How the NIH uses the US government’s billions to shape the world of biomedical research

The National Institutes of Health is in many ways in a league of its own as a public research funding agency. With a budget of $45.1 billion in 2022, it is the largest non-military government research spender in the United States and claims to be the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.

Its history begins in 1887 and the establishment of the US Marine Hospital Service, which was originally tasked with checking passengers arriving at ports for disease. Since then, it has grown into a behemoth that has supported over 150 Nobel prizewinners, along the way becoming first the National Institute of Health in 1930 and then expanding to multiple institutes in 1948.

While the NIH conducts its own in-house research, more than 80 per cent of its funding is awarded externally, largely through competitive grants. These are channelled through 27 separate institutes and centres, covering all areas of medical research and public health.

Rising tide

Except for a moderate decline between 2012 and 2013, the NIH’s budget has steadily risen since the turn of the millennium and has increased more rapidly since around 2015. While external grants are awarded across a variety of categories—including career development fellowships, training awards and business R&D contracts—research project grants consistently account for between 50 and 60 per cent of the NIH budget.

However, the picture of inexorable rise looks somewhat different from the perspective of individual researchers who win grants. When inflation is taken into account, there has been little difference in the average size of research grants since 1998.

Big spenders

The NIH does not spread its spending evenly across its various centres. The five top-spending centres together account for over 50 per cent of spending in recent years. Those centres cover cancer; allergies and infectious diseases; heart, lung and blood; general medical sciences; and ageing.

At the other end of the scale, the institutes with the smallest research budgets are the National Library of Medicine, the National Institute of Nursing Research and the John E Fogarty International Center, which focuses on global health.

The majority of centres spend more than 95 per cent of their budgets on research project grants, but there are some exceptions. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences, for instance, spent nearly 7 per cent of its budget on research training grants in 2020, while the Office of the Director reserves around half of its budget for special awards.

Higher education focus

The NIH is a hugely important funder for the expansive US academic community, with medical schools around the country relying on it hugely. In line with this, higher education institutions win the largest share of NIH grants compared with independent research institutes, hospitals, non-profits and companies.

Higher education institutions won nearly three-quarters of research project grants in 2019, the last year for which data are available. They claimed an even higher proportion of career development fellowships and training grants.

Institutions attracting the most NIH funding are located in the research heartlands of the east and west coasts of the US. The north-east cities of Boston and New York—home to world-leading research institutes including Harvard and Columbia—came out top in geographical concentration of funding in 2020. But when it comes to individual institutions, Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University top the leaderboard.

Most NIH awards go to US institutions, with those overseas winning less than 1 per cent of the total grant funding in 2020. Even so, non-US grant funding amounted to more than $290 million and over 600 grants were parcelled out to 66 countries. Top among these were South Africa, Canada, Australia, Germany and the UK.

Win or lose

Since 2016, success rates for research project grants at the NIH have been fairly static, at about 20 per cent, having fallen from nearer 30 per cent around 2000. When the NIH budget dropped between 2012 and 2013, success rates hit their lowest level—about 17 per cent—but they have since improved moderately.

The gap between men and women, in terms of the proportion of grants won, has shrunk considerably since the turn of the millennium. In 2000, men won around 75 per cent of research project grants and women took around 25 per cent, but in the past three years, men have won around 65 per cent of grants, with women taking around 35 per cent. Success rates, too, have improved, and have mostly been fairly even since around 2003, although it is notable that the success rate for women dropped further than that of men when the NIH budget was restricted in 2013.

In other areas, funding is much more even between genders. For instance, women were awarded at least 50 per cent of career development fellowships from 2016 through to 2020.

Diversity gap

When it comes to race and ethnicity, the NIH has made it clear it wants to see the proportion of non-white award-winners rise, but there has been only a small amount of movement in this area in recent years.

In 2016, the proportion of non-white  winners was 23 per cent, rising to 25 per cent in 2020.

Outside non-white winners, by far the largest proportion of grants are won by people of Asian origin: consistently around 20 per cent since 2016. In contrast, only around 2 per cent of research project grant winners have been Black or African American. Hispanic researchers have consistently made up 5 per cent of research project grant winners in recent years.

Looking forward

The NIH occupies a critical position at the centre of US research—and therefore, to a large extent, at the centre of world research. Even small shifts in how much it has to spend and what it chooses to spend it on can have huge consequences for entire disciplines, let alone individual researchers.

As well as a change in leadership, with former director Francis Collins stepping down in late 2021 after 22 years at the helm, another major change on the horizon is that the NIH will be housing the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a new funder geared to deliver medical breakthroughs.

While lawmakers have set aside an extra $1bn for the agency, known as Arpa-H, in 2022, it remains to be seen whether its creation could put pressure on core NIH funding in the long term.

Originally published as part of Research Professional News’ Special Report: Research Funding’s Big Players in April 2022

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Velux Stiftung offers project grants in an eclectic range of subjects linked to daylight

Velux Stiftung is a grant-giving foundation that is perhaps less well known than it should be, especially by researchers in fields linked to light, vision and healthy ageing whose interdisciplinary ideas may not easily find favour with national funders. Ophthalmology researchers with ideas for projects in low- and middle-income countries should also be aware of this funder.

The 2023 round of the foundation’s Research Grants schemes is open now, with up to CHF100,000 (€101,000) for applicants to the daylight and healthy ageing stream, and up to CHF400,000 available in the ophthalmology stream. Projects in both can last for up to four years. The deadline for daylight and healthy ageing applicants is 30 April and for ophthalmology 7 May.

In April 2021, the foundation’s senior scientific officer Kirstin Kopp shone a light on these grant programmes.

Top tips

• Connecting different fields is strongly encouraged in bids, especially when this isn’t supported by other funders
• Velux Stiftung likes to see the transfer of results from previous research
• Grants applications in ophthalmology should focus on low- and middle-income countries

For researchers with ideas for projects a little different from the norm, Velux Stiftung might provide a welcome ray of light. The Swiss funder, founded by the inventor of Velux windows, awards grants on an annual basis for projects lasting up to four years. It specifically asks applicants to explain why their project is not eligible for funding by other sources.

Velux Stiftung awards grants in three specific areas: ophthalmology, daylight research and healthy ageing.

The funder recently held a strategic review that led to some important changes in its grants programme. Senior scientific officer Kirstin Kopp tells us more.

How long has Velux Stiftung had a research grants programme?

Velux Stiftung was founded in 1980 and it’s been giving out grants ever since. From the early 2000s it really took off. The Danish engineer Villum Kann Rasmussen had the idea that people needed to have more light and air within built environments. With his Velux roof windows, he made a fortune and founded several foundations.

Tell me a bit more about the three funding areas.

First, there is daylight research, as we call it, which brings together many different disciplines, including chronobiology, psychiatry and architecture—considering the built environments where we spend 90 per cent of our time—but also topics in daylight and nature as well as daylight technology. Second, there is healthy ageing, where we also try to focus on this interdisciplinary approach. The third area is ophthalmology.

Are you open to applications from any country?

We give out international grants but I should point out that as a charitable Swiss foundation, we are tax exempt and that requires us to spend 50 per cent of our money in Switzerland. So 50 per cent of our funding is open to international research grants. Broadly, we receive more applications from within Europe, but we have also been getting applications from overseas.

How many grants do you award each year and what are your success rates?

In the past five years, it’s been around 20, with an average success rate of 23 per cent. It does vary. In 2019, we had over 100 applications, so the funding rate was below 20 per cent, but usually it’s around 20 to 25 per cent.

Is there a total budget?

In the past couple of years we gave out around CHF7 million in total, but it depends on the financial markets.

Do you tend to fund more projects in any one of the three main areas?

No, it’s actually quite variable. When you look at our funding history, in some years there is more money going to healthy ageing and in other years there is more into daylight research. There is no fixed quota, and it’s not split into equal parts for the three different funding areas—it really depends where the best ideas come in.

Are all three areas distinct or do you like to see some crossover?

We are genuinely quite fond of interdisciplinary approaches. This might be within one of these areas but reaching out to another discipline which is not in our funding portfolio, but it also might be an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of the three areas we fund, and these projects are of particular interest.

You ask for applications not to be eligible for funding by other sources. How should applicants show this?

Not all national funding agencies have programmes for proof-of-concept studies, for example. So that’s something where you could demonstrate that you’re not eligible for funding. Another example would be interdisciplinary projects that fall between categories. And some funding agencies continuously fund a certain research stream but once you start to reach out and want to try something new or apply your work to a different field, it becomes more difficult to find funding.

Can people apply with proposals that have been turned down by their national funders?

Well, you need to be within our funding areas and your research question should be relevant but also neglected in that nobody else wants to fund it. And then scientific quality is important, of course. It’s not like if you have fallen through your national funding agency’s selection procedure then we will cover you—that’s not the case.

Could you give an example of a project that would be the right fit for Velux Stiftung?

It could be that you have a great idea and a great research partner, but this partner is in a country that is not supported by other funding sources. We’re also interested in how much applicants are invested in transferring research results. Obviously, if you’re doing basic research, the next level might not be developing a product, but you might want to go on and see who else is interested and who you could collaborate with. I think that this kind of transfer step is very important.

Velux Stiftung has recently had a strategic review—has this changed your funding priorities in any way?

When we did a bit of background research on where funding for ophthalmology went in general, we saw that there was a lot of funding for diseases that were common in high-income countries but that the majority of visual impairment was actually in low-income and middle-income countries and was due to diseases for which solutions existed. Often these solutions work well in high-income countries but are not adapted to the local situation in low-income and middle-income countries. As we are a rather small foundation, we wanted to know where we could make a difference, so the focus is now set on ophthalmology research in the context of low-income and middle-income countries where there is less funding available.

And are there any other changes to your funding programmes on the horizon?

As a sneak peek I can tell you that the foundation is actually looking at starting a funding programme in forestry and climate change. But we’re still at the very beginning and at the moment we are considering what we should focus on. We’re trying to set it up this year so by next year there should be some more details.

The post From the archive: Cross-cutting projects shine for Swiss funder appeared first on Research Professional News.

This year the Zeit-Stiftung Foundation’s Beyond Borders scheme is for PhD students interrogating conflict

Top tips

• These scholarships serve to supplement the work of doctoral researchers by means of joint activities and conferences
• This is a scheme which requires tailored proposals—do not copy and paste
• Having the right language competencies to enable the project to be carried out is important
• Mention what you will gain from the scholarship beyond financial resources

The Zeit-Stiftung Foundation is a private charity based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundation runs several fellowship programmes, conferences and exchanges throughout the year, mostly aimed at PhD students.

One of those programmes is Beyond Borders, a scheme for PhD students that supports research on borders and boundaries within the social sciences and humanities. This year, in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the foundation is looking for projects that cover borders, contestation and conflict.

A total of €500,000 is available through the scheme, and projects will last for up to three years. The foundation expects to award 15 to 20 scholarships. The deadline for applications is 1 March and applications are accepted from any country.

Anna Hofmann, academic director of the programme, tells us more.

What is Beyond Borders?

It is an international PhD scholarship programme that has been running for three years. Every year we focus on a particular aspect of border and boundary studies. We started with a programme on borders, democracy, and security for the first generation of scholars. They were dealing mostly with national borders, and the whole question of negotiating democracy or statehood at the border.

Last year we focused on borders, migration and knowledge, looking at the production of knowledge about boundaries and border-making, and how different perceptions influence the way we learn about borders. This year the focus is much more on conflict and physical borders. We hope to get more projects on history and inter-ethnic relations. What happens in everyday life and everyday border management, and in the everyday experience of borders for different people?

Why was it set up?

The decision to focus more on borders and boundaries came out of our previous research funding programmes, where we noticed more and more emphasis on transnational aspects of research. At the same time, the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe highlighted a rising awareness of borders. We turned away from the process of reducing barriers and having borders dismantled in the process of European integration; for example, with free movement. But with Covid, those borders came back very quickly.

For this call, what type of support is available?

Three types of scholarships are available: Dissertation Completion scholarships for advanced PhD students; PhD scholarships for PhD students at any stage of their studies; and Start Up scholarships for advanced master’s students or PhD students who are at an early stage of their studies.

Are there restrictions on who can apply?

They must be doctoral students, or, for the Start Up fellowships, master’s students. Applicants also must work in social sciences and humanities in a broad sense, and their work has to involve the study of borders or boundaries. In the past we have accepted some people from a law background because their research goes beyond classical law.

Do applicants need to move to Germany for the scholarships?

No. They stay at their home institution and we will bring them together at least twice a year for a conference with everybody on the programme. They will present their project and discuss it with the advisory board and their peers from the programme. During the pandemic we moved communication online, and now that we are back doing physical conferences students still want to keep more regular online communication.

We also try to have one additional workshop or field trip, or another meeting during the year, and this is smaller and the offer is more diversified. For example, we might offer our Start Up scholars a workshop on proposal writing and research design development. For those who are much more advanced, we might propose a workshop on science communication, so going beyond the research work and thinking about how they may have more impact with their research. These are tailor-made to the needs of the individual group and people can register for them and apply if they want to participate.

Do participants work alone on their projects?

Yes and no. Participants work on their own projects, but they will also work with other members of their cohort for group discussions and so on. We try to create diverse groups with an interdisciplinary focus, but to have some kind of framework for productive work in the group discussions, we focus one overall topic or theme so that people can get into discussions with each other.

How many people do you expect to fund?

For this call we estimate we will select between 15 and 20 people. Our overall budget is around €500,000 for all participants, and that includes conferences, travel, workshops and so on. The funding covers the projects for up to three years.

What makes a good application?

The first thing we look at is the research question. Then we look at the candidate and their skills, their preparation for this research. For example, we look at language competencies, which are always a big factor in international projects. Can you access the literature in the archives? Are you prepared in terms of academic qualification? We consider whether this person can deliver on the topic they are proposing.

What advice would you give to applicants?

I would also say that applicants should make their proposals as specific as possible to this programme. In my experience, people often apply with a standardised research proposal that is more suitable to a graduate school. But usually for us it is much too long; we deal with a huge number of applications, so we are looking for a maximum of seven pages. The application for the Start Up fellowships is even smaller at five pages.

It is also very important to explain why you want to join the research programme and how it will be beneficial to you beyond the financial support.

Is Zeit-Stiftung the organisation that runs this scheme?

Financially speaking, we are a classical endowment charity. The founders, Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius, donated their wealth to the foundation after they died in the 1990s. As an institution, we are linked to the Die Zeit newspaper, which Gerd Bucerius founded in 1946.

Do you run any other calls throughout the year?

Yes, several. This is the only fellowship programme for PhD students, but we regularly advertise workshops or summer schools for interdisciplinary exchanges. Currently, the call for our Hamburg Summer School in Social Research is open. We also run a fellowship programme for international postdocs at the HafenCity University Hamburg in Germany which covers urban research.

The post Opportunity profile: Crossing borders, breaking boundaries appeared first on Research Professional News.

Leo Foundation offers skin disease grants with enviable success rates and is increasing its funding

Top tips

• Read and check eligibility requirements and requests for supporting documentation—this often catches people out.
• Familiarise yourself with the Leo Foundation’s philanthropic scope and show how your bid is in tune with that.
• Feasibility is an important criterion; partner with other groups if you do not have the necessary experience in-house.
• Skin cancer is out of scope for applications, but skin cancer models can be used in methodology.

For dermatology researchers, the Denmark-based Leo Foundation is a particularly valuable funder. The philanthropic organisation manages financial assets of around €2.3 billion and is accelerating its annual funding upwards of €20 million.

The Leo Foundation owns the pharmaceutical company Leo Pharma, which focuses on dermatology.

As part of its funding portfolio, the foundation offers Research Grants of around €270,000 to €540,000, lasting one to three years. The grants are available to researchers in any country and there are three funding rounds per year. The next deadline is on 28 February, followed by 23 June and 31 August.

Projects in basic, translational or clinical dermatology are welcomed but the Leo Foundation does not fund projects on skin cancer.

Chief scientific officer Anne-Marie Engel says the Leo Foundation is upping its funding and planning new options for clinical and translational researchers. Engel explains more about the Research Grants scheme and its encouraging success rates.

How much funding is the Leo Foundation expecting to award this year?

For this year, we expect to give altogether around €27m, and our aspiration and ambition is that by 2025, it will be €33.5m. We are also increasing the number of different grant-making instruments.

What is the aim of the Research Grant scheme for the foundation?

The idea behind a scheme like this is to give an opportunity to as many researchers as possible. The grants are not very large, but they are there to help and support researchers with excellent ideas and innovative ideas within dermatology research, in a very broad sense, going from basic to clinical.

How many grants are you expecting to award this year?

Somewhere between 25 and 30 grants. That, of course, depends on how many excellent applications we get.

Is there a fixed amount of funding or does it depend on the quality of applications?

We have an agreement with our board about how we expect to distribute funding across the different grant-making instruments we have. But it also depends on the applications we get, so for this particular instrument we can agree with the board of directors that if there’s more quality than expected, we can add a bit to the budget. And if there’s not enough quality, we won’t award as many grants. We usually get around 30 applications per round.

With three rounds a year and an estimated 25 to 30 grants, that’s a pretty good success rate.

Yes, although the success rate was quite high in 2022, but it may vary. The average success rate over the past five years is 19 per cent. But our scope in the foundation is very clear: it’s dermatology research, from basic to clinical, so it’s important for us to see that we are still getting a fairly high number of highly qualified applications within this field.

Is it possible to apply more than once, potentially in the same year?

If you do not get funding for your application, you can reapply once, and you’ll have to add a page or two explaining how you have worked on the project since you first applied. If it still doesn’t get funded, you can apply to the foundation again but with a different project.

Do you give feedback on applications that aren’t successful?

Regrettably not. We do give an indication to people of whether they were in the top, middle or bottom third of the applications when it came to ranking by our international expert committee.

Why are projects about skin cancer not eligible for funding?

As it’s easier to get funding from other agencies for cancer research than for other kinds of skin disease-related research, it’s been decided here to focus on the other skin diseases to give them a chance of getting funding for good projects. However, we do permit applications where skin cancer is used as a model to look into other mechanistic hypotheses and ideas for other skin diseases. So you can use skin cancer models in your skin research applications, but if it’s fully focused on skin cancer, you will have to apply elsewhere.

Grants are open to researchers worldwide, but do you get more applications from any particular country or region?

We do get most of our applications from Europe and from North America, but we’re seeing increasing numbers of applications from the Asia-Pacific, specifically Australia, which we’re thrilled about.

What proportion of grants awarded are for basic research against clinical research?

It’s not level, let me put it like that. We get more applications for basic research and thus we’ve also given out more grants for basic research, but we very much invite applications from people who do translational research and clinical research as well. In the future, as we increase our grant amounts, we will also have some thematic grants that invite, in a more focused way, researchers within translational and clinical research.

What level of ambition are you expecting to see in applications?

We’re really looking for excellence, and whether a project is something that can potentially jump to a whole new stage of knowledge within an area. Our board asks us about the potential for leaps forward every time we meet with them. At the same time, it’s also important to make sure that really good research groups and research environments can continue on course towards new knowledge and, hopefully, new treatments.

Are there any common mistakes that applicants should avoid?

A common mistake is that people fail to read the small print in the instructions to applicants. They sometimes forget to attach some of the mandatory documents so that when we screen the applications for eligibility, we have to reject them for administrative reasons, which is really a pity because there can still be a great idea in there. Also, we have a very clear scope for our philanthropic activities, so if people are very far away from that scope in what they’re applying for, the likelihood that they’re getting funding is close to zero.

Is there a minimum level of experience required to apply?

People must have PhDs or equivalent experience, and what we see is that we mostly award grants to people who are assistant professors and above that. Your experience as a research leader is, of course, something that is part of the evaluation.

Are there any elements that would make an application stand out?

What’s important for us is that when people apply they have some kind of feasibility analysis of the project that they are suggesting. So if they don’t have all the expertise and infrastructure in-house, within their group, it’s important for us to see in an application who they are teaming up with, to make sure that they cover all the expertise needed.

What would your top advice be to applicants?

The main advice would be: read the application guidelines carefully, then ask us if there’s something you think is unclear. It’s a pity if people think they are a fit for the Leo Foundation and it turns out that they are not, and that kind of question can very easily be clarified by an email or a phone call.

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The Human Frontier Science Program is an international funder focused on the new

Top tips

• Novelty and innovation are watchwords for this funder
• Consider how you can leverage novel technology in your project
• Be proactive in networking—strong bids are likely to grow out of organically generated partnerships

The Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) is an international organisation dedicated to boosting collaboration on basic research into fundamental biological problems. Founded in the late 1980s, it comprises the G7 nations and Australia, India, Israel, South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand and the non-G7 members of the European Union, which are represented by the European Commission.

The HFSP invites research proposals that take novel approaches to problems via interdisciplinary and international projects. It offers two types of research grants: Early Career Grants and Program Grants.

The Early Career Grants were previously known as Young Investigator’s Grants. Candidates must be within five years of recruitment into an independent position in academia, and they must have finished their PhD no more than 10 years ago.

The Program Grants, meanwhile, allow teams of independent researchers to conduct research through new international collaborations. Each project needs two to four members and there are various amounts of funding available depending on the size of the team.

The deadline for submitting letters of intent for both programmes—which were profiled in Funding Insight in 2022—is 30 March (and applicants must obtain a letter of intent ID number by 21 March).

Christine Cheung, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, won a Young Investigator’s Grant in 2019. She discusses her project and how she won funding through the HFSP.

What is your background as a researcher?

My own research programme is around vascular disease biology. We are biologists trying to address the basic mechanisms of endothelial dysfunction, which underlies vascular abnormalities in many inflammatory conditions or degenerative aging conditions.

What does your HFSP project involve?

For the HFSP, the project actually takes a different flavour. The funder requires us to work with investigators from other continents, and the reason for that is because they want investigators to be funded who would otherwise not be supported by local public funding. They value that creativity and that convergence of different disciplines, so it is not just a continuation of our own research programme.

While I am a vascular disease biologist, my co-principal investigator is from a developmental biology background. The funded project looks into developmental aspects of the brain, and how the intertwined relationship of blood vessels and brain development inform and guide each other’s development during our lives. In the project, we use mice and human pluripotent stem cells as our experimental models.

What’s the overall aim of the research?

Whether it’s for regeneration or as part of disease progression, blood vessels are very plastic. There’s a concept called foetal reprogramming that suggests that even in disease, or when the tissue is stressed or vulnerable to trauma, blood vessels can kickstart regeneration and the cells actually enter a foetus-like programme. They actually go back in development and reactivate to help the tissue rebuild. By understanding the early beginnings of the brain and blood vessel development, it may inform other mechanisms that may interplay during disease as well as regeneration and offer some insights for tissue regeneration.

What is the grant’s duration and size?

Young Investigator’s Grants usually run for three years, but we have a one-year extension because of the pandemic. It finishes at the end of this year. Teams are usually between two and five people; we had two people. In total we won US$750,000 (€690,400).

Would the project be difficult to fund locally without the HFSP?

I can’t speak for other countries but in Singapore, our public funding cannot be used outside of the country. Another funding mechanism that allows both myself and my international collaborators to be funded is usually thematic grant calls co-funded by both institutions—say, if my university had an agreement with another university.

It’s very hard to run an international collaboration where all the principals can be funded appropriately to do the research programme together. This is where the HFSP has been very valuable.

So you found your international collaborators before you applied for the HFSP grant?

Yes. We knew each other beforehand, but this grant facilitated us working together. Without it, we would still try to collaborate within our own means. But we would probably only be able to run a pilot project because of funding restrictions.

Was it the first time you applied to the HFSP?

No, I applied once and failed, but it was several years ago. Then in 2019 we tried again but I went in with no expectations. For a winning proposal, maybe one ingredient is to adopt really advanced or emerging technology. Whether you are the developer of a new platform or not, you should be bold enough to leverage new technology.

How far did you mould your research to fit in with the HFSP grant requirements?

In terms of the research scope they’re broad, as long as it’s in life science or biomedicine. We didn’t feel constrained in what we wanted to research. I didn’t give up my fundamentals—my passion is doing vascular biology, and my colleague is into developmental biology. But the research must be interdisciplinary; they want to see novelty and creativity.

How long did it take you to put together your proposal?

For us, the initial conceptualisation stage was around four months. There were two stages: the letter of intent and the full proposal. The letter of intent is a shorter format; they use that to shortlist candidates for the full proposal. With the letter of intent, they look at the scientific merits of the project and also the idea itself—whether it is a novel idea and whether it adheres to the criteria. If you are shortlisted, you have to write something longer and more detailed with your methodology, your implementation plan.

What advice do you have for people considering an application this year or next?

Be proactive. We need to develop our networks and hone our skills—the more applications we make, the better we get. The pandemic has really made us slow down in networking, so maybe it’s time to start again. Go to conferences, build a network, meet other investigators. Because there are many opportunities, and the opportunities lie with the people who have the will to succeed together.

Would you apply to the HFSP again?

Yes. When this project has finished, we want to go for one of the Program Grants but we are still deliberating whether it should be an extension of this current proposal. We could go in as a brand new proposal altogether, because the science has evolved in the three years since we won the previous grant.

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Eight tips for funding-call information sessions and networking workshops

Major funders, be they national or international, seem to have been pushing towards larger and more strategic grants for a few years now. And these are often attended by town-hall meetings and sometimes networking sessions that aim to inform researchers of what the call is about and, in the latter case, facilitate partnership-building.

In August 2018, Funding Insight columnist Adam Golberg gave potential attendees eight tips on getting the most out of such events. His first is somewhat unlikely, bearing in mind his day job in research management and his having written this article after a UK Research and Innovation call workshop: “Don’t send research development staff.”

Nowadays many major grant calls include workshops or networking events, and this is increasingly true of calls from UK Research and Innovation. These typically aim to do two things: first, to publicise the call and answer questions from potential bidders; and second, to facilitate networking and develop consortia, often including non-academic partners.

Space is often limited. There’s an application process to gauge demand and to allocate or ration places (if required) between disciplines and institutions. These events are different from ‘sandpits’, which have a more rigorous and competitive application process and which may result in direct research funding. They’re also distinct from scoping meetings, which define and shape future calls. The advice below focuses on the call-information day, but could also be applicable for sandpits and scoping meetings.

I recently attended my first UKRI call-information event and have come up with hints and tips that might help other first-time attendees.

1.       Don’t send research development staff

Research managers like me are more experienced at recognising how different calls vary, and understanding the specific focus of each, but we can only go so far when it comes to networking and representing academics. Regardless of how well we are briefed, there will come a point at which we can’t answer further questions because we’re not academics. Send an academic if you possibly can.

2.       Hone your pitch

A part of me dies inside every time I use a phrase like “elevator pitch”, but you’re going to be introducing yourself, your team and your ideas many, many times during the day. Prepare a short version and a long version of what you want to say. It doesn’t have to be crafted word for word, but prepare the structure of a clear, concise introduction that you can comfortably reel off. 

3.       Be clear about what you want and what you’re looking for

If you’re planning on leading a bid, say so. If you’re looking to add your expertise on X to another bid to be confirmed, say so. If you’re not sure yet, say so. I’m not sure what possible advantage could be gained about being coy. You could finesse your starting position by talking of “looking to” or “planning to” lead a bid if you want, but it’s much better to be clear.

4.       Don’t just talk to your friends  

Chances are that you’ll have friends or former colleagues at the event who you may not see as often as you’d like, but resist spending too much time in your comfort zone. It’ll limit your opportunities and will make you appear cliquey. Consider arranging to meet before or after the event, or at another time to catch up properly. 

5.       Be realistic about what’s achievable

Although these events shape the composition and focus of bids, I doubt that any collaboration starting from ground level at one of these events has a realistic chance of success.

6.       Do your homework

Most call meetings invite delegates to submit information in advance, usually a brief biography and a statement of research interests. It’s worth taking time to do this well and to read the information submitted by others. Follow up with web searches about potential partners to find out more about their work and, of course, what they look like. Follow them on Twitter too: it’s not stalking if it’s for research collaboration.

7.       Brush up on your networking skills 

If networking is something you struggle with, have a quick read of some basic networking guides. The best tip I was ever given was to regard networking as a process to identify “how I can help these people” rather than “how I can use these people to my advantage”. Also, I’ve found that saying “I think I follow you on Twitter” is an effective icebreaker.

8.       Don’t expect any new call info

There will be a presentation and a Q&A, but don’t expect major new insights. As not everyone can make these events, funders avoid giving any unfair advantages. Differences in nuance and emphasis can emerge in presentations and through questions, but don’t expect radical additional insights or secret insider knowledge.

If your target call has an event along these lines, you should make every effort to attend. Send your prospective principal investigator if you can, another academic if not, and your research development staff only if you must. Do a bit of homework: be clear about what you want to achieve, prepare your pitch and identify the people you want to talk to. In this way you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals.

Adam Golberg is research development manager in the faculty of social sciences at the University of Nottingham. He tweets as Cash4Questions and blogs at www.socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk

The post From the archive: Getting the most from town-hall meetings appeared first on Research Professional News.

The British Ecological Society’s funding is open to scientists all around the world

Top tips

• The society only supports projects where it can be the majority funder.
• Grants are open to all members, regardless of career stage.
• Track record is considered but is balanced by assessment of impact an award would have on the applicant’s career.
• Grants are relatively small so ensure your proposal is realistic.
• Show evidence-based impact and clear methodology—these are highly valued by reviewers.

The British Ecological Society is now into its 110th year of existence—but this is its first profile in Funding Insight. The BES’s Research Grants are an important part of its work and ensure not only that the society maintains an active role in ecological science but also that it supports the next generation of ecologists as they build their careers.

The society holds two rounds of funding each year offering three types of Research Grants

• Small Research Grants of up to £5,000, open to members of the BES.
• Large Research Grants of up to £20,000, open to those who have been members for at least two years prior to application.
• Ecologists in Africa Grant of up to £8,000, open to citizens of African countries classed as a ‘low-income economy’ or ‘lower-middle-income economy’ in the World Bank categorisation, who are working in Africa, with no membership restrictions.

The first round for all three grants is open now and closes on 15 March. Outreach Grants—open to members and worth up to £2,000—are also available. The second annual round of funding will open in early July. With the exception of the Ecologists in Africa Grants, all schemes are open to ecologists in any geographical location.

BES chief executive Hazel Norman and grants and community engagement officer Dylan Byrne describe how the grants work and key elements reviewers like to see.

How would you summarise the call?

Hazel Norman: We invite ecologists from around the world to apply for our Research and Outreach Grants. We usually award about 50 grants per year and try to help early career ecologists in particular because they struggle to get funding. But the grants will support any ecologist who wants to advance ecological science and the understanding of ecology via a project. The BES sees funding as a crucial way to support a thriving ecological community and thriving ecological science.

How many are given out for each type of grant typically each year?

Dylan Byrne: We usually award about six to seven Large Research Grants each year. For the Small Research Grants, it is around 14. Similar for the Outreach Grants. For the Ecologists in Africa it is around seven to eight awards per year. Our success rate is around 15 per cent across all our grants. Overall, we have got £400,000 of funding that we award every year.

Can grants be used as bolt-ons to larger projects?

DB: If you apply for a BES grant, we must fund the majority of the project. If you have already got a project in the works and you require some additional funding, we would not fund that. We basically fund projects where people have an idea but they need funding to be able to do it. We do not want to act as a top-up fund and so we have to be the majority funder.

HN: People often build projects from different funding pots, but we don’t like to fund that kind of research. We are much more interested in being a main funder on a particular project.

If a researcher wants to get money from elsewhere, should they make that clear in the application?

DB: When someone applies, we have a budget table that breaks down all the costs. For example, equipment and accommodation if they need it. If it is a Large Research Grant, for example, and their costs came to £26,000 and they can only request £20,000—the maximum we award—they would have to justify where the other £6,000 would come from, and there is space to do that. But, again, we would still need to be the majority funder.

Who are the grants primarily intended for?

DB: Our grants are open to most people in membership although there are some eligibility criteria that must be met. One of the main ones is that we would not fund to complete a PhD project but we would fund a project that compliments a PhD. It generally tends to be early career researchers applying for the Small Research Grants especially but those are still open to anyone.

How much is track record considered on bids and is it balanced by other criteria for early career researchers?

DB: Track record is scored so we do look at evidence of what a researcher has done in the past. But we also look at impact as part of the scoring criteria, which includes how much of an impact would this funding have on a person’s career.

What would make a proposal stand out in the calls?

DB: For all our grants, evidence-based impact with a strong understanding of methodology will always make an application stand out. That is, make sure that whatever you are doing has an impact that you can evidence, that you understand the methodology you are using and that your evidence can be achieved in a realistic timeframe.

Beyond that, we always look for a good, clear breakdown of your costs in the budget table. Being realistic about how much a project will cost is also important. For example, the Small Research Grant, which is maximum £5,000—what can you do with that £5,000?

You need to know and show what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, why you are going to do it and the impact that it is going to have. On the BES website, we have examples of successful grant applications that can help in understanding what a high-scoring grant looks like.

HN: I’d second that the peer review college is always interested in seeing that the proposal is realistic within the time frame and the resources asked for.

Are there any geographical restrictions on where the research can be carried out?

DB: Apart from the Ecologists in Africa scheme, there are no geographical restrictions either on location for the research or the researcher’s home base. We see ourselves as supporting the global ecological community.

How do you assess applications?

DB: Our review college is made up of 350 members who have completed a PhD or are undertaking one. We match up the topics of the application with the topics of the Review College members. Three members review and comment on each grant. 

If a person is successful or not, they get to see those reviewer feedback comments. We also have a grants committee made up of 12 members who will review the highest scoring grants and have the final say on what projects get funded. 

This committee also regularly reviews our grant application process and eligibility criteria to ensure our grants meet the needs of the global ecological community and align with our society’s values and strategy.

What are the available topics for BES grants?

HN: Our grants can cover over 30 topics, all relating to different branches of ecology, from agroecology to urban ecology. Selecting three topics relevant to your grant application helps us ensure that the most relevant members of the review college assess and score your application.

Do you have any other advice for potential applicants?

DB: Don’t be afraid to apply even if the competition is tough. We use Flexigrant, which is a user-friendly online grants platform. Starting the process helps to understand the process and what type of questions are asked.

All applicants get feedback whether their grant is successful or not. We accept modified reapplications; the original proposal should be 80 per cent different and they must take the reviewers’ feedback on board.

If potential applicants have questions, is it easy to get in touch with you?

DB: I am the BES grants and community engagement officer. If anyone ever has any questions, they come directly to me. They are not dealing with multiple people, they are just dealing with one person through the whole process.

HN: I would really encourage anyone with eligibility or any other questions to reach out to BES and Dylan before they put their application. One question can often save a lot of time and effort.

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US funders and agencies forced to confront an inconvenient truth

In the last year the problem of harassment in isolated research environments has caught the US scientific community’s attention and garnered considerable mainstream interest thanks to two publications.

The first was an article on the Buzzfeed News website in December 2021, which carried the testimony of 16 female scientists who had suffered sexual harassment and assault at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a research station in Panama.

This was followed, in August this year, by a report from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its linked bodies the Office of Polar Programs (OPP) and the United States Antarctic Program (Usap).

The report revealed widespread assault, harassment and stalking at Usap sites and during Usap missions. It makes for harrowing reading. “Every woman I knew down there had an assault or harassment experience that had occurred on ice,” one interviewee is quoted as saying.

The report notes: “This was a sentiment or experience echoed by many of the members of the USAP community we spoke to”. The NSF and the National Science Board—which sets policy for the NSF—have both since responded with emergency actions for assault and harassment prevention in Usap.

Concern over the situation has now risen to the summit of US politics. Last month the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy brought together senior scientists, agency officials and survivors of assault and harassment for an online roundtable on preventing this behaviour in isolated scientific research environments.

During the discussion, the director of the OPP Roberta Marinelli said that what was revealed by those two publications is the tip of the iceberg of problematic behaviour occurring in such locations. And, of course, while it is misconduct at US-linked sites that has so far garnered headlines, the problem is likely to be far more widespread.

Here are five takeaways from the roundtable.

1. ‘Isolated research environments’ does not just mean fieldwork

Asmeret Berhe, the director of the office of science at the US Department of Energy, opened with an observation that many of the preventative measures under discussion should not only be considered by those organising projects in remote corners of the earth.

“Isolated research environments can still exist in proximity to bustling campuses or large metropolitan areas,” Berhe said. “[They] can come in many forms, wherever people might feel threatened or unsafe because of their identity and when they can’t find others to seek help from.”

Ellen Stofan, undersecretary for science and research at the Smithsonian Institution, agreed, saying that there can be “risk…in a laboratory late in the evening or early in the morning”.

However, she added: “Remote fieldwork presents an especial risk we have to address head on.”

2. Effective systems to report harassment are vital

A key finding of the Antarctic research report was that NSF bodies lacked adequate reporting and response systems. The first point of action in the NSF’s response to that report was to set one up. The Sexual Assault/Harassment Prevention and Response office will now act as a single communication endpoint for all complaints.

While having a single communication point is sensible, so that reports of harassment do not get lost in the system, Stofan added that there should be multiple ways to reach it. For the Smithsonian this now includes “a 24-hour reporting line so that anywhere in the world, any time of day, someone can pick up a phone a report what’s happened to them”.

Of course, there is no point in having established channels for reporting harassment if researchers are unaware of them, she added. In addition to training, she said all field stations now have posters up displaying the steps to take if somebody wants to report an incident.

3. Training is essential

There was general consensus among participants that good specialist training of all staff and supervisors who work in isolated research environments was not a magic bullet, but it was nonetheless essential—“a minimum”, in Stofan’s words.

Training for those who will not be victims or perpetrators of harassment, but will become aware of it—bystander training—was deemed particularly crucial.

Amelia Shevenell, an associate professor of geological oceanography at the University of South Florida and survivor of harassment aboard Antarctic research ships, said: “We aren’t born knowing how to intervene and that is a critical part of good training—to be able to develop that sort of mental recall to be able to intervene.”

Training should be imbued with a sense of urgency, Stofan added. “We need to be training supervisors on how to have difficult conversations with people, not the 400th time but the first time [they suspect inappropriate behaviour],” she said. “How does a supervisor, a community enforce standards from the beginning, so these things don’t get to the level that they do?”

4. Power dynamics must be addressed

When it came to addressing the wider cultural issues that enabled harassment, there was broad consensus on the need to pluralise and flatten the linear and hierarchal power structures that exist in isolated research units—and within science more generally.

In Stofan’s words, victims will often not report harassment “because they feel the harasser has power over their career and they fear retaliation”. This is, of course, often a legitimate fear. To deal with this, Stofan said, the Smithsonian had begun breaking up reporting lines so that there is at least two people for a staff member to turn to in the event of harassment.

Both Stofan and Shevenell referenced a 2021 article in the journal Issues in Science and Technology by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the managing director of the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University, that argued it was time for science to rid itself of the hero model.

In the article, Elkins-Tanton argued this was as much to improve the quality of science than anything else. The roundtable participants reasoned that having teams with several leaders and mentors should also help reduce the power imbalances that allow harassing behaviour to continue.

5. Now is the time to discuss and examine the complex issues around this topic

When Marinelli said that what has emerged about harassment in isolated environments is only “the tip of the iceberg”, she clarified that we are starting to hear of “very highly visible, extraordinarily damaging activities that tend to make headlines and are often criminal in nature”.

Even if such offences are not addressed in court, the responsible bodies will have a disciplinary procedure to deal with those, she added. (Although, as others pointed out, this too was frequently weak.) But “below the waterline”, Marinelli said, there was a vast amount of assault and harassment that was happening that was not so immediately visible but was nonetheless extremely damaging. This included gender harassment and “conduct which is hostile, exclusionary”. This, Marinelli urged, needed more attention.

But dealing with it can be even harder than dealing with the most flagrant cases. Erika Marín-Spiotta, professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, asked: “What happens if there is not a finding of a violation of a code of conduct but there’s knowledge [of problematic conduct from an individual] and there are decades of evidence of harassment?”

There was consensus among attendees that it was presently too easy for such people—mostly, but not always, men—to slip through the cracks, and it became easier the more powerful they were. The institutions that employed them had a habit of turning a blind eye as long as the reputational damage they caused could be limited and did not exceed the reputational benefit they brought via their renown, the participants warned.

“How do we make sure [these people] don’t keep being recognised as leaders and keep getting funding?” Marín-Spiotta asked. This is an urgent question without an adequate answer.

The post Freezing out harassment in remote research environments appeared first on Research Professional News.

How a PhD student followed the learning curve to win a Leakey Foundation grant

Funding for research on human evolution that will cover both palaeoanthropology and behavioural studies is hard to come by, which makes the US-based Leakey Foundation’s work highly valuable. The foundation’s Research Grants scheme is open to bids from scientists anywhere in the world and encourages applications from early-career researchers. PhD candidates can apply for up to $20,000 while senior scientists and post-doctoral researchers can ask for up to $30,000. There are two rounds of funding each year and the next deadline is 10 January.

In November 2020, Funding Insight caught up with Matilda Brindle, then a PhD student at University College London and now an assistant researcher there, following her Leakey Foundation grant win. She spoke about her attitude to her first grant application and also her approach to studying and communicating a topic that the general public might view as eccentric—her PhD was on masturbation in primates.

Top tips

• Treat reviewers’ comments as input to improve your submission.
• Stress how your bid matches the funder’s remit, especially in parts that do not align superficially.
• Highlight previous work showing that you are uniquely positioned to undertake the project.
• Ask for feedback from collaborators, peers and colleagues.

The Leakey Foundation is a California-based not-for-profit organisation that funds research related to human origins and evolution. Its research grants cover research expenses directly related and essential to projects for early-career researchers. The foundation issues a call twice a year, with the next deadlines on 10 January and 15 July 2021. Researchers affiliated with an academic or research institution anywhere in the world may apply.

As Paddy Moore, the foundation’s grants and programme officer, explained in Funding Insight in 2016, grants tend to fall into two major categories: palaeoanthropology—including fossil excavations, DNA studies and molecular anthropology—and behavioural studies investigating all aspects of behaviour in primates, including humans.

Matilda Brindle, a PhD student at University College London, won $14,700 for a project whose unlikely focus is masturbation among monkeys.

Question time

Brindle’s PhD centres on the evolution of masturbation in primates, including humans. Masturbation, Brindle says, is something of a puzzle for evolutionary theorists. It is energetically costly behaviour and therefore “shouldn’t be retained by evolution if it doesn’t have a benefit to the individual”—so what is that benefit?

As for Brindle’s choice of study subjects—macaques—she says: “Masturbation, like other sexual behaviour, is difficult to study in humans because of the cultural taboos that surround it, which means that people are often reluctant to be totally open about it. Non-human primates, on the other hand, aren’t burdened by any of these taboos and so make great research subjects.”

Brindle’s successful bid came off the back of two failed pitches to the funder. Luckily, she had the self-assurance to be spurred on by those failed bids to improve her applications the next time around. “Responding to reviewer comments is something most people will have experience of from writing scientific papers, and I did not treat the grant application process differently,” she says. “The peer review process allowed me to improve the quality of my research proposal and helped me become confident that our fieldwork protocol would be a success.”

She says she knew that persistence would be important and that she has since been told that it is very rare for applicants to get their first Leakey proposal funded.

Her first bid had six pages of reviewer feedback. She read it all carefully. That some reviewers knew first-hand the island where she planned to do the fieldwork meant their advice was particularly useful, she adds.

Clear view

The foundation’s website advises applicants to state clear, testable hypotheses and specifies that “all applicants must explicitly demonstrate that the research is related to understanding human evolution”.

Brindle’s task to achieve these goals was complicated by the fact that she had three parallel hypotheses for the evolutionary function of masturbation in male macaques to examine: that it boosts their arousal, that it refreshes sperm supply and that it offers a remedy to sexually transmitted diseases.

Whether the monkeys masturbate to ejaculation, and whether they do so before or after sex, would provide evidence to test all three hypotheses. “We thought it’d be a really nice study system to have these three interacting hypotheses with separate predictions,” she says.

“We made really clear that people had conducted similar data collection and that it would work. We had really clear hypotheses and clear predictions and underlined how we would test each of those predictions, down to the statistical analysis we would use.”

Shoring up the theoretical grounding of her proposal was made more difficult by the dearth of systematic studies looking at masturbation in primates. However, Brindle used a database of the scant masturbation literature built for her PhD, which may have helped convince reviewers that she was uniquely well positioned to carry out this research. Brindle says she was also careful to explain why macaques were a suitable model for ancient human masturbation, citing the similar size of males and females and their habit of living in mixed groups.

Ask around

She adds that over the course of her three applications, she became increasingly aware of the importance of input from peers. “Asking for feedback from collaborators, peers and colleagues is so useful when writing a grant application. It’s easy to miss little mistakes, and sometimes even the bigger picture, when you’ve spent a long time working on something—getting a second or third opinion can make a huge difference.”

She gives particular thanks to her collaborator James Higham, associate professor at New York University, who gave her “insights into how to make my proposal stronger, as well as more technical details like what would constitute a reasonable budget and how we will analyse our data after the field season”.

Brindle’s project involves fieldwork on Cayo Santiago, an islet off the east coast of Puerto Rico. It is home to macaque colonies and an overseas territory of the United States. Unfortunately, however, UK Foreign Office advice against non-essential travel due to Covid-19 invalidated the insurance provided to Brindle by University College London. A separate constraint is that the mating season of the isolated troops of rhesus macaque monkeys on the island peaks from January to April.

“Whilst I could probably get away with going in the summertime Covid-wise, the macaques won’t be masturbating frequently then,” says Brindle. “Macaques do occasionally masturbate outside of the peak mating season, but not enough to systematically study.” Luckily, the foundation was happy to offer an extension to the grant period, although the project must wind up before the end of Brindle’s doctoral training.

Brindle also mentions the importance of one of her collaborators being one of the field managers on Cayo Santiago. The fact that he was able to provide copies of the requisite permits and explain the facilities available—which included a comprehensive genetic database of the monkeys—was very helpful, she says.

Does Brindle have any advice to other young scientists who are working on what the general public might perceive as eccentric topics? In her experience, a frank, straight-faced approach is best: “I’m always very upfront about what I study. I try to tackle it with a sense of humour, but not making any smutty jokes at the expense of the topic.”

The post From the archive: Let your bid evolve appeared first on Research Professional News.

Cancer Research UK readies for next year’s Cancer Grand Challenges call

Just over seven years ago, Cancer Research UK announced that it would be launching a grand challenges international funding scheme, which would offer successful teams more money, more time and more scope to get to grips with some of cancer research’s most intractable problems.

Since then, there have been three grand challenges funding calls, with 11 projects funded and more than 700 scientists involved. To give a further idea of the size of these projects, the four winning projects of the most recent call will receive a total of $100 million in funding.

Ahead of the fourth call, which is set to launch in March 2023, CRUK and its partners have set up a suggestions box in the lobby and are asking all those with experience of cancer care or research to come forward with what they think the programme—now named simply Cancer Grand Challenges—should tackle next. You’ll have to move fast, though, as submissions close on 28 November.

To help any researchers mulling over a possible suggestion, David Scott, director of Cancer Grand Challenges at CRUK, spoke about the history of the challenges at the charity, why it continues to pursue them as part of its strategy and, for those wondering if they might be part of a bid in the next round, what the winning teams to date have understood about the scheme.

How did grand challenges come to play a role in CRUK’s offering?

It happened when we were reviewing our funding offer. There was a lot of discussion with the external cancer research community nationally and internationally and we really felt that there was space in our portfolio for a challenge-based initiative, which we hadn’t had previously. It was then logical to think that if we were going to go down that road, why would we restrict that only to the UK? Why not go international? Today, the concept is very much the same as when it started. We’re trying to make progress against the most complex problems in cancer via international, team-oriented science. 

How have the calls unfolded?

Under the umbrella of the CRUK Grand Challenges initiative, we ran two funding rounds, and across those we funded seven teams with several different partners, including KWF Dutch Cancer Society and the [US-based] Mark Foundation for Cancer Research. The programme then evolved to become Cancer Grand Challenges, which represents a foundational long-term partnership between CRUK and the National Cancer Institute and other foundations as well. The first funding round ultimately funded four teams, which were announced in June this year. Currently we have 11 teams working on 10 challenges involving scientists from 10 different countries. And of course, we’re now running the consultation for the next one.

Tell me about that.

We have a scientific committee that ultimately recommends which challenges will form the funding call. But it’s important that we throw this open to the community in the broadest sense—that includes scientists, other funding agencies, patients and the advocate community. We need to bring their ideas into the mix as to what the tough, complex problems in cancer that require this international approach are.

What has the grand challenges intiative brought to CRUK?

To be honest it’s less about CRUK and more about the research community we’ve historically funded. Science is collaborative and scientists instinctively want to collaborate with their peers. One of the barriers that’s traditionally got in the way of that happening is that most funding agencies don’t operate internationally. We’ve been able to provide a new avenue to facilitate international collaboration with this approach. I get a lot of positive feedback about the opportunity this provides for scientists to collaborate with international peers and get joint funding. 

What results has the programme produced this far?

The teams funded in round one haven’t finished their work, so there’s no formal readout as yet. But, yes, this is the big question, isn’t it? You set a challenge, you gave teams considerable funds to solve the challenge… Has it worked? We’ll start a thorough analysis of the teams from the first round next year as they start to wrap up their work.

But our initial metrics, and also anecdotal evidence, suggest that, yes, this is very high quality research that is progressing well in the specific challenge areas. For example, in the first round, one of the challenges was to develop a way to map tumours at a molecular and cellular level, so a ‘tumour atlas’ approach. We funded two teams for that challenge. Anecdotally, those teams are at the point where they have both constructed different methodologies to map those tumours, reflective of the different interdisciplinary approaches taken.

Have you found that the grand challenges approach fosters more adventurous interdisciplinarity?

Interdisciplinarity is something we’re trying to push where it’s important for the problem. As an example, one of the teams working on tumour mapping is led by Greg Hannon, at the University of Cambridge. He is actually involving an astronomy department to bring in their methodologies on how you map the stars and apply it to how you map data points for a tumour. For the other mapping project, Josephine Bunch at the National Physical Laboratory is an expert in mass spectrometry who had not worked in cancer before and is bringing her instrumentation expertise, working with cancer biologists.

Do you think that the rise of grand-challenges-style funding is in danger of squeezing out researcher-led, curiosity-driven schemes?

For a large organisation like CRUK, as for most other funding agencies, I’d argue you need a sweep of different mechanisms to fund science. We have an intramural programme, which is very much investigator-led, and an extramural programme and whole range of funding schemes to support career development, and those to support development of drugs and diagnostics. Cancer Grand Challenges fits into this wider portfolio. It represents 5-10 per cent of CRUK’s overall portfolio.

In addition, while we do set the broad questions, I’d argue the approach is still investigator-led. We don’t tell investigators how to solve these problems. We throw these challenges out to the community and what happens is based on how the community chooses to address them.

Is there an approach to responding to the grand challenges call which tends to favour success?

The scale of funding that is on offer does provide the opportunity for scientists to think extremely creatively about what they can put forward. All of the teams we’ve funded have embraced that. In addition there’s a certain degree of tech innovation and development that has been an important component each time.

In terms of the composition of the teams, we’re looking for teams that have embraced those wider possibilities and look far and wide in terms of the team members and expertise they bring on board. That’s a large part of the idea—you can’t just be a team from the same university or country even.

Added to that, and we pushed this in the last round, is that the teams might put some of the junior faculty in prominent roles. This shouldn’t be seen as something that’s just about funding the more established investigators. Of course, there are many of those involved, but increasingly more junior members are stepping up.

The post Up to the challenge appeared first on Research Professional News.

‘Science showoff’ Steve Cross on using humour wisely

To accompany our interview with Tom Richards, recipient of a grant from the Royal Society’s public engagement fund and originator of the ‘Tadpole Doctor’ project tracking a new disease in larval frogs, we republish some serious advice from a public engagement funny-man, Steve Cross.

Cross is the founder of Science Showoff, which aims to take science engagement from learned societies to pub basements—a few steps down in literal terms, but maybe not in figurative ones?

In this interview from February 2019, he promises that public engagement can benefit from the incorporation of humour, but “how can I be funny?” is not a good starting point to achieve that end.

Steve’s top tips

• Comedy can be a great help in public engagement as it builds a connection between the researcher and the public.
• When searching for comedy material, think about how your work affects you personally.
• Do not think you are going to be a gifted comedian straight away; comedy is a skill that takes a lot of practice.
• When addressing delicate topics, the targets of any jokes should be people of higher status.

Steve Cross understands that scientists and the general public may have certain misgivings about ‘science comedy’, but he is indignant in its defence: “We’re not cynically slipping science facts in as people do comedy, we’re building relationships between audiences and researchers.”

And, he argues, science really needs a push to get it to meet large sections of the general public. At present, most public engagement exercises are consumed by a small minority of the population. “There’s a group of people and they go to everything science-related,” he says. “They watch [BBC science television programme] Horizon, they go to science festivals.”

Opening line

Cross first hit upon the idea of deploying comedy to drive engagement during his time as head of public engagement at University College London. He was challenged by his steering group at UCL to find a project where people between the ages of 18 and 40 could listen to researchers.

Working with comedy producer Miriam Miller, he put together the template for Bright Club, a training programme and comedy night where researchers perform alongside a professional comedian.

The concept has since spread across the UK and Europe and now pops up further afield without any involvement by Cross or UCL. “I don’t even know who started the one in France, for example,” he says.

Cross left UCL in 2015, after seven years, to become a freelance science engagement consultant and trainer. He continues to travel worldwide with his comedy workshops.

“All the stuff I do is one thing, even though it’s a lot of different things,” he says. “It’s all helping clever people to be funny.”

Breaking it down

His most prominent project these days, Science Showoff, started as a themed version of the Bright Clubs but has morphed to include one-off panel shows and improvised comedy games.

Cross sees the Bright Clubs, which are set up by autonomous groups of researchers rather than as part of a national scheme, as part of a wider trend. “Science engagement used to be run by three or four big organisations, but big programmes didn’t actually connect with most researchers.”

Cross expects public engagement to become “much more granular”, with researchers choosing from a wider array of approaches, better tailored to their personalities and the nature of their research. These smaller-scale, more local forms of engagement are being encouraged by many universities, he adds, as they enhance links with local communities.

So how can researchers bolster their own public engagement work with a bit of comedy? Cross’s top-line advice runs as follows: “If you want to be funny about your research, don’t start by thinking ‘How can I be funny?’ Start by thinking: ‘How do I grab attention?’”

Hitting a funny bone

“I encourage people to think about their emotional reactions to the work that they do,” he adds. “That’s the hardest bit, because researchers are taught to do exactly the opposite. The questions to ask are: What in work has made me happy? What in work has made me sad? What felt awkward? When did it feel really strange?”

These relatable starting points can form the kernel around which a few minutes of great comedy can be written, he says. “If you start a set by saying the ninth digit of Pi is seven, I might titter in a Radio Four way, but if you start by telling me about the raw misery of doing your work, I can really relate to that.”

Cross says that his own comedy material mostly stems from whatever he’s living through at the time. He scheduled this interview in a brief window of time in the midst of looking after his newborn twins. “Because I’ve been mostly thinking about parenting for the last two months, it’s been very hard to come up with material about anything else,” he says. 

True to form, Cross has recently set up a parenting-themed comedy night. “I’ve got comedians who are parents. I book them and pay them to do material about parenting so that I can learn about it,” he says happily.

No laughing matter

Returning to science-related material, Cross says that the most frequent mistake researchers make when trying comedy for the first time is deciding they are going to be brilliant. “I do get people who turn up and are like, ‘Steve, I know you’re teaching us how comedy works, but I want to do something that throws all of that away.’ Comedy is a learned set of skills, like anything else. You can’t run before you can walk, you’re not born with natural genius.”

Deploying humour when you work in a sombre research area is still possible, Cross says, but it has to be done tactfully. The key, he says, is to make the target of any jokes somebody of higher status than the researcher on stage. “People have done sets where they talk about maternal death in developing countries,” he recalls. “The trick is you don’t do jokes at the expense of dying mothers.”

It’s also important to remember that what goes down well with one audience might not work with another, Cross adds. He recently went to Nagoya, Japan, to run a comedy workshop with both Japanese and non-Japanese researchers. “One of the Japanese researchers just launched straight into a joke about how fat his PhD supervisor is, who was in the room and laughed at it,” says Cross. “It was a lot crueller than what I would do.”

When used well, humour can greatly improve public engagement, Cross concludes, but a working knowledge of how to deploy comedy can also help researchers in many other areas of their professional lives, not least when it comes to funding. “If you can be funny at the right moment, it’s easier to get the budget allocated where you want it,” he says.

Cross does not say that this might not be the right time to remark on your supervisor’s corpulence, but it’s probably safe to assume that’s the case.

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Know what you’re signing up to by familiarising yourself with this vital document

I have a confession. I never read the tenancy agreement when we moved into our rented house. I’m not saying I didn’t look at it at all; I skimmed it, checked that our names were spelled correctly and that the address was correct. But I was tired after all the hassle it took to get to the point of signing the contract and I just wanted to move in. This wasn’t my first rental rodeo, I thought; I’d survived previous rides unscathed and besides, aren’t all tenancy agreements pretty much the same?

Summer came, and the letting agent visited to do the first of the biannual house inspections. I wasn’t expecting that, though it was in the contract. They tried to tell us off for the state of the front garden, which, admittedly, was not pristine. But in our defence, it was mostly weeds when we moved in. So I read the contract, and the fairly detailed inventory we’d been given when moving in. I quoted both of these to the letting agent and made it clear that they were holding us to a higher standard than the contract allowed. They haven’t tried to tell us off since.

Checking it over

Like moving house, applying for research funding can be a surprisingly drawn-out and tiring process, but one with a dollop of excitement and purpose when you get a successful outcome. When a project is awarded, and you get to the point where the funder is ready to issue the contract, you will find that having a colleague who is trained to read and understand these often lengthy documents can help you get to grips both your rights and obligations and therefore help ensure the project runs smoothly.

Often, a researcher will forward me a contract saying, “I’ve had a look and it’s all fine”. Usually this means that they have looked at it in the way that I looked at my tenancy agreement, with only a skim over the terms. Other times, a researcher will tell me how important it is for her to be able to publish the results of the study. Or, anxious not to disrupt a relationship with a funder, for him to ensure that the company’s confidential information is protected.

I don’t expect academics to know everything that goes into a contract (or why). That’s my job. But a contract is an integral part of a research project and it’s always a good idea if the researcher(s) leading that project has had a good look at it. One of the barriers to reading a contract is unfamiliarity with the format. So, in these two articles, I’ll explain how to read a contract, how the parts fit together, why some things are important even when they seem like window dressing, and look at how a research contract can be different to a services or consultancy agreement.

Start at the beginning

As Fräulein Maria sang, let’s start at the very beginning—it’s a very good place to start. However, with a contract that isn’t necessarily true. As we will see as we go through, a contract is not a linear document meant to be read from page 1 to page 36. Rather, it’s circular, with clauses cross-referenced against, and building upon, each other.

A contract starts with the party names. This is the proper legal name of the organisations that are entering into the contract and it’s important to get it right, as later we will be required to warrant, or promise, that we are authorised to enter into the contract; cases have been lost in court when people got the party name wrong. You won’t end up in court if you put Oxford University instead of The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford (and anyway, the contracts manager at Oxford will correct that). But the contract should be with the university itself, and not just with your department, because your department isn’t a legal entity with authorisation to enter into a contract.

Next come the recitals. These are not legally binding, but they offer the chance to explain why the parties are entering into the contract in the first place. Think of the opening to a certain American 80s sitcom: “Now, this is a story all about how… a group of academics submitted a proposal for a project entitled X, which was awarded by the funder on 1 August 2022”.

Recitals can be useful when certain things need to be explained, for example if one (or more!) of the researchers has moved institution since the application went in. Remember, the contract will be referred to by various teams at each organisation to ensure that they comply with the obligations (and reap the benefits). So a person not connected with the project needs to be able to pick it up and understand what it is about.

Speaking confidentially

Let’s skip ahead to confidentiality. This is the part of a contract that industry partners in particular will be interested in. For a contracts manager, the wording here tends to be fairly generic and standard, but it’s an essential part of the contract. In a previous column I discussed the value of having a standalone non-disclosure agreement (NDA) when you want to have preliminary discussions with someone. But when you’ve passed the discussion phase and have developed a project plan and budget, a simple NDA will no longer cut it. It’s time to set up a project agreement.

The confidentiality clause is a kind of condensed NDA. It sets out the criteria for what is to be designated as confidential information and the very specific set of circumstances in which that information might be disclosed to third parties. Sometimes I have been asked to sign an NDA in addition to the project agreement. This is not necessary, as the confidentiality clause in the project contract will ensure that the information is protected. The project contract should supersede a previous NDA so that everything is contained in the one document, otherwise no one will know which contract they should refer to.

The confidentiality clause requires the parties not to disclose the information each has received from the other(s). To do so means that at the very least you are in breach of the agreement. However, there are certain exemptions to this rule, setting out the specific circumstances in which you might disclose the information without getting into trouble.

I am providing you with as exciting a cliffhanger as contract law has to offer when I say that you will have to tune in next time to find out what these exceptions are. And you will also be treated to the exciting conclusion of our discussion of contractual anatomy.

Stephanie Harris is a contracts manager at City, University of London. She writes here in a personal capacity.

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What should a researcher, embarking on a long and winding academic career, take with them?

Today’s aspiring researcher needs a sharp mind and keen analytic skills. The ability to read, write and do basic mathematics will also help enormously. But what else? What should the hopeful researcher be loading into their backpack for the research journey?

I propose 10 items.

A jug of persistence and a bottle of resilience

History is written by the winners, and those winners typically grasp the opportunity to make it all seem as easy and natural as possible. They want the power of their ideas to shine—who doesn’t?—so they let you believe that trifles such as funding, gruelling exploration and the final dazzling outcome all fell together naturally.

Of course, normally it never works like that. It’s not that the truth is anything to be ashamed of. Usually the reality involves toil, sweat and persistence in the face of rejection. And, even more commendably, it requires the resilience to pick oneself up and carry on. If you believe that your thing is worth doing, you have to hold onto that and not be dissuaded by the mean, jealous or small-minded.

A nice website

If history is written by the winners, that only happens after they’ve won. In the meantime, they should take care to have a nice website, full of interesting stuff. How does anybody in the world know who you are? By stumbling across you in person or happening to see one of your journal articles? No, you have to take charge of this yourself by having a website heaving with valuable delights.

Then you need to get people to look at this site, using whatever means are at your disposal. This will almost certainly involve pointing to it as part of your useful existence on social media. You can go about this by providing interesting comments, pointers and insight on social media, rather than plastering it with adverts for your website. If people like your intelligent commentary, then some of them will look you up.

Lemon drizzle cake

Research is about collaboration. It’s not especially likely that all the greatest ever ideas reside in your own head—I mean, what are the chances?—so combining your own skills and insights with those of others is likely to pay off. Even if you’re the world’s biggest brainbox, you are probably lacking in some other department. Therefore, you’ve got to get along with others. How? Cake.

I suggest lemon drizzle cake. Everybody likes that and Marks and Spencer do a good one that is probably cheaper than the one-person latte you just enjoyed. And think—that cake alone might launch a fruitful collaboration of up to six people.

A flagon of reputation

Reputation goes up when you have made some valuable research contributions to your field. That’s straightforward. So does reputation go down when you haven’t? No. It merely remains the same. Reputation goes down when you are known to be someone who cancels things, hates students, or networks only for selfish purposes.

So the variables that actively drive your reputation upwards or downwards are not the same. Of course, you want to be doing the good stuff that makes it go up, but also make sure that you don’t do the bad stuff that makes it go down. Am I saying you’ve got to do academic work of the highest quality, and be nice? Yes.

A copy of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

In which we discover that the reason nobody likes your work is because you are incredibly cutting-edge and therefore a painful thorn to the carefully established status quo. You’re pushing the paradigms to breaking point. Good news for patient practitioners: everybody hates you now, but in three short decades you’ll have the last laugh.

A copy of The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper

Usually considered the opposite of Kuhn, because people think Popper said that scientists just find out facts and write them down. But he didn’t say that at all. We keep Popper in our backpack to remind ourselves that we don’t actually have to get stuff right—we only need to be making testable propositions. This can sometimes be comforting.

A thesaurus and a telephone

You need a thesaurus so that you can fill your work with really hard words that nobody can understand, in order to demonstrate your commitment to academia, right? Wrong. Precisely the opposite. Clarity of communication, so that non-specialists can understand what you are talking about, is absolutely essential.

Even within your field, things that are nice to read are always going to make people happier than things that are horrible to read. This can hardly be a surprise. The clues are in the adjectives. If clear writing does not come naturally to you, use a thesaurus to turn the long and weird words in your writing into more normal ones. Then use the phone to call your friendliest non-academic relative and see how much of your prose you can read to them before they hang up.

Paracetamol

Because there will be headaches, I promise you.

David Gauntlett is Canada research chair at the Faculty of Communication and Design, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

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A sceptical medical establishment meant Barry Marshall found alternative ways to fund his groundbreaking research

This week’s archive selection is intended as a boost to all researchers currently struggling to make headway. Barry Marshall’s tale of the funding setbacks that led the way to his Nobel Prize are as engaging as the famous story of the personal experiment by which he most convincingly evidenced his theory that bacterial infection was the root cause of most stomach ulcers.

Barry Marshall has one of the best-known stories about winning a Nobel Prize. In 1984, frustrated that his work wasn’t being taken seriously enough by his peers, Marshall drank a culture of bacteria that he was convinced were the cause of chronic gastritis and stomach ulcers.

Sure enough, after ingesting Helicobacter pylori, he developed gastritis. Two decades later Marshall was awarded the Nobel with his collaborator Robin Warren for revolutionising the treatment of stomach ulcers.

He had started working on Helicobacter in 1981 at the Royal Perth Hospital but didn’t manage to secure a grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council until 1984 and, even then, not a very big one.

“They didn’t believe that I’d be able to do it, so they only funded me for one year out of three,” Marshall says. The budget of around A$50,000 for a clinical trial to test antibiotics for the treatment of ulcers included Marshall’s salary but little else and the NHMRC asked him to give a progress report at six months to be considered for further funding.

Home help

Another side-effect of the scepticism he faced from a medical establishment was that, from the earliest days of his research, Marshall didn’t rely only on public funding. The NHMRC had refused Marshall funding to develop a blood test for ulcers, but by that stage he had already been developing his own diagnostic test for Helicobacter.

“I sort of got a waiver to keep it for myself, if I wanted to do it,” Marshall says. “Nobody believed me so they said: ‘You can patent that yourself Barry.’”

“So my father and I just did that—we did some development work in the laundry at home using my dad’s pool chemicals,” he recalls. Marshall’s father, who worked as an engineer for a chicken factory, stumped up around A$3,000 to get a patent, which Marshall says was more than he could afford at that stage.

In addition, Marshall was already tapping up pharmaceutical companies for funding and in 1984 had received some support from Pfizer and Abbott, and Smith, Kline and French. His diagnostic test was also picked up for commercialisation by a young biotech company in Western Australia, and he struck up a relationship with the company Procter and Gamble, makers of the antacid Pepto-Bismol, who were interested in his work.

He says his approach for getting industry interest is that, once a patent is filed, the best thing to do is leak a little bit of information in the 12 months before the patent gets published to potential sponsors. For researchers thinking about commercialising he advises going first to the company at the top of the market.

“Bust your gut to try and get through to the person who might be interested or make the decisions about new products,” he suggests. Failing that, Marshall says, go to the main competitor or companies that want to challenge the big guys.

Mix your bag

Despite his early push towards commercialisation, he was still keen on public or philanthropic funding since there was no expectation from such funders that they would have any equity in products that might come out of the research. “They don’t want a piece of the company, they just want you to succeed,” he says, “so it’s nice to have the double mix, if possible.”

In 1986, Marshall moved to the United States to take up a research fellowship at the University of Virginia, where he continued his two-pronged approach to finding funding, though he found securing grants from the US National Institutes of Health was a challenge, despite having run a successful clinical trial in Australia.

“I started off applying for funds at too high a level,” Marshall says, finding that his previous work made little impression on American reviewers. At the same time, he was calling up pharmaceutical companies, finding that his proximity to big US companies opened doors.

“If you’re a bit lucky, you can get a grant with a phone call in an afternoon, if it’s the right time,” he says, recalling landing funding from Abbott in the space of a few hours. Though he points out that his previous relationship with them probably helped.

Tough timescales

Marshall says that with few Australia-based pharmaceutical companies, the options for young investigators are very different, although he strikes an optimistic note about the growth of philanthropic foundations.

“In Western Australia, it’s a lot better than it was and there’s some wonderful philanthropists around here,” he says, having received some local philanthropic funding for some of his newer projects.

Marshall now has a research centre named after him at the University of Western Australia, having moved back in 1996 and stringing together an impressive array of grants from public funders. But he laments the long timescales of funding rounds that early career researchers have to contend with, which mean it can take up to a year between submitting a proposal and starting a grant.

“It’s so frustrating at that stage,” Marshall says. “Are you going to try and run off the smell of an oily rag for 12 months in the hope you get funded?”

Don’t believe the hype

Despite his own success in commercialising his work from an early stage, he warns young investigators not to get too drawn into the hype around the potential of new discoveries without putting in the hard yards.

“If you’re a really honest, hardworking scientist, you don’t want to be talking to investors and hyping it up too much until you’ve got it,” he says. “Every day you turn on the news, somebody somewhere has discovered a fungus growing on a rock which is going to cure cancer—the real solid ones are coming from somebody who slaved away and got his PhD, did a little bit of a postdoc and got it to work.”

Marshall recalls that in his early days he was working long hours, every day of the week but that with the support from people like his own dad, he knew he had a product that worked. Despite being considered a maverick at that time, he says he was fearless because young investigators have everything to play for and little to lose.

“You can actually stick your neck out and go 100 per cent for something as you haven’t got anything else on the go,” Marshall advises. “If you fail, no one ever heard of it, and if you succeed, it’s great.”

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Defaulting to generalities in bids is a mistake—here’s how to avoid it

Researchers are not normally people with much time on their hands, and when you add in the motivational erosion that might occur after a few funding knockbacks, it’s easy to understand why some might just reach for a chunk of generic text to slot into the ‘less important’ sections of the application form. But in so doing, they are greatly reducing their chances of success, warns Adam Golberg. In this article, first published in November 2018, he identifies some tell-tale boilerplate phrases that should be avoided and discusses what to write in their place.

Given the ever-expanding requirements of most research funding applications, many applicants may be tempted to pay less attention to some sections of the form. This could lead them to write text so generic, so bland, that it could be cut and pasted into almost any other proposal with minimal editing.  

Researchers should resist that temptation. Using text that looks like it could be cut and pasted between proposals suggests that they haven’t thought through the specifics of their project or fellowship, making it appear less plausible as a result.

No substance

I frequently see paragraphs that are so empty of content that they make my heart sink. For example:

• “We will present the findings at major international conferences and publish in world-class journals.”
• “The findings will be of interest to researchers in A, B and C.”
• “This is a methodologically innovative, timely and original project that represents a step change in our understanding.”
• “We will set up a project Twitter account and a blog, and with the support of our outstanding press office, write about our research for a general audience.”
• “Funding will enable me to lead my own project for the first time and support me in making the transition to independent researcher.”

These claims might well be true and can read well in isolation. But they’re only superficially plausible, and while they contain buzzwords that applicants think funders are after, they’re entirely free of content, evidence and argument. I’ll challenge each of these examples later in this article. 

Losing out

Why should researchers care? Because their proposal doesn’t just have to be good enough to meet a certain standard, it has to be better than its rivals. If there are sections of the application that could be transferred into any rival application, this might be a sign that the section is not written as strongly or distinctively as it could be. The author of that application therefore does not have a competitive edge.

Cut-and-paste sections may be actively harming researchers’ chances. When compared directly with more thoughtful and detailed sections in rival applications they can look weak and lazy, especially if they don’t take full advantage of the wordcount.

Such texts tend to appear in the trickier sections of application forms and sections that get less attention such as: dissemination, impact plan, academic impact, personal development plan, data management plan and choice of host institution. Sometimes these generic statements emerge because the applicants don’t know what to write, and other times it’s because it’s all they can be bothered to write for a section they wrongly regard as less important.

Give evidence

Researchers should give these sections the time, attention and thought they deserve. There should be detail, specifics, argument and evidence. Applicants should find things to say that only apply to their proposal. If they don’t know how to answer a question strongly, they should get advice from research development colleagues.

The more editing it would take to put it into someone else’s bid, the better. Here are some thoughts on improving the earlier examples.

“We will present the findings at major international conferences and publish in world-class journals.”

I find it hard to understand vagueness about plans for academic impact. Even if the research findings may have an impact on how they are  disseminated, it’s surely not too much to expect some target journals and conferences to be named. If applicants can’t demonstrate knowledge of realistic targets, it undermines their credibility.

“The findings will be of interest to researchers in A, B and C.”

I’d ban the phrase “of interest to” when explaining potential academic impact. That tells the reader nothing about the likely academic impact—who will cite the proposed work and what difference is it expected to make to the field?

“This is a methodologically innovative, timely and original project that represents a step change in our understanding.”

Who will use the methods and frameworks? If all research is standing on the shoulders of giants, how much further can future researchers see perched atop of this particular work? How exactly does the proposed project go beyond the state of the art, and what might be the new state of the art after the project?

“We will set up a project Twitter account and a blog, and with the support of our outstanding press office, write about our research for a general audience.”

If researchers are talking about engaging with social media, they should write how they are going to find readers and/or followers. What’s their plan for their presence in terms of the existing ecosystem of social media accounts that are active in this area? Who are the current key influencers?

“Funding will enable me to lead my own project for the first time and support me in making the transition to independent researcher.”

How does funding take the applicant to what’s next? What’s the path from the conclusions of this project to their future research agenda?  

Looking for cut-and-paste text—and improving it where it is found—is an excellent review technique to polish draft applications and to improve those harder-to-write sections. Yes, hammering out the detail is more difficult, but it could give applicants an advantage in the race for funding.

Adam Golberg is research development manager (charities) in the faculty of social sciences at the University of Nottingham.

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A well-fitted fellowship for art and visual culture researchers

Few institutions are as generous as the Clark Art Institute in giving researchers of art and visual culture the time, space and resources they need, Barbara Penner, one of the 2019 intake of fellows, told us in this article published that year.

This year the institute has 10 fellowships available with different subject emphases. All fellowships are worth up to $30,000 each per semester and provide on-site accommodation, office space and library access. Travel to and from the institute will be reimbursed for the scholar and an accompanying family member, and visa support may be provided. The deadline is 15 October.

Those dissuaded from applying to the Clark Art Institute because of its towering reputation in the field should feel encouraged. It has one of “the most humane” application procedures that Penner had encountered, she relates.

Barbara’s top tips

• Make reference to materials in the institute’s collection and explain why you need access to them.
• Get in touch with staff at the institute to discuss your bid.
• Give specific examples of what you hope to achieve.
• Include some illustrations in your bid.

Clark Art Institute fellowships enable scholars engaged in the theory, history and interpretation of art and visual culture to spend time in residency at the institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the United States.

The institute runs eight different fellowship types for scholars in different disciplines and at various career stages. All applicants must hold a PhD or demonstrate equivalent professional experience, and they may come from academia, museums or professional backgrounds.

Fellowships are worth up to $30,000 each per semester and provide accommodation, office space and library access. Travel to and from the institute will be reimbursed for the scholar and an accompanying family member, and visa support may be provided. The next deadline for fellowship applications is 15 October.

Barbara Penner, a professor of architectural humanities at the Bartlett school of architecture at University College London, was awarded a Summer Fellowship to work on research looking at how particular social scientific research techniques inform domestic design and architectural practice.

How did your research project come about?

The work is inspired by a book called The Bathroom, by Alexander Kira, a former professor at Cornell University. It is without a doubt one of the most bizarre design books of the 20th century but considered a real classic of user-centred design. While writing my own book on the story of the modern bathroom in 2014, I became more and more intrigued by the research techniques that Kira deployed in his book. I started thinking: Where did they come from? Who else deployed them? How did he know to study the human body in the way that he did? So it was that dangling thread from my last book that eventually led to this project, which someone aptly described as a ‘study of studies’.

What does your project involve?

Essentially, it’s a study of social scientific research techniques—how they were picked up by designers and translated into the built environment—and the effects they have on that environment. Some effects are small, some are large—but we’re often unaware of the reasons why certain environments work the way they do. My particular interest is in how the human body is studied in domestic environments, because the research that has been done so far has focused more on the body in institutional settings—such as factories and prisons.

How did you find out about this fellowship scheme?

Once a year in my department, we have research mentoring—when colleagues sit down and talk through each other’s research and plans. One of my colleagues mentioned the Clark Art Institute. It turns out that quite a few UCL scholars have studied there—although they are mainly art history researchers. In fact, the Clark takes on quite a few international scholars. While I was there, there was only one American; the others were Canadian and French.

What attracted you to the scheme?

I find that more and more schemes offered by the UK research councils seem more focused on group work and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement. But sole-authored research, or individual research, is still extremely important in academia and needs to be supported. There just aren’t that many fellowships that are as open and generous as this one in terms of giving you time, space and resources, and not asking for too much in return. The Clark was amazing in that sense. They were there to support you and facilitate your project. For a start, they provide you with a fully stocked office so you’re ready to go the moment you open the door.

Did you consider any other funders for this idea?

No, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have even gone for the Clark if it hadn’t sounded so perfect. Because I have a senior management role here at UCL, I can usually only do little projects. This fit the bill in terms of offering me time and space to get my larger project off the ground. 

What does the fellowship cover?

Because it was the summer term, it didn’t come with a stipend of any sort. I think their assumption—quite rightly—is that if you are coming over the summer, you don’t need to be bought out of any teaching. But they do pay for all travel, accommodation and office space.

Do they cover accommodation for family, too?

Yes—and they could not have been more accommodating in that regard. They provided one apartment for me and even put a second one aside for my family so they could come, too. 

Could you talk me through the application process?

It was a single-stage application process. And it was actually fairly light compared with European grants, where you can spend night and day on the application. For example, they don’t require institutional approval. I think they assume that if you win a prestigious grant, your department will move heaven and earth to make it happen for you. This is very different from Europe, where almost all grants require you to provide some evidence that your department is OK with you applying and will release you.

Which elements did you bring to the fore in your proposal, and how long was it?

The proposal was about five pages, single-spaced. The Clark has one of the world’s leading art libraries and, while they don’t stipulate directly that you need to draw on their collection, I think that’s implied. So for me it felt quite important to let them know that my work had a strong visual component to it. I also wanted them to know that their resources would make a real difference to my project.

Was there anything you found challenging?

I wouldn’t say it was easy, but I thought it was one of the most humane applications I’ve done. It felt very focused on the project and the work itself. I didn’t need to supply a full CV—only a very short one. So I got the feeling they were really putting the project before the scholar.

Do you have any tips for future applicants?

Really try to show the Clark that it’s a viable project by giving specific examples of what you aim to do. Even though my larger book project isn’t as advanced as I would like, the whole project has been planned out. And I think they liked that I was able to demonstrate there was a larger project there. At one point I broke off to state, specifically: ‘In six weeks, I will be able to complete a certain section.’ And I showed exactly where this section would sit in my table of contents.

Did you get any advice from anyone during the application process?

Normally I would ask for advice, but I didn’t this time around because the project had been stewing for so long that it was already well developed.

Did you have much communication with the institute prior to your fellowship?

I asked them so many questions that they must have been sick of me—but they were lovely. For instance, I asked if there were any summer camps for my daughter. I don’t drive, so they offered to pick me up and take me to the grocery store the morning after I arrived.

What do you think made your application stand out?

I think it stood out as quite quirky, as I opened my proposal with Alexander Kira and some of his very bizarre bathroom studies, which I illustrated. In fact, I almost always illustrate my applications. People don’t often do that. But in the fields of architectural history, art history, visual culture or material culture studies, I think illustrations are quite important. If any of those happen to be your field, I recommend throwing in some good images—not gratuitously, but to add interest.

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Ruminations on the level of detail needed in a grant application—and thoughts about cake

As a research development manager, one question that I’m not asked regularly enough is how much detail is required in a grant application.

Another way to think about this question is to ask what resolution an application should be written at. And, as with much else when it comes to writing funding applications, it can only really be answered if you take into consideration the audience you’re writing for.

It’s impossible to give a complete account of what you intend to do, even for a simple research project, within the limitations of an application form. Just as it’s impractical to produce full-scale maps (as all readers of Jorge Luis Borges will appreciate), it’s also impractical to write a full-scale grant application that covers every single step. Or to expect reviewers to read and review such a document.

As no-one can ever give a full-scale account of their proposal, there must come a point at which reviewers and funders infer from what you have written that they (and you) know what you’re doing. That you and your team have the advanced skills and experience necessary to execute the detail of what you’ve proposed. Even those details that you’ve not spelled out.

As an applicant, all you can ever produce is a summary or overview. It’s important to understand this and make your peace with it. Only when applicants stop trying to cram as much detail as possible into the space allowed, and instead think strategically about how much detail to go into and where, can competitive bids begin to be forged.

Word budgets

Prosaically, how much detail you should go into in research proposals is determined by the format of the application form. For better or for worse, this is the space you have been allocated.

It’s entirely possible that the amount of space you’ve been given and the way that space is divided up isn’t optimal, or even sufficient. This is especially true with larger and more complex proposals. While bigger grants tend to have more complex forms, they’re not proportionally longer or more complex.

If a funder offers two schemes, one with twice the maximum budget of the other, it’s very unlikely to offer double the space. To turn that around, the larger and more complex your proposal, the less space you are likely to have, proportionally speaking. And that’s a challenge. But the constraints are the same for everyone, and your rivals face the same challenges.

Treat your word count as a budget and make careful and mindful choices about how to spend that budget. Which sections are more complex, more novel and need more explanation, and which are relatively straightforward? And be ready to write at a lower level of detail than perhaps you’d like, especially at the outline stage.

Ready for my close-up

Many novice applicants write in excessively granular levels of detail, zooming in so closely that non-experts cannot see the broader picture and may struggle to follow the argument of why a proposal should be funded. In response to word count pressure, such bids can end up reading more like navigation directions that omit to mention the appeal of the destination. They give too much and too little information.

The impulse to go deep into the detail is entirely understandable. Writing a grant will often ‘flush out details’, so to speak, by forcing decisions on issues not fully discussed or considered during its conception. In addition, such detail is how researchers may seek to demonstrate their competence to assessors, especially if they are in their early career stages and keen to prove themselves. But it still isn’t the right way to go.

Cakes, not sieves

Let’s consider a different kind of work package: baking a cake. I could tell you that “I will use a 20cm stainless steel sieve to hand-sift hard-wheat, organic, strong, white bread flour [and so on, for 500 words]”. This would be tedious and you would lose interest fairly soon. As I mentioned, this is both too much information and too little.

Could I just tell you that I’m going to bake a cake? Perhaps, but arguably that’s too little information. You’re probably wondering what the context is: why am I baking a cake? So I need to tell you it’s a birthday cake for a friend, and that we’re going to eat it after a celebratory dinner for eight people.

Do I need to tell you what sort of cake it is, what sort of icing? What I think makes for a good cake? Is it my friend’s favourite? Should I show I’ve researched that? Or have I prioritised inclusion in terms of dietary requirements and preferences of my guests? Do I need to explain my methods, or why I’m baking a cake rather than buying one? Or even why cake is better than ice cream?

The answer is that it depends on why I am telling you about the cake, what you need to know, how much space I have and various other forced metaphors for variations in funding schemes and application forms that I am now struggling to come up with. But to mix my metaphor with its subject, 500 words focusing on these issues will be much more useful and informative than 500 words on sieves. Also worth considering: if my Cakericulum Vitae demonstrates that I’m a competent amateur baker, why do I need to show you that I know how to make a cake?

What’s always true is that as a reader, I want to hear about the cake, not the sieve.

Zoom in, zoom out

Of course, the cake example assumes a relatively straightforward task in which there’s little or no novelty, innovation or controversy. If I were proposing a radical new cake flavour or baking method, I should expect to say more about what I’m doing that’s new, why I’m doing it, what reasons I have for thinking that it might be a good idea, and what my backup plan is if it turns out to be inedible.

Most grant proposals are a mixture of new and innovative and tried and tested methods and techniques. It’s very rare for every part of every work package to be novel – we need some knowns as reliable scaffolding as we build towards the unknown. When allocating your word budget, don’t distribute it evenly—zoom in on the detail in your innovative sections, which need greater explanation and defending, and zoom out when covering tried and tested techniques or methods.

In summary, it’s the format of the application form that determines what level of detail you should go into. You have a budget of word count to spend. Don’t get drawn deep into the detail unless there’s a clear reason for doing so, especially in the more mundane sections. Tell reviewers about the sieve only when you need to, and never at the expense of the cake.

Anyone else suddenly craving cake?

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

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Future Earth’s communication grants give scientists the chance to flex their creative muscles

Top tips

• Those with less experience of science communication are welcome to apply.
• All applicants should consider having a communications expert on their team.
• Applicants should read and adhere to the eligibility criteria.
• Applications from anywhere in the world are welcome but one third of the funding will go to projects in low- and middle-income countries.

Future Earth—a network of scientists set up by the UN to advance research in sustainability—has launched the second round of its Pathways Communication Grants, which are new this year. The grants offer small sums to help ensure that science on the development of pathways for sustainability reaches audiences beyond the scientific community. The programme supports projects that use innovative communication formats and practices to disseminate research findings.

Although financed by a collection of French funders, the grants are open to anyone, regardless of their geographical location. The call is open until 31 October and there is up to €30,000 (£26,000) available in this round. Each project can receive between €2,500 and €10,000, and Future Earth expects three or four projects to be successful.

Future Earth is governed by the International Science Council, the Belmont Forum of funders, three UN bodies, the World Meteorological Organization and the Science and Technology in Society Forum. Natalie Chong, a science officer at Future Earth, gives us the lowdown for those thinking of bidding.

How would you summarise the programme?

The programme provides financial support to researchers working on pathways to sustainability who want to increase their reach beyond the scientific community to non-academic audiences, such as practitioners, decision-makers and civil society. The grants are for projects that do this through innovative formats. The programme is quite new. It was launched at the end of last year and this is the second round.

How much funding is available?

In total for the year 2022, there is €60,000. About half of that was used for the first round, so there is about €30,000 left for this round.

What would make a proposal stand out?

Creativity and diversity. These types of grants are really few and far between, so it is an opportunity for scientists to really think outside the box and flex their creative muscles. Normally, science is communicated in the same ways, in the form of academic publications or posters. This is a chance to move beyond that and have a bit of fun with it.

That might be daunting to those with little communications experience.

Yes, we know that science communication is not really part of many scientists’ training. That is why we encourage them to team up with communication professionals. Diversity is another factor that is important to us because we want to encourage interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration. We also want diversity in terms of geography, gender and career stage. We really want to encourage a good mix of people.

But do researchers with a track record of public engagement get prioritised?

No, not at all. We really want to encourage anyone and everyone to apply. We want anyone who is keen to communicate their research. We do have two different priority groups. We have dedicated a third of the funding to projects that are led by researchers working in low- to middle-income countries. The other priority group is projects led by early career researchers. That is PhD students or researchers who have received their PhD within the last six years.

How is this scheme different from other research communications schemes that exist?

One thing that makes this scheme stand out is that it is available to anybody. There are no geographical restrictions. I think that a lot of grants are tied to a geographical location, but this is truly open.

What was the success rate in the first call?

In the first call, there were three successful projects out of around 36 proposals. That is mostly because the three projects had quite big budgets and we wanted to save some funding for the second round. For this round, we have about half of that funding left and the number of projects awarded will depend on what their proposed budgets will be. I expect this round will be similar, with maybe three or four projects selected.

How do you assess applications?

The scientific committee of the Pathways Initiative assesses the applications. That is made up of different researchers from varying disciplines. Also, there will be members on the committee who are communication professionals. Applications will be assessed on how well the proposal fits the scope of the call, the clarity of the proposal, the quality and the originality.

What is the weighting given to the project versus the people involved?

The people and the project are equally important. The scientific quality is a big factor, but we also encourage an interdisciplinary team, which means social scientists as well as natural scientists.

What mistakes did applicants make in the last round that should be avoided?

Not reading the call text thoroughly, particularly the part about the eligibility criteria. There were a lot of proposals in the last round that did not meet the basic eligibility requirements. It is really important as, otherwise, we cannot assess the proposals properly. If applicants have questions, we encourage them to contact us ahead of submission so we can avoid these issues.

Beyond eligibility, were there any other issues?

Some researchers had really good ideas but their timelines were not realistic or did not match up with their objectives. Communication professionals have the necessary skills to help them sharpen the narrative and increase the impact of their research to these non-academic communities through a cohesive communication strategy. By collaborating with communication professionals, researchers are more likely to produce a realistic timeline.

In a project team, what should the split between researchers and communicators be?

A team should mostly be researchers and then having one or two communication professionals would be great.

Do you offer any communications coaching?

There is no specific coaching but I am here to answer any questions for them, so they can just contact me directly via email.

Are you aiming to have a good geographical spread?

That would be ideal but, in the end, it comes down to the quality of the proposals. Of course, having a geographical spread will be a consideration. Last time, the awards went to a project in Uruguay, another in Australia and one was an international collaboration from researchers all over.

Could you go into some more detail on one of the projects from the last call?

The one in Australia, for example, was about fair food futures. What they proposed is having an interactive animated video and a podcast that is teaching the community about this topic and how to get involved.

The post Opportunity profile: Communicating sustainability appeared first on Research Professional News.

Early career researchers should not be expected to bid for funding with little project experience

Helping early career researchers develop viable projects before they go to search for funding is imperative, says Tseen Khoo, co-founder of Research Whisperer, in this article first published in May 2018.

When I’ve asked researchers about their funding streams, many want to talk about the projects they want grant money for. Drilling down a bit further, however, it becomes obvious that many of the projects aren’t actually projects…yet.

Some researchers have ideas for projects, while others have started initial discussions but haven’t gotten their collaborators to commit to the project yet. Some researchers have said they have a full-fledged project in their head but haven’t talked with anyone else about it. Often, even if the team has come together, the thinking around the project itself has not.

This makes it hard to talk to your university’s grants team because the research project you want funded isn’t properly baked. It’s all still a bit doughy and unformed. I’ve written before about why you should only submit golden-brown applications, and I know how much work it can take to get to that stage.

Most grants teams are fabulous and want to help you submit strong applications to those competitive funding rounds. However, it’s often neither their job nor do they have the capacity to get you to the project grant application starting block with a red-hot project and a team ready to go.

Grey areas

The problem here is the grey area of where this research development happens.

Particularly for early-career researchers who may be fresh out of their PhD, starting that next big project—without a supervisor or the scaffolding of a degree—can be a significant challenge.

Major, prestigious schemes such as the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Research Award (Decra) assume that candidates are past this stage and target researchers who have already proven themselves as independent scholars. This is a basic requirement of Decra candidates, given the high competition (it has about a 16 per cent success rate) and stated ‘excellence’ requirements in the scheme.

The skill of staging research and knowledge of the processes that this requires comes with practice. Established researchers tend to know the steps they need to take to make it to the gateway of major grants-ville, or niche grants-ville depending on the project. And there’s the rub: established researchers tend to already have a research programme and rich profile in a particular area, so that what they do next and who they might collaborate with has a logic to it.

What to do?

What early-career researchers do next can be tricky, particularly if they’re not attached to a lab or department that is offering them exciting extensions or progressive project work that allows them to build their skills, networks, and research plans. Or they’re on precarious employment and their research plans are not supported in any way.

Deb Brian’s post about building your track-record as an early-career researcher is an excellent starting point for research planning and mapping out the possibilities for funding. It’s useful for early-career researcher in the process of doing it, and for those who want their early-career researchers to succeed and, therefore, should be advocating for and providing resource and infrastructure. 

This post focuses on the steps that come before plotting out where project funding might come from. It offers two main elements that can support early-career researchers in pulling a project together in the first place, and the things that are useful for emerging researchers to look for and ask about.

Getting money to talk about it

Often, savvy departments or faculties will fund developmental activities for research. This includes building the collaborations with potential non-university partners and collaborators from other universities.

Find out whether there are schemes in place, or any discretionary funding available, for these kinds of initiatives. In Australia, there are often whole units devoted to building relationships with industry partners.

Researchers will need to have an idea of what kind of project they want to carry out, but the good thing about these schemes is that they’re for the specific nutting out or thinking through of the research project and where it might go. Even if the initial result isn’t a major project, there may be other outcomes that are valuable, such as events, presentations, knowledge transfer, small projects or funding opportunities.

Remember that anyone who gives you money wants to see good things happen because of it; be ready to talk about how much good came of it.

It would be really good to see universities recognise the highly conservative nature of most of the research they do and that, for all the rhetoric, very little is invested in truly innovative ideas or approaches. These schemes for the early stages of cohering a research project should be open to failure or complete redirection. After all, we all know that a seamless research narrative is fiction. Giving researchers the chance to try out good ideas and fail with no punitive consequences would require a sea change in academia as we know it. These instances would certainly result in important new knowledge, just not in the way we’re used to evaluating it.

Finding colleagues who care  

What early-career researchers are really hungry for is good mentorship. Strong research mentors who can be good critical colleagues about emerging projects and potential research teams are gold. If you want to grow your early-career researchers’ confidence and activity in this area, you need to ensure that there are opportunities for finding and consulting with research mentors consistently in this way.

I’m not talking about internal review panels for major grants (more on this below) but a much earlier, supportive, constructive dynamic that helps emerging researchers test out ideas and receive advice about what might or might not work. Some departmental seminars work beautifully for this, but it needs to be a prioritised, cultivated part of a unit’s research culture before it can do this.

Is there a recognised cluster of strong, established researchers with predispositions to mentoring whom early-career researchers can access and build connections with? If not, why not? Manage this so that mentoring early-career researchers is a recognised collegial necessity, not a chore or an extra-curricular role. Be open to sharing mentorship across disciplines to erode the silo mentality that’s so apparent in our universities.

Inclusive review panels

Review panels for major grants are all well and good—and can be very useful when done right—but early-career researchers can often miss the benefits because it can be a while before their momentum culminates in a major submission. At this stage, what can be good for early-career researchers who are forming their own research plans is being a part of the panel rather than in front of it.

Seeing the mechanisms of how a review panel works—warts and all—can be good education on many levels. It provides insight into the pitching of projects and their logistics, how to give and receive feedback, and what constitutes strong work. In addition, having early-career researchers on review panels can improve the behaviour of more senior researchers.

At a basic level, units need to grow a community that cares about the success of its emerging researchers and invest in proactive ways to do this. 

If these two simple components were more prevalent in our institutions, early-career researchers would have a much stronger, supported, sustainable path in developing their research programmes and plans. I know these are simple components with a complexity of implementation, but it’s worth doing and doing right.

The post From the archive: Ready to launch appeared first on Research Professional News.

Each year the Australian Research Council tries to lure researchers back home

Many of Australia’s mid-career researchers work overseas. The Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowships scheme aims, in part, to entice them back. In this article from 2017, Gerd Winter spoke to Tim Bayne, a professor of philosophy who moved back to Monash University on a fellowship.

The 2023 round of Future Fellowships will open this Autumn with a deadline likely in December. In the previous round, up to 100 fellowships were available, each worth up to A$232,481 per year for four years, depending on academic salary level. A further A$60,000 per year was available for project funding.

Being remote and relatively small in terms of population, brain drain is a perpetual issue for Australia. Faced with limited options for developing a career here, many budding researchers seek opportunities in better-resourced countries, such as the UK and the United States.

The Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowships act as a bridge for mid-career research talent from across the globe to come to our shores. Tim Bayne’s return to Australia last year is a prime example, and his biography illustrates the high level of mobility that defines many modern research stars.

Widening horizons

Educated in New Zealand, he left the country for the US with an honours degree and the support of a Fulbright scholarship, first going to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and then to the University of Arizona. There he was taken under the wing of a new recruit to the university, philosopher David Chalmers, who supervised his doctoral dissertation on consciousness. 

It was a good move, Bayne says. Chalmers was not only a very good mentor, but as his career was taking off, it helped Bayne’s career too. Chalmers went on to become one of Australia’s most influential philosophers and a leading theorist on consciousness. 

After completing his doctoral thesis, Bayne returned first to New Zealand—a condition of the Fulbright—and then moved to Australia, where he spent five years at Macquarie University in Sydney. He left for the UK after that, taking up positions first at the University of Oxford and then at the University of Manchester, where he led a European Research Council project on the structure of consciousness.

With his career taking off, he also became a chair of the philosophy of neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, while continuing his project in Manchester in a split position.

Time to return

Bayne says that he would have been happy to stay on, but when the opportunity arrived to return to Australia, he went for it. “I was at a point in my life where I wanted to put down some roots.” A four-year Future Fellowship, worth almost A$900,000, made it possible. “My understanding is that it was set up to bring people that have some kind of connection with Australia back to Australia.”

Crucial to the move was Monash University, where he had an ongoing collaboration with fellow philosophy professor Jakob Hohwy. Monash offered to sponsor him, which was significant: “You cannot just apply, you have to do it through an Australian university—so you have to have someone inside, a sponsor.”

Though not obligatory, Bayne says that to entice high-calibre researchers from overseas, the sponsoring university will generally have to offer some form of continuing employment. “This is a big investment on their part; they have to be pretty sure that they want you for the long haul.”

Building a hub

What made Bayne attractive to Monash and ultimately helped him in the fellowship? Previous engagements in Australia played a role, he says, and a strategic argument playing in his favour. “My collaborator at Monash [Hohwy] is himself an ARC Future Fellow, and we have previously written ARC grants together. They could see that they were building up a certain area of expertise in Australia in this field. And it helps to have more than one senior person in a field in an institution.” Monash has turned out to be a perfect fit in other ways too, particularly in helping to manage the grant.

Having started his fellowship in September 2016, Bayne is developing a philosophical framework by which consciousness can be measured. The project builds on previous work with Hohwy and Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist based at the University of Western Ontario, in which the researchers proposed a complex multidimensional structure that underlies our consciousness.

It has led the researchers to question a concept that is often used by clinicians to determine different stages of wakefulness. Described in the literature as ‘levels of consciousness’, it implies that degrees of consciousness can be discerned along one single, scalable dimension. “This sort of makes sense in dealing with disorders of consciousness: someone comes out of a coma and enters a vegetative state where they are probably not conscious at all and then enter a minimally conscious state where they are a little bit more conscious and so on,” Bayne explains.

Leading the way

However, he and his coworkers believe that this view has problems, or is even unhelpful. The internal structure of consciousness is likely to be far more complex and may consist of different dimensions or variations of consciousness rather than just one.

For example, take the set of cognitive capacities and actions we are capable of. Healthy individuals will use their experiences to make decisions, to direct voluntary behaviour, to consolidate memory and so on. But if we had an epileptic seizure, we might still be conscious while some of the actions governing aspects of our brains will probably shut down. Maybe we could walk but not remember anything nor talk about what we were experiencing.

“That’s just one dimension, a sort of agency dimension, but there might be many others,” Bayne says. Importantly, variations in the internal structure may not have anything to do with being more or less conscious, rather being differently conscious. “Take language, for example. To model all the languages in the world you may look at their vocabulary, morphology and syntax. These are all different dimensions that define languages. But we are not saying Swahili is more ‘languagey’ than Cambodian.”

Bayne argues that once the multidimensional structure of our consciousness is better understood, we could, for instance, begin to look at how the consciousness of infants compares with adults, or look at the kind of consciousness that other creatures might have.

Using again languages as an analogy, he says that we can ask what kind of language it is and whether it belongs to this or that language group. And he believes this can also be done to compare different groups of consciousness. “It really is a question about taxonomy, and we are interested in how we should taxonomise states of consciousness.” 

Multidisciplinary potential

Bayne’s work at Monash will also aim to identify general markers that can be used to detect the presence or absence of consciousness. To this end, he is very interested in working out what kinds of clinical tests could be used to evaluate whether, for example, a comatose patients is conscious. “There are also ethical issues that may come into play in a clinical situation, for example when switching off life support,” he says.

Philosophy is primarily a theoretical world, and this is also the case for Bayne. But his work does throw up crossovers into other more applied fields outside of philosophy, such as the neurosciences. Bayne enjoys engaging with science without having to do the experimental work himself.

His work’s multidisciplinary potential may have helped him in his Future Fellowship application, he suggests. “I do collaborate with a number of scientists. I don’t think you have to span across disciplines in order to secure a Future Fellowship, but I guess in my case it was very helpful.”

Set on using a philosophical approach to help unravel the fundamentals of one of the great mysteries of life, he has no illusions that it will be fully understood in his lifetime. “But if I can make a little dent in it, and lots of people can make little dents in it from different angles, then maybe someday we will. It is very much an ongoing journey. Sometimes you feel like one of the explorers of former time: you go without maps, no Lonely Planet, no Trip Advisors.” 

The post From the archive: Return journey appeared first on Research Professional News.

How to get writing done, even during tough times

Such is the nature of academia that many Funding Insight readers will be using their university’s summer break to get some work done. And for many of you that will involve carving out some time to sit down and write.

You may dream of spending untold hours in a perfectly calm state, uninterrupted and focused, but this is unlikely to occur as much as you hope. That being the case, it’s maybe a good time to consider (again) Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s advice on getting writing done when the going is hard and time is limited, first published last year.

Let’s just be honest: it’s been hard to get much writing done this past year. Whether you’ve been home-schooling, helping elderly and vulnerable relatives and friends or just reading the news, you may have had less free time than usual and almost certainly less of a free mind. In addition, the demands of online teaching and the closure of libraries and labs have taken a toll on everyone’s research productivity.

But even when things get back to normal—whatever our new normal turns out to be—there will still be challenges to getting writing done. Academic workloads aren’t getting any lighter, and personal circumstances will still require your attention. How do you keep getting words on the page when things are difficult? Or even start writing at all?

Take your time

First and foremost, you need to find some time. That involves actively searching for that time, not passively waiting for it to present itself to you. You should sit down with your calendar and work out where you can fit writing sessions into your week.

In the best circumstances, I block out one day a week for it, usually Fridays, but I also identify shorter periods in other days. Maybe you have two hours mid-morning on Tuesdays, or maybe you only see that PhD student every other Thursday and can use the alternate weeks for your book. Whatever it is, actually add it to your calendar and maybe even set an alarm to remind you.

If your weekly schedule is too changeable, identify writing slots at the start of each day. Even if it’s just a small window—20 minutes before that meeting, 45 minutes between classes—note it down. And take advantage of impromptu opportunities: when something ends early or someone cancels, pull up your document and fix that sentence that’s been bugging you or fill in that footnote. Little and often adds up.

Start small

But how do you start writing? Especially if you’ve been feeling blocked or disconnected from your writing, is it worth trying to get started again if you don’t have much time? Emphatically, yes! In fact, starting small is a great way to get back into writing because the stakes are low and unintimidating. You know that you are not going to write your magnum opus while waiting for your daughter to finish her swimming lesson, but you could sketch out a paragraph or two while she splashes away.

Even if you do have the luxury of lots of time, scheduling shorter sessions is still a good idea. When I have a whole Friday ‘to write’, I usually only block out a couple of hours in the morning and a couple more in the afternoon to put words on the page. I divide the rest of the time among things like additional research, a long walk to ruminate or a yoga session, and the inevitable little tasks that build up, such as answering that overdue email. Again, the idea is to structure the time and to avoid setting the bar too high.

Having realistic—preferably low—expectations will help you to relax about writing and even enjoy it, ultimately enabling you to write more, even in difficult times. If you sit down to ‘write this chapter’, you will certainly have failed to do that by the end of the day or week, and then you will feel bad. Feeling bad will impede your ability to write, and then you’ll get even less done and feel even worse. It’s a vicious cycle.

Perfectionism is the enemy

Developing ways to feel relaxed and happy about writing will keep you from second-guessing yourself and allow the words to flow. Give yourself permission to ‘write something bad’. It really is OK if it’s bad at this point. You’ll come back to it later when you’re editing or when you’ve progressed a little further in your thinking. If you can’t find the right words, put some placeholder text in brackets for now. You may be surprised at how often you’ll decide that your ‘temporary solution’ works just fine after all.

Similarly, be kind to yourself about quantity. Get a sense of how many words you usually write in a given period and let that be enough, at least for now. As you get more relaxed about writing, words may come more quickly, but demanding 1,000 words per day from yourself when you usually produce around 200 is setting yourself up for grief. Award yourself full credit for what you did write, however much or little it is. You want to close your laptop feeling satisfied with yourself and deserving of a little downtime, not least so that you can pick it back up the next day feeling refreshed and ready to go.

Finally, don’t force it too much. Writing can be a welcome refuge in difficult times, but it is important to recognise that sometimes things are so hard that writing is impossible. Maybe your teaching load is just too heavy or you’ve experienced a bereavement, or you are suffering from depression. Not writing in those circumstances is normal. Trying to force yourself to write might even be counterproductive, creating anxiety around writing, as well as harming you in other ways. Be compassionate toward yourself. Trust that when things get easier and there is time and mental space for writing again, the words will come. 

Justine Firnhaber-Baker is a senior lecturer at the University of St Andrews

The post From the archive: The hard write appeared first on Research Professional News.

Banish your doubting inner voice with this compendium of first-grant advice

I’m going to open with a quote from Yoda, because the diminutive, elf-eared old sage from the Star Wars films really did know a thing or two about grant applications. In particular: “Do or do not—there is no ‘try’.”

In other words, if you’re going to commit to writing a grant application, you need to be prepared to devote a substantial amount of time and effort. You might give your application your best efforts and it still might not get funded. But if you submit a rushed, half-hearted, phoned-in, last-minute effort, your chances are close to zero. You’ll have wasted your time, the time of the people supporting you, and the time of the funder and referees and reviewers.

To be in with a realistic chance of success, you need to allow time to develop your ideas, to draft, re-draft and re-draft again—to seek out and respond to feedback, to get the technical and irritatingly fiddly bits of the form right. All the advice that’s given to undergraduates who are assessed via essays is advice you need to follow for grant applications. In addition, I’d also say this…

Bark up the right tree

Make sure you have found the most appropriate funder and the most appropriate opportunity for what you want to do. This can be tricky, especially if you work in a niche area. Not all funders do a great job of explaining their schemes or remit. Eligibility rules can be complicated. Funding calls are complex documents and hard to read without projecting your own interests on to them. You should seek advice from senior colleagues and your friendly neighbourhood research development manager. Get the wrong scheme and you’ll have wasted a lot of everyone’s time.

Lower your expectations

If you’ve already lowered them, lower them again. You probably already know the success rate for the scheme you’re aiming for, and if it’s much above 25 per cent it’s one of the better ones. People usually enter academia after a lifetime of being top of the class, so it might come as a shock to learn that, whatever the success rate is, it applies to you. Don’t get disheartened, however. Some people do succeed, and you might be one of them.

Your primary goal should be to assemble, construct, scope, shape and write a research grant application that you’re proud of and that does full justice to your research vision. You want to get it through your institution’s internal approval systems and submitted on time and in funder-specified format. For your first application, if you’ve done this, then you’ve succeeded, whatever the funder response may be. You will have learned a lot through this process. It will have helped you develop your research ideas, get a better sense of how to express them, and learn about the trials and tribulations of the application process.

Your ‘stretch goal’ should be for your proposal to make it through to the final stage of assessment. This isn’t possible with all funding schemes, but some have formal outline stages or other levels of sift where only some go forward. If it’s still in the running at the final stage, it’s competitive. You can’t control the strength of your rival bids or how discussion goes on that final panel, and while funding isn’t a lottery, there’s no denying the role of luck.

Actually winning funding should be considered a ‘cherry on the cake’ goal. It is perfectly possible for your first application to win through, but that should not be treated as the sole indicator of success. Even without such pressure, if you don’t get the funding, it will hurt. Go easy on yourself.

Commit to the admin

As well as writing your application, there will be several administrative tasks to be completed, and processes to follow. Miss any of these or get them wrong and it can prevent your application being submitted or lead to immediate rejection from the funder. It’s important to be aware of these and take early action.

You will need a proper costing for your project and for that costing to be approved before your application is submitted. Different funders have different rules about what they will and will not fund, and it is seldom straightforward. When you apply for funding, your university is endorsing your application and (effectively) agreeing to support you in delivering the project for the budget requested (which, in the UK at least, seldom covers the full costs). It’s not unreasonable, therefore, for your university to want to make sure the budget has been done correctly. You’ll probably have access to a self-service costing tool and/or administrative support for costings.

There will be a deadline for your final application to be submitted for internal approval, and likely another for internal peer-review to develop and improve your application. If you need a letter of support from your head of school or other senior leader, that also takes time. The letter needs drafting (which you’re likely to be asked to provide some material for) and approving and signing. This depends upon their availability, so find out early.

You should also engage early with the online submission system. You should make sure you (and your team members) have accounts, and that you’ve thoroughly explored the system and the application requirements. Some funders will provide PDF printouts of the form, but these can be misleading—some sections may appear or disappear if certain boxes are ticked. You don’t have to start populating the online version of the form until later, but you want to make sure you know what’s there and how it works.

Well-resourced universities that are serious about research will make sure you’re not on your own. It might be your first grant application, but you should have the support of a research administrator (for costings and approvals) and/or a research development manager (to advise on funder choice, scheme rules, lay review). Supporting funding proposals is literally their job, so enlist their help as soon as you’re even thinking about applying.

Oh, yes…the writing

Writing grant applications is different from writing academic papers, and rather than trying to explain why and how in less than 150 words, I’m going to bombard you with even more links.

Previously on Funding Insight, I’ve written about summaries, about applying for small grants, about outline applications and postdoc fellowships. I’ve also written about getting better feedback on draft applications.

I’d like to think all these articles are worth a read. But because time is short and you don’t want to spend all your writing time reading, for first-time applicants I’d particularly recommend this article on how to structure a proposal and one on who you’re writing for when you’re writing a grant application. Errors in those two areas are easy to make, but with a little thought they’re also easy to avoid.

If you want one final tip, and it’s probably the most important tip—don’t ‘do a Gollum’. Don’t keep your precious proposal secreted away; get as much help and feedback and support and as much external input as you can.

Best of luck!

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

The post Attacking your first grant application appeared first on Research Professional News.

With the right skills, non-US scientists can unlock overlooked American funders like the BrightFocus Foundation

Unfamiliarity with application processes can put many researchers off bidding to US-based but internationally oriented funders. That is unfortunate, as many of these institutions offer highly useful grants and specialist support.

The BrightFocus Foundation, a not-for-profit that aims to combat dementia, is one such funder. Henrietta Nielsen, an associate professor in neurobiology at Stockholm University in Sweden, is one of its handful of successful non-US applicants. In this article, first published in October 2020, she explains how her experiences working in the US came to the fore as she crafted her bid.

BrightFocus’s Standard Awards scheme—which provided Nielsen’s grant—is open now for bids of up to $300,000 and up to three years’ duration. The deadline for applications is 1 November.

Top tips

• For many US funders, your aims should be independently achievable, rather than interdependent.
• Ask your research office for help writing a ‘biosketch’ if it’s your first one.
• Preliminary data are important—more so than for most European funders.
• Find collaborators who are experts in particular techniques if you don’t have a track record or the facilities.
• Refer to patient benefit, which is a particular focus for this funder.

Most researchers find out whether a proposal has been funded by email. And with Henrietta Nielsen, an associate professor in neurobiology at Stockholm University in Sweden, it was that way too. However, she also found out she’d been awarded a Standard Award from the BrightFocus Foundation just before chairing an opening panel at an Alzheimer’s disease conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

“I was shifting from ‘We got the grant!’ to ‘Wait a minute—I need to listen to what’s being said’,” she says of the panel.

Nielsen won her three-year, $300,000 Standard Award from the US-based funder BrightFocus under the charity’s Alzheimer’s disease programme in 2019. BrightFocus also supports work in glaucoma and macular degeneration. Alongside its Standard Awards, it also offers Postdoctoral Fellowships worth $200,000 over two years.

Third strike

Nielsen’s winning application was her third submission to the scheme but her first success, a hit rate she partly attributes to the competitive nature of funding but partly to the subject she chose to investigate. “It’s very controversial,” she says of her project’s focus on the influence of fat-binding protein Apolipoprotein E in the bloodstream. APOE and certain variants of the gene that codes for it have long been associated with Alzheimer’s, but many researchers dismiss the presence of the protein outside the brain as irrelevant.

While her proposal’s focus on APOE meant it clearly met BrightFocus’s requirement that projects address “an important problem or a critical barrier to progress” in Alzheimer’s research, the focus on APOE in the bloodstream meant she had some extra convincing to do.

“My previous applications had similar aims but we did not have enough preliminary data,” she says. What Nielsen calls her “98 per cent” rejection rate had a positive side effect, however. It meant she had time to build up a collection of hard-to-source liver samples and carry out the preliminary work necessary to back up her hypotheses with hard evidence. In the end, persistence paid off.

Outside source

Nielsen is unusual among BrightFocus grantees as she is not based in North America. However, before her current position at Stockholm University, Nielsen worked for nearly four years at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. During her time there, she developed the mass spectrometry techniques that allowed her collaborators to measure blood levels of APOE, and she also became acquainted with the workings of US funders.

“As Europeans, we should definitely keep our minds open to applying for American grants,” she says. “And the BrightFocus Foundation is a well-known association in the US with a reputation for funding high-quality research in international competitions.”

But there are a couple of tips that European applicants should take on board to raise their chances when they apply to US funders, Nielsen says.

“There is a huge difference in how you write proposals,” she says. “Your aims should not be linked, as they might be for a European funder—they should be independent. This means that you have more of a distribution of the risk—if one element fails, the whole project doesn’t fall through.” US funders are more willing than European ones to back riskier work, she says, and their adoption of this approach explains why. They know that there is likely to be at least some positive outcome of the research even if the project’s main goal remains elusive.

“It’s more of a business-type approach. You want to ensure you get something out of your money. In Europe, it’s more of a holistic approach, an ideological approach to testing out hypotheses,” she explains.

Another major challenge for Europeans can come in the form of the ‘biosketch’—a punchy, professional profile, quite different from a CV, favoured by many US funders, including the National Institutes of Health. “Get in touch with someone who has written those things before,” she urges applicants, suggesting that a university research support office will probably be familiar with the format and know what is important to include.

Nielsen also advises that US foundations and charities may have their eyes fixed even more firmly on the clinical prize than similar funders in Europe do. “To show the benefit to patients in the short and long run is very important for a foundation like this,” she says, adding that she was sure to work this into her proposal.

Keep it simple

Apart from the extra supporting data, what else does Nielsen think made a difference between this application and her previous attempts? For one, she replies, she uses a humanised mouse model, which includes transplanted human liver cells. “We had to team up with a company,” she says, adding that the transplantation procedure is “not a trivial thing” and so outsourcing it to a private partner made sense. “It also gave the study’s feasibility a boost, because we don’t have a track record running this type of study on our own,” Nielsen says.

Other big changes from earlier proposals included a whittling down and tightening of the project’s aims. One aim was removed completely after Nielsen admitted to herself that she would have insufficient time to perform the work and that the conclusions she wanted to draw from it would be insufficiently supported by the data she could get. Nielsen also tightened and simplified her study’s other aims.

Nielsen’s winning application also included an extra subheading on “rigour and reproducibility” that she added under the “experimental design” section of the form. She used this extra subheading to talk about preventing experimental bias, such as by blinding clinical samples and monitoring reproducibility batch to batch.

The experiments included in the bid “we know we’ll be able to finish and publish”, Nielsen says, reflecting on the feasibility of past attempts.

Nielsen has become something of an evangelist for US funding, particularly for others working in neurodegeneration, an area that is much more generously funded by private and federal funders in the US. Of course, she recommends BrightFocus as a particular funding target, especially as the foundation has been “very supportive” in all her dealings with them.

“I think most people don’t think it’s for them, or think that it’s too difficult,” she says in relation to Europeans applying to US funders. “But I think once you break it down and see what you need and get the right help then it’s definitely doable.” 

The post From the archive: Open your mind to US Alzheimer’s funding appeared first on Research Professional News.

Four tips to take on board before talking with commercial counterparts

The tendency of public funders—and not only public funders—to increasingly favour and encourage economic impact and business engagement is certainly widespread and may even be universal around the world. While there are fewer academics today who have managed to advance their careers without much contact with business, there is still a cultural divide between academia and the commercial world that needs to be navigated.

Before entering journalism, James Brooks worked as a headhunter for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries and watched many researchers attempting to cross that divide. It gave him some insights that those looking to partner with the commercial world may find useful, which he related here, in this article first published in October 2019.

In many people’s books being a journalist is a pretty poor show, but in my case it was a step up from the circle of hell I used to occupy as a headhunter for the pharmaceutical industry. Worse still, my particular niche was snatching senior scientists and clinicians from the hallowed halls of academe and delivering them into the hands of big pharma, there to toil endlessly ensuring shareholder returns and senior executive bonuses.

I did this for eight years. During that time I observed certain ways that academics would interact with their pharma industry counterparts during the recruitment process and particularly at interviews (I would sometimes sit in on these and, if not, would be told about them afterwards).

As a result, I developed a checklist of things to know about the pharmaceutical industry, and crucially, what to avoid in engaging with its representatives, and I would brief candidates on it, in an attempt to prevent any foul-ups. The tips that follow may be particularly relevant to academic biomedical researchers looking to jump ship to industry, but I hope they will resonate with anyone engaging with the commercial end of science for the first time.

1. Your motivation shouldn’t be primarily financial

I saw this rule broken most flagrantly during the interview of a senior clinical researcher with a major pharmaceutical company. First question: “So, Professor, why would you join the pharmaceutical industry after so long in a successful academic career?” Answer: “For the money!”

It was said jokingly, but the joke landed badly and was taken as an inept attempt to laugh off a genuine motivation. The rest of the interview was a wash-out and that person was not recruited.

The fact is that most scientists in the pharma industry aren’t, in fact, in it for the money (which will often be not so much better than they could earn by staying in academia). They believe, instead, in the social benefit of what they do, which they would class as producing better medicines for patients suffering from nasty health conditions.

Now, you could argue—and many people have—that that’s an over-simplistic definition, but that’s not the point. The point is that industry-based scientists’ motivation is rarely financial and yours shouldn’t be either if you’re looking to engage meaningfully.

2. Industry is nonetheless governed by commercial imperatives

As a headhunter, I came across a fair few academics who, after years of ploughing through grant applications, getting knocked back and somehow scrambling together resources for their labs, seemed to view industry as the hiding place of the pot of gold.

This view seemed to exist largely subconsciously, which made it particularly difficult to dislodge before such candidates would go to interview to be disabused of it there. So make no mistake: industry scientists have to fight for funding and attention for their projects almost as much as academic scientists do.

What’s more they mostly have much less freedom over the direction that their research will take. Most frustratingly, programmes will often close or change tack due to financial or strategic reasons rather than scientific ones.

Academic scientists who approach industry as the place where they may be liberated from the bondage of academic politics and funding constraints (either as employees or partners) will be disappointed. Be warned.

3. Nobody cares about your publication record

OK, this is an exaggeration. In industry people do care about your publication record—it confers on you a certain legitimacy—but just not as much as they do in academia.

During my time as a headhunter I became well acquainted with the “departmental big cheese” candidate. When asked to send his—these people were almost always men—CV, the departmental big cheese would either just send a publication list or have that list feature prominently on it. Then that person would stride into interview and almost never get the job.

It’s not that scientific legitimacy, and indeed precise scientific questions, wouldn’t come up at interview, it’s more that the interviewers from pharma companies were interested in other things as well. What had the interviewee really done? Did they have a leadership style? Were they convincing at arguing their case? It was hard for people who’d climbed to the top of the tree in a “publish or perish” culture to understand that a different approach was needed here.

Less-published candidates often did better at interview because they sought to engage with their interlocutors in a two-way discussion and not automatically assume the mantle of expertise their scientific publication record might otherwise grant them.

4. Don’t be put off by management-speak

Very few people working within pharma R&D resorted to what I will call management-speak, and others might have less charitable names for. However, people in other roles often did, and that can be off-putting, especially if that interaction is the first contact with the company in question.

I’m sure that several candidates underperformed at interview for this reason. They would engage well with the senior R&D person on the interview panel but not so well with the HR or business representative.

Yes, management-speak is frustrating but it shouldn’t be a barrier to industry engagement. Ensuring it doesn’t become so requires adopting a certain attitude. If you think a person is deploying management-speak in lieu of having something worthwhile to say, smile politely and nod and move on. However, if you think that the management-speak obscures a genuine point, ask for clarification. There’s no shame—in fact there’s a certain degree of honour—in not being conversant in this language.

And hopefully if you follow that advice, you will be able to move forward across the piece, deploying granular solutions to achieve your strategic objectives.

Good luck!

The post From the archive: How not to engage with industry appeared first on Research Professional News.

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

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 open, with letters of intent accepted until 30 September. Wilson says the foundation usually receives 150-200 letters, which are whittled down to 40-50 applicants invited to submit a full application. The deadline for full applications is 23 January 2023.

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.

“The interesting thing about IBD is that despite us knowing and looking into it for over 25 years or so, in terms of research, it’s still a very difficult autoimmune disease,” she explains. “There’s lots of unanswered questions, there are still a lot of gaps in the field.”

In recent years, some of the things that have caught the foundation’s eye include the role that stem cells could play in perpetuating, or potentially treating, the disease, as well as the neurogastric connections that could help explain the disease’s progression.

In the end, by aiming to open up new avenues of research, Wilson says that the Kenneth Rainin Foundation is focused on “challenging researchers to push the boundaries of their expertise into IBD and funding really off-the-wall ideas”.

The post Opportunity profile: IBD funder welcomes off-the-wall ideas appeared first on Research Professional News.

French organisation’s chief executive discusses new opening to attract top young talent from other countries

 Top tips

• There are no exact requirements for how many post-PhD years you must have before applying.
• Get in touch with a laboratory associated with your challenge before you apply.
• You can apply to more than one of the 25 positions, but each is quite specific and your skill set may not be applicable to more than one.
• Demonstrate high scientific potential in the application; this scheme is all about attracting the brightest and best.

The CNRS is France’s largest public research organisation and the only multidisciplinary one. In a bid to attract more scientists from outside France, it is offering a new path of entry this year with a generous welcome package and the promise of tenure at the end of the programme.

There are 25 positions available under its tenure track call, each tackling a specific challenge—from climate change to artificial intelligence. Successful applicants will receive a package of support worth around €300,000 for three to six years.

The deadline for applications is 31 August. CNRS chief executive Antoine Petit explains the rationale behind the scheme.

For those who are unfamiliar with French research, what is the CNRS?

The CNRS is a big, public research organisation. We have 33,000 employees and our annual budget is around €3.6 billion. Around 75 per cent of that comes from the French government and the last 25 per cent comes from funding calls—mostly French calls or European calls. We are considered one of the most successful scientific institutions in the world. We also have a high level of success in European Research Council grants—we are number one in Europe for number of grants awarded.

Who usually applies to your funding opportunities?

The CNRS is already very international: every year, around a third of all permanent researchers we recruit are nationalities other than French. This doesn’t include PhD students or postdocs, where of course the ratio of non-French citizens is higher.

The tenure track programme is designed to attract non-French researchers, but can French researchers apply too?

Under French law, you cannot say that the tenure track programme is only for foreigners. You can just give an indication of what you would like to do, and we said we would like to work with people who are not already in France and do not have a permanent position here. It can be non-French citizens who want to come to France, but we are open to the idea of recruiting French citizens who have spent time in another country and want to return to France.

Is this the first time the tenure track scheme has run?

For the CNRS, yes.

How many positions are available?

We decided to have 25 positions through the tenure track scheme, which is about 10 per cent of our annual recruitment of 250 new permanent researchers. Those on the tenure track programme are not technically permanent researchers, but they will become permanent researchers in three to six years, with a very few possible exceptions.

How many post-PhD years should candidates have?

People who will be recruited to the programme for tenure track positions will become permanent researchers after three to six years. That gives us an idea of their expected scientific level. By that, I mean we cannot say that we want to recruit people between 5 and 10 years after their PhD—it is more complicated than that.

It can be different from one discipline to another. We cover all fields of science, including humanities and social sciences. And if we look at the age where we recruit people, there are differences between subjects. Among the disciplines of science, computer science and mathematics, we usually recruit people younger than in biology or humanities, for instance. This means that people in different disciplines will become senior researchers at different ages, and so we cannot give precise rules on how many post-PhD years candidates must have before they apply.

Does this programme address career precarity for researchers?

To be frank, for us this was not the priority. The priority is to attract the smartest scientists. But under the tenure track programme, each researcher will get a welcome package of €200,000 over the three to six years and the CNRS will add a doctoral contract worth around €110,000. That’s something that does not usually exist in France. And we know that it is absolutely crucial.

Although this type of welcome package is more common in other European institutions, it is not usual in the French system. We really think that with this package, plus the added support from the CNRS, we will be more attractive.

Will this type of package become more common in France?

It will have to. In France, we love equality, but unfortunately competition is not the same in different domains. In some areas, if we are not able to propose such a package, we will not be able to keep attracting the best researchers. The idea of the package is to give some capacity of autonomy to new researchers. They often have several years of post-PhD experience, they are ready to construct their own group and we have to give them the possibilities for that.

There are 25 specific challenges in the tenure track programme. How did you decide on those?

The CNRS is organised into 10 thematic divisions, and we try to have balance between the disciplines. We also want to recruit researchers in areas where France is not as strong as it could be.

Can researchers apply to more than one challenge?

Everyone is free to apply to one or more, but each of them is quite limited. It was a requirement of the government that we did not recruit for a tenure track position in mathematics, for example, because that is too broad. We had to be more precise. So, it is unlikely that you will find several tracks that correspond to your speciality.

Where will candidates be based?

Two-thirds of the positions are open in parallel in several labs. The CNRS is a national organisation and we often put our recruits into several labs because we want to attract the best researchers. We will do the same for the tenure track positions. For the other third, they correspond to a given lab.

Can candidates suggest the laboratories they want to work with?

Usually they can, but not for these tenure track positions. For this programme, candidates have to contact the people from the labs that are associated with the position they want to apply to, before they make their application. That’s very important. We will never send somebody to work in a lab if the lab is not happy to receive them.

What are you expecting the success rate to be?

We don’t have any idea, and in fact I don’t care about the success rate, because everybody knows that to have a permanent position at the CNRS is really tough and it’s a really selective process. You have a lot of people who will not apply for positions in the CNRS. For an institution like the CNRS, the success rate is not a good indicator. You cannot summarise the quality of research by quantitative indicators. We really want to have a qualitative evaluation and not a quantitative evaluation.

Will you repeat the tenure track call next year?

If it is a success, next year we’ll open new positions. But if not, we won’t. And if we consider that it is a success in some fields but not in other fields, we will only open positions in those areas. So this is an experiment, if you like.

What advice do you have for candidates?

First of all, show us that you want to go to the CNRS and that your scientific perspectives are fantastic. At the CNRS, you have no obligation to teach, so show us that you plan to do fantastic research that will impact society. Also, everybody should know that competition is hard, and every year we have very good candidates who do not get a position at the CNRS. So there is no shame in that.

The post Opportunity profile: CNRS lets the outside in appeared first on Research Professional News.

The Gatsby Charitable Foundation seeks to fill in the funding gaps for early career researchers

Top tips

• With its Small Grants programme, Gatsby specialises in funding elements that would not attract UK Research and Innovation interest, including equipment and pilot project work.
• Grants are open to all, but early career researchers are favoured when equally strong bids are in competition.
• The charity is not averse to risk as long as the underlying science is sound.

Founded by David Sainsbury, a former chair of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain founded by his great-grandfather, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation has a diverse range of interests, including neuroscience, art and African economic development.

Its plant science programme offers PhD and Undergraduate Studentships alongside Small Grants of usually no more than £25,000 each. There are no deadlines for the grants, and the panel of advisers that selects them meets quarterly. They are open to researchers anywhere in the world.

Jane Langdale, chair of the advisory panel, discusses the kinds of Small Grant applications that the charity favours and gives a quick tour of its other programmes.

Could you introduce Gatsby in a few sentences? 

Gatsby is a charitable foundation set up by David Sainsbury. He has a small number of long-term interests, one of which is plant science—but there are others such as neuroscience and there is an Africa economic development programme. The plant sciences programme was set up over 30 years ago to promote plant sciences as a discipline in the UK.

Where does Gatsby continue to get its funding from?

It is all from David Sainsbury’s personal wealth. Since 1967, when Gatsby was established, more than £1 billion has been distributed to charitable causes.

Who are the Gatsby trustees?

Joseph Burns, Andrew Cahn and Judith Portrait.

What type of funding does Gatsby offer in the plant sciences? 

There are two main routes. One is via the two Sainsbury research labs: one in Norwich and one in Cambridge. They have their own budgets funded by Gatsby. Then there is a programme primarily based around PhD Studentships that is run by a group of plant science advisers, of whom there are five and one of them is me. It was initially set up for PhD Studentships only, but we now do Undergraduate Studentships as well.

Do you fund only UK-based applicants?

No, we fund overseas as well.

Can you break down the research grants?

We have £100,000 a year and we do not tend to give out grants of more than £25,000. It is not meant to be a substitute for UK Research and Innovation funding. It is meant to fill gaps that UKRI is not likely to fund.

Is there a particular type of researcher that you favour?

We always have a preference for early career researchers.

So bearing in mind those two elements, what would constitute an interesting application?

It could be, for example, a young investigator just starting their own lab who desperately needs to get a bit of preliminary data before putting their first grant in, and they want six months’ funding to get a technician to help them get some data.

Another type of funding we provide is if a researcher needs a piece of equipment that costs £10,000 to £15,000. That could be too much for their department to pay, and UKRI requires 50 per cent funding from departments. We are sometimes able to come in, if we can see that the science would really benefit, and invest in a piece of equipment for somebody to get started.

What is the application process like for the grants?

People are asked to send just a two-page proposal. There are no deadlines, but the advisers meet four times a year. The applications go to our administrator Roxaana Clayton and she groups them and presents them at the next advisers’ meeting. The five advisers then go through and decide which ones to fund. With only £100,000 a year, that is just one grant of £25,000 per meeting. They are hugely oversubscribed. It really is about ‘what difference would this £25,000 make?’, as opposed to sort of keeping somebody going a bit longer. Could this be a route to getting a big grant? Or, for example, could it tie up a piece of work that, unless this £25,000 comes along, will never get published?

What should people focus on in their applications? 

We always go on the basis of the science. That is the primary thing. Is the science good and is it feasible in the scope of what has been requested? Sometimes, it can be a really wacky idea that nobody else would fund but if it worked, it would be really big. Sometimes, we will take that risk and say: ‘OK, this is worth £25,000 and if it works it will be fantastic.’ If we have four grants that are equally good science and equally likely to give some output, we will always prioritise the early career researchers.

Can you tell me about some research projects that stand out in your memory?

We funded to finish off publication of a project that had been going for a long time on pin and thrum flower development in primroses. We got that through to publication; otherwise, that valuable research was just going to languish unpublished, probably for a long time. When I started out, Gatsby gave me £10,000 for a powerful freezer. Those sorts of things are not very sexy, but they make such a huge difference.

Can you give a brief breakdown of the studentships? 

For the PhD Studentships, we award up to four a year through a competitive interview. We interview up to eight students for up to four studentships. The PhD Studentships come with an enhanced stipend, which is more than the UKRI stipend, plus research expenses for the lab or supervisor if it is field-based work and quite a generous travel allowance. The students are placed all over the UK but come together twice a year: once in April for a training weekend, where all current students on the course have training with the plant science advisers, and then in September, the whole network gets together—that’s current undergraduate students and PhD students and all the alumni.

How many Undergraduate Studentships do you fund?

We have up to seven. The way we do that is we have Gatsby mentors across the UK who are charged with finding students in their second year who they think would benefit from a studentship in plant sciences. The students then get £1,000 and funding to go and do a research project over the summer of their second year. If that is completed satisfactorily, they get another £1,000 in their third year. They are also allowed to develop their own projects and apply for one of the PhD Studentships.

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Non-disclosure agreements are sometimes advisable when entering discussions on research partnerships—but not always

A good many researchers will be far too familiar with the following dialogue.

“Hi Dr X, it was great to meet you last week and discover that we have a mutual interest in cancer biomarkers/saline extraction technology/political marketing. It looks like we could potentially collaborate on a project together. To proceed, you’ll just need to sign our company’s standard NDA, which I’ve attached here.”

This column will focus on non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or confidentiality agreements. In particular, the use of the NDAs in the context of research.

A quick aside on terminology: I use the words contract and agreement interchangeably. They mean the same thing. There is no subtle difference between the two, or reason why you should use one or the other. Calling something an agreement does not make it less ‘contracty’ than calling it a contract. Putting them together to say contract agreement does not confer superpowers.

Not a formality

More than any other type of agreement, the NDA tends to be treated as a formality by the business representatives of both organisations—one that doesn’t merit a great amount of scrutiny. The example above is the same email that drops into academics’ inboxes daily. I don’t think anyone is trying to lure you into a false sense of security by pretending that it’s just some simple paperwork when it isn’t; they just genuinely don’t see it as a big deal.

The legal representatives of each party see things differently. We know that however short and simple it might be, the NDA is still a legally binding contract and it will impose strict obligations, even if the meeting only lasts an hour and nothing comes of it. There could be consequences for breaching it.

And yet there is also a strong sense of urgency that comes with them, as the parties should not be able to discuss business until the NDA has been signed. And as we all know, time is money. So we contracts officers recognise that this isn’t something to be put on the back burner, and the goal is to get this signed as soon as possible.

So what is an NDA? Is it just some benign paperwork, or should you fear receiving a cease-and-desist letter years after you forgot the names of the people you met with? Let’s consider some of the elements that go into drafting one, which will help us to answer that burning question: is your NDA necessary?

Ask any of my colleagues and they’ll tell you I’m the mirthless one who keeps insisting we need a contract for everything. But with NDAs my first reaction will always be: prove to me that we need this. Just because you’re talking about doing a project together, doesn’t mean the discussion has to be legally bound by confidentiality. You shouldn’t need to disclose your secrets to decide if a project is viable.

But sometimes you do. You could be sharing details of intellectual property that you want to protect, or you could be showing them around your lab. Or you could have certain know-how and methodologies that inform your analysis and you want to have a frank discussion without worrying that the company might take your ideas.

What to consider

The most important thing to consider when setting up an NDA is the purpose. You’d be surprised how often this is done badly, or not at all. Let’s say the company sends you their NDA and it says something like “The parties shall exchange confidential information solely for the purpose of engaging in discussions relating to a potential business cooperation between the parties.” 

That seems reasonable and benign, doesn’t it? I’ll let you in on a secret—they all say that. This generic sentence doesn’t leave us any the wiser as to whether we’re thinking about curing cancer or starting an engineering project.

What will the discussion be about? “The parties wish to disclose certain confidential information relating to the use of the company’s E-Z-find technology to self-diagnose coronavirus and the university’s methods of stratifying patients into risk groups” gives a much clearer idea of why everyone is around the table.

But we still want to ensure there’s a bit about engaging in discussions relating to a potential research project because what the NDA is not about is undertaking any joint project work; that is, a business collaboration. If you’re already at the point where you’re ready to do a bit of this kind of project work together—even if it’s just for a few hours—then we might as well just skip the NDA and go straight to setting up the project agreement.

The other element to consider is the length of time involved. How long will the discussions go on for? It’s important to put a time limit here because I don’t want Bob from the company reminding me of the NDA we signed four years ago for a different project and realising that it’s still in force. (This is entirely possible if the purpose was generic.) It is therefore important to set a fixed time-period, say a year, to let the discussions go back and forth.

Finally, you will need to be aware of how long the obligations to maintain confidentiality on the specified subjects last. If you’re a researcher, the university will enter into contracts on your behalf, in part because universities don’t want certain obligations to fall on you personally. But it’s important to emphasise that you will be required to observe the confidentiality for the given time period. Ultimately, if there is a breach of the confidentiality agreement, it’s the university that will be sued, not you, which is perhaps even more of a reason to take this seriously; others would pay the price for any carelessness.

The length of time during which confidentiality must be observed will depend on the nature of the information itself. Maybe you know that the information will be public in the next two years, or maybe you can’t envision how it would ever stop being confidential. That’s a discussion to have with your contracts officer. If the information is extremely sensitive, think carefully about whether it is appropriate to disclose it at all. There are remedies for a breach of confidentiality, but they cannot put the genie back in the bottle if it gets out.

If you’re meeting with a potential partner, and you are wondering if that conversation should have the legal protection of an NDA, talk to your contracts officer. We can help you clarify the purpose and the nature of the information you want to receive or disclose. Once you’ve decided to go ahead, we can then put in place the right agreement to protect the university, you, and your hard work.

Stephanie Harris is a contracts manager at City, University of London. She writes here in a personal capacity.

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Second competition on climate and health launches with more calls to follow

Top tips

• Applications should be led by researchers experienced in project leadership.
• The trust is particularly keen to encourage bids led by researchers in countries affected by global heating.
• Active involvement of affected communities is expected.
• The call is focused on biological vulnerability to extreme heat but proposals are expected to be multidisciplinary.

The Wellcome Trust’s strategy shake-up in 2020 saw it introduce programmes on three major themes—infectious diseases, mental health and the health impacts of climate change. The trust’s commitment to the final theme in that list is hard to doubt as it has committed up to £75 million to it this year alone.

The programme’s first call on managing the health effects of heat has just closed, but its second call on biological vulnerability to extreme heat in maternal and child health has just opened with a deadline for preliminary applications is 8 August. Applicants who make it past the first round will be invited to submit full proposals in September.

This call is open to researchers of any nationality who can be based anywhere except mainland China. Up to £2 million is available per award, and projects are expected to last three to five years.

Wellcome declined to comment on how many awards it expects to make, but said it would prioritise funding for research in disadvantaged communities.

Applicants need to have enough experience to lead a research programme and have significant postdoctoral research experience under their belt, and projects need to have strong potential for making a real-world impact on policy and practice.

Reetika Suri, senior research manager for climate impacts at the Wellcome Trust, guides potential applicants through the climate and health programme and its most recent call.

How does the climate and health programme change how things are done at Wellcome?

Before the current strategy, we already had an Our Planet, Our Health programme, but it was a small part of what Wellcome did at the time.

We’re good at supporting and enabling health and biomedical-based research, particularly research that translates easily into policy change. As a financially and politically independent global funder, we do have that influencing function as well, and hence the idea to expand our climate and health programme.

We’re building on what we learned from our earlier programme, thinking about the different geographies and how we structure things. But in terms of eligibility and our grant conditions, that’s all very much the same.

How will funding under the climate and health programme be structured?

We’re fairly new and still understanding the space and the needs of our research community, so we have these one-off calls. We’re thinking through and developing this programme of work, but starting from next year, we hope to put together recurring schemes that will run maybe once or twice a year.

This would mean that the research community knows what’s coming, knows there are certain themes we’re interested in, and it will help us to build this field and build capacity around climate and health, putting health at the heart of climate action.

How popular was the programme’s first call?

We didn’t have any expectations of what we were hoping to see in terms of numbers of applications. But it seems to have crossed the 100 mark so far, which we’re excited about.

Is Wellcome expecting to launch more climate and health calls this year?

We’re developing another one around mitigation actions, and looking at July as a likely launch time.

Why did Wellcome choose the topic for the call on biological vulnerability to extreme heat in maternal and child health?

Heat is an important topic in terms of climate change—about a third of climate change-related deaths are related to exposure to extreme heat. Most of the work on biological vulnerability to heat stress has been done in elite athletes and in the military.

We were thinking about where those research gaps are, who those disadvantaged communities are, and the fact that, particularly in maternal and child health, there are large populations that are exposed to extreme heat. Hence the focus on filling that evidence gap and understanding what we need to improve interventions to protect that next generation.

Is there a minimum amount of postdoctoral research experience needed to apply?

We’re looking for somebody who has experience of leading a research programme, and that is from the generation of an idea all the way down to the successful completion of a programme. That’s how we are defining the career stage of the lead applicant.

How much funding is available?

We haven’t specified a total amount of funding for the call as a whole. Some applications might come in at £2 million, some might come in at well under that and still be excellent applications, so it’s all relative.

Is there any preference for researchers geographically located in areas where extreme heat is more common?

We would love to see leadership from researchers based in low- and middle-income countries. That is not to say we will exclude people who are based in other countries, but if we do have leadership from high-income countries where the research will not directly affect the population, we would expect those researchers to be collaborating with people based in countries where people will see the effects of the research.

What would make a proposal stand out in this call?

A clear articulation of what the problem is and how the team is going to be able to address the problem. We’re looking for transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research teams that will co-produce and will work closely with the affected communities that they are studying. 

We are looking at biological vulnerability, so it needs to be a physiology-based application and have appropriate expertise as part of the team as well.

How can applicants demonstrate potential opportunities for translation into policy and practice?

By having a good understanding of either a policy window or a practitioner or community need. Then typically building relationships with the people who will be doing that translation into policy or practice from early on as part of the proposal—involving those stakeholders and co-producing the research with them. There are lots of ways to demonstrate that as part of the application process, from things like letters of support, for example, as well as regular check-ins.

Do applicants need to have previous experience of public engagement?

It will be important to have that experience on the team, and that could take the form of one of the researchers having that experience, or having, for example, a public engagement officer. We appreciate this is more likely to happen in a high-income country where big research offices can provide that support, so that’s why we’re thinking about these teams that would have different types of expertise, potentially from different parts of the world.

What would be your top piece of advice for first-time applicants?

For me, it’s thinking about working with populations and who you need to support you to build your team. If there is anything on the scheme page that people have questions about, talk to us—we’re friendly, we have a dedicated inbox that we’re happy to take questions from, so please do reach out. We are unable to give advice around the competitiveness of proposals, but where we can help, we will.

The post Opportunity profile: Wellcome’s climate programme heats up appeared first on Research Professional News.

Uncovering the ageless yet unfounded stories that dissuade people from applying for fellowships

What does it take to secure a funded fellowship? A lot of work, certainly. But it’s not a mountain to climb, more likely a steep hill. In the first of two articles originally published in 2018, Kay Guccione, then at the University of Sheffield and now head of researcher development at the University of Glasgow, picks over three of the most common myths that put researchers off even attempting that climb. In the second article, which will be published next week, she applies a dose of reality to dispel them.

Although establishing your independence is crucial for postdocs who want a career in academia, many shy away from seeking fellowship funding that would enable this to happen.

In 2016 I undertook a research project funded by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education to try and understand why this was, and to identify what had helped certain researchers to get a fellowship. I spoke with 25 fellows—13 women and 12 men—from a range of disciplines in eight UK research-intensive universities.

I discovered that there were several enduring myths that deterred many from even applying. I’ll talk in more detail about the most common of these and, in part two, I will suggest what you could do to overcome them and maximise your chances of getting fellowship funding.

1. There’s only one type of fellow

People often don’t apply because they feel their ‘face doesn’t fit’. Yet I found a diversity in the profiles of research fellows: their sense of self-confidence, their career mobility, the number of fellowship applications they had put in, their networks and support systems, and their motivation for applying for funding all varied greatly.

For the 25 fellows I met, the mean time from PhD to fellowship award was 4.4 years, and the median number of applications a fellow had made was three, although for some up to eight applications had been made before succeeding—meaning that perseverance matters.

The need to demonstrate independence by moving institutions is often cited, but my findings did not bear this out. More than half of the fellows stayed at their original institution, and 10 had been working within the same department since starting their PhD.

In addition, eight of the fellows had taken at least one parental leave career break. Therefore the myth of mobility and a lack of personal ties (with the associated gender disadvantage it creates) should be challenged.

More important than specific ‘types’ of applicant are the attributes they have, and the potential research leadership qualities that they can demonstrate.

2. It’s all down to you

Full responsibility for gaining independence is not down to you as the individual postdoc, and success is not solely the result of positive thinking or a ‘can do’ attitude.

It is important, given rising pressures on research careers, to recognise the complex relational and cultural tensions within which your career develops. There are systemic structural barriers, career bottlenecks, and well-documented gender and ethnicity inequalities. Although some were able to do so, most early-career researchers needed help and support in overcoming these, and in writing a fellowship application.

My research showed that your successful development is greatly influenced by your principal investigator or mentor giving you the permission and the encouragement to take up career-enhancing opportunities, to spend time identifying and generating ideas, and writing them into project proposal.

Look around at your place of work and see what else is already available to you. Most institutions now have a well-developed set of workshops and one-to-one support for early-career academic development. If you don’t see what you want, why not suggest it?

3. It’s all down to luck

Fellowship success is often written off as luck, both by award holders who will regularly say ‘I was really lucky to get the funding’, and also by aspiring fellows who say ‘I’m just not that lucky’.

But it is not likely that luck alone leads to success. Individual agency—our capacity to take action and to make our own choices—is a greater predictor of postdoctoral career success than luck.

That is not to say that there isn’t an element of luck. Due to increasing numbers of high-quality funding applications, and diminishing research budgets, not all excellent applications get funded.

However, putting yourself in the best possible position, demonstrating your leadership qualities and getting all necessary help and support, will mean that your chances are drastically increased. I will address how to do this in practical terms in the next article.

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