internal dissemination of funding opportunities in part two.

Social media

Many funders have a social media presence on X (formerly Twitter), and many use it to supplement their email communications. This used to be a good thing, as it was an additional means of communication and a quick way to keep up with what funders were doing.

Now I’m not so sure, and I’ve got concerns about how some funders are using X instead of rather than as well as email communication, or they are offering more or faster information or context than is available elsewhere.

To mention a couple of funders I’ve been tracking, my impression is that the Wellcome Trust sometimes tweet opportunities before they appear in newsletters. However, in mitigation, today’s Wellcome Trust is probably better than most other funders at giving advance notice of calls within their priority areas—not always the case historically—as well as having a laudably predictable annual cycle of discovery award schemes.

Turn to the UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) and a different, more problematic picture emerges. The chances are, that unless you’ve been following the agency, and a few key Aria individuals and programme directors, on X, there’s every chance you’ve missed out on key information, or got it later than others. Most of the information is also on their website, so it’s in the public domain. But if you didn’t know to look, you wouldn’t know.

Platform decay

The advice I used to give was to set up Tweetdeck with different columns for different funders and use that to keep track of activity. But Tweetdeck-style functionality is no longer available as part of the free product. I’m not averse to paying a fee for services that deserve financial support, but neither the price nor the product nor the record of the current owner appeals. Writer Cory Doctorow described this process—not unique to X—as platform decay, or more memorably, as ‘enshittification’.

It’s still possible to bookmark the profiles of accounts in your web browser for easy reference, but it’s much more time-consuming to search through. And although I’ve tried to do this, the reality is that it has not worked, and I’ve not kept it up.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking there was ever a golden age of Twitter. It always had problems, it’s just that they are orders of magnitude bigger now. My view is that research funders should be thinking long and hard about using X to transmit more, better, or earlier information than they’re sending out via email newsletters or equivalent. It’s increasingly hard to justify given how much harder it is to keep up.

Adam Golberg is strategic research development manager (research growth) at the University of Nottingham. He tweets @Cash4Questions and blogs at socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk.

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Why research managers and academic leaders need a holistic approach when choosing funding opportunities

Over the last decade, major national and international funders have tended to favour big project or programme grants necessitating multi-partner bids—and there is little sign of a reversal.

Applying to these schemes takes lots of work, drawing academic and research-office time and resource away from other activities. Clearly a strategic judgment on whether to apply is necessary. When should universities and departments take the plunge? Ragnar Lie, a senior adviser at Universities Norway, had some suggestions in this article published in January 2021.

Competition for external grants is the name of the game for funding research activity in Europe and beyond, both at the national scale as well as through EU framework programmes for research and innovation. From the point of view of funding organisations and governments, this is done by design so that only the best projects and the best research groups win.

But how to play the game from the point of view of research organisations? It takes two to tango, and if the overall aim is to increase the quality of research, how can an ambitious research unit make the best decisions on what funding to target?

My answer is to only go for the money that will contribute to your unit’s academic and thematic goals. It is always tempting to go for the big money rather than the good money, but to misquote Frank Zappa, “we’re [not] only in it for the money”.

Focus on quality

To put this idea into practice, I suggest using a simple fourfold table (pictured) that helps categorise a potential project as to whether it is in line with your units’ research strategy, as well as whether the project will finance itself or require additional contributions from your own budget. The best scenario is for a project to add to the academic strategy and to be well-financed. The worst scenario is for a project to be underfunded and a bad academic fit.

The basic premise behind this model is that external competitive funding should be seen as a means to improve academic quality and focus, and there can be a trade-off between money and academic focus. If your research unit encourages its staff to apply for as much funding as possible, disregarding whether the projects add to research quality in the long run, you risk ending up less focused and ultimately less attractive to the best researchers and the most important funders.

Of course, for this model to work, you need to know what your academic focus is. Without a coherent research strategy—an ambition for where you want your research unit to go over the coming years—you will not be able to tell the potential suitable projects from those who will lead you astray.

Strategic development

This way of thinking developed gradually during the 1990s, while I was managing an initiative from the Research Council of Norway on a new programme for research on the EU, which later became the Arena Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. The ambition was to build a world-class research centre on European integration studies, starting from scratch.

What part of the broad research field of European studies could we possibly contribute to in a serious way? Together with the first small group of professors and young researchers, the first Arena research profile was made. Once in place, this profile was our common and shared guide to look for funding, as well as research staff, that would take the new centre in the direction of its academic goals.

At Arena, balancing potential academic return with economic return and how to make synergies with ongoing projects when developing new applications has long been a part of its DNA. Almost 30 years later, after numerous EU and nationally funded projects, this small unit of 30 people from 11 countries continues to contribute significantly to the field.

Holistic approach

For the system to work, you need a professional research administration office that not only helps researchers scout for possible funding opportunities but also assesses the economic sustainability of potential projects. Remember: no money is for free. Most externally funded projects require some kind of top-up money, and you need dedicated and professional research administrators to tell which projects will need additional internal funding.

While determining the economic return of a potential project is a job for research administrators, determining the academic return falls to the academic leadership. The job for the leadership and administration working together is to organise a process for balancing these two priorities. You should end up with a portfolio of projects which add to the research strategy, as well as to a balanced and sustainable budget.

In the end, you need to see all your resources combined as one portfolio, encompassing projects, funding, people and infrastructure. Too often, external funding can be seen as just that—external, an add-on. On the contrary, external funding, and the people and infrastructure funded by it, should be seen as a core means to meet your goals. 

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Early career researchers can build networks around societal challenges through Europe’s Institutes for Advanced Study

Many funding schemes aim to give early career researchers a start in leading their own research project. Relatively few aim to give them the time, space and access to other researchers necessary to think beyond their next grant and about how they could contribute to wider societal issues.

The Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study’s Constructive Advanced Thinking programme is one of those rare schemes. Its most recent annual round closed in October, but it is scheduled to open again in the autumn next year.

Manuel Spitschan (pictured top left), now a professor of chronobiology and health at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, led a successful bid to the CAT scheme in 2020. In this interview, published in July 2021, he explained why putting careerist thinking out of mind is important to constructing a solid bid.

Top tips

• Keep the focus on social impact—don’t see the project as a line on your CV
• Make the most of buy-in from non-academic organisations
• Build a team you want to work with, where everyone brings something different
• Bringing together researchers from different countries is a plus

Now in its third year, the Constructive Advanced Thinking programme from the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study gives early career researchers a chance to push forward research agendas for societal challenges.

Unlike standard programmes at Institutes for Advanced Study, the CAT programme does not fund extended residential visits but instead allows groups of three to five junior researchers to meet for short stays of up to two weeks at any of the 10 participating institutes across Europe for the 2021 round. Applications must be made via the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz.

Groups can meet two or three times a year for projects lasting up to three years. The principal investigator must have a stable position at a research institution in the EU, or in countries associated to the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.

The CAT programme covers travel and accommodation during the visits, with the possibility of a small amount of research-related expenses. The programme is designed to “maximise the creativity of groups”, and while there are no designated topic areas, proposals will be judged on their societal relevance, and collaborations with organisations outside academia are encouraged.

Manuel Spitschan (pictured top left), a lecturer at the University of Oxford in the UK who is leading a network that was selected in 2020, explains how he put together a winning bid.

What is the aim of your project?

Our focus is really on understanding the impact of light and light exposure on human health and wellbeing. I suppose the question we are answering as a network of scientists is: how can we bring together the evidence that we have in this field and make it relevant and translational? Our main activity is in tying together the various strands of research that are going on in the field.

What are your objectives?

We really have three big objectives as part of this programme. The first is understanding a little bit about the complexities of the effects of light on our circadian system, what we generally call the non-visual systems. The second is understanding how we can, as researchers, really drive towards creating a robust evidence base for these types of data. What is needed to go from a lab study to recommendations? How do we harmonise different types of data sets that are collected in different labs? The third is working on understanding how we can communicate complexity in biomedical research about these non-visual effects of light. How can we make this information accessible without dumbing it down and simplifying it?

Was the application process as easy as the literature promises?

The application is definitely one of the lighter applications I’ve written, mostly because it’s not very data focused—you’re not trying to generate new results. Instead, you’re trying to synthesise evidence, you’re trying to come up with new ways of thinking and put that into a framework. You have to submit an abstract, a proposal and a work plan, and then there’s a page or two to describe the team. It’s really important when you describe the team to say what the unique added value of any given member is.

How else was applying to the CAT programme different from other funding programmes?

Applying to a mechanism like this, you definitely have to think about, and be really clear about, how the project fits into broader society, how is it not just some academic exercise. I think the application will shape your thinking about that.

How did you emphasise the societal relevance in your application?

One thing we did was highlight the importance of light as something that surrounds us. Almost all processes in our body and our brains are somehow circadian, so circadian rhythms are everywhere. I think we might be a little bit lucky because it’s not a hard case to make to say that sleep disturbance will lead to chronic health issues. It was really building an argument for why this is an important topic around examples like people working night shifts optimising their schedules, or supporting employees with good lighting in occupational health.

The call says it encourages collaborations with partners outside academia: is this something you are doing?

I think this is where the societal relevance becomes quite practical—we demonstrated in the application how we are linked to various kind of stakeholders, organisations or associations that might benefit from the findings that we put together as part of this network. Before the application, we were engaged with various scientific societies but we also reached out to groups such as the organisation that standardises quantities related to light—we got them on board and asked if they would support this project with a letter, which they did. Basically, you need to demonstrate buy-in from the people who can actually change things. Of course, that requires you to already have some connections and networks.

How did you find your collaborators?

I assembled a team in a kind of stepwise fashion, so I approached one person and said, ‘I’m thinking about applying to this, would you be interested in joining?’ And then we were two, so we thought, who else could join this team? And we built it up by seeing what expertise we had, and who else we needed, who else we could imagine working with. This to me was quite important to have a team of fellow investigators who I can work with, but then who also have relevant expertise to contribute that’s different from mine.

Beyond what we’ve discussed, why do you think you were successful?

The one thing we definitely have is quite an international team—we have people based in the UK, the Netherlands, the US, Singapore and Australia. That is geographically quite a unique constellation, I would say, though it makes things difficult when scheduling Zoom calls due to the time zone differences. Also, it’s a timely topic because there are various expert recommendations and various drivers who want to really bring this knowledge of the non-visual effects of light into society—that might have piqued interest in our project.

Have all the travel restrictions from Covid affected the project?

Basically, what they’re funding is not research but networking activity. The problem is we haven’t done any in-person visits, which is a shame, but nonetheless we have an interest in the topic so we are basically meeting every other week to discuss it, and we have made some great progress.

Given there is no support for salaries or research expenses, how are you fitting it around your other commitments?

If we had been able to spend time together residentially then, probably, we wouldn’t have had Zoom calls every other week. At the same time, we are really trying to make the most of the formal structure that we’re in. Ultimately, it is something that will also lead to outputs, so for our careers it is also beneficial. A key thing, which can be difficult to navigate, is what the realistic commitment is that you can put into something like this—it really depends on career stage and what flexibility and independence you already have.

What advice would you give to other early career researchers applying in this year’s call?

Work to get an awesome and motivated team together, and then also think about the big picture. Really think about what the project will achieve beyond creating another line on your CV. What is this going to enable beyond your immediate career development? If you look back at this in 50 years, what was the net positive that this project accomplished? It’s hard to evaluate this in advance, but you can pick a project and design a project in a way that can maximise the chances that it’s going to have some impact that’s not just academic.

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