Hundreds of thousands of young researchers are at the mercy of European Union funding policy, but they are rarely involved in conversations about it. Only by engaging more fully with the budget process will junior researchers be able to bring their concerns to the table, as we have found in our governing and managing roles at advocacy group EuroScience (B.C.) and the Initiative for Science in Europe (M.M.). The European Commission hosts an annual event to help shape research and innovation policy, called the European Research and Innovation Days. At this year’s meeting, held virtually over three days in September, Mariya Gabriel, commissioner for innovation, research, culture, education and youth, urged attendees to work together to make the European Research Area (ERA) — a ‘common market’ for research across the EU — into a “lighthouse of excellence”. Although we acknowledge her good will, reaching this goal requires the buy-in and collaboration of researchers, research institutions and member states. Researchers put much energy and passion into improving European research, yet member states do not seem to care much. Just when the coronavirus pandemic has shown us that a multi- and interdisciplinary approach is the only way to face systemic challenges, policymakers have slashed the European Commission budget for research. In 2021, the European Research Council (ERC) will get 14% less than it received in 2020. The programme of grants called the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) faces a budget cut of roughly 25%. Worse yet, in July, both the MSCA and the ERC were excluded from Next Generation EU, the programme to support EU efforts to recover from the pandemic. This seems particularly ironic, considering the roles of both the MSCA and the ERC in supporting the next generation of researchers, and the extraordinary levels of financial support from the recovery fund. By contrast, researchers, particularly those in the early stages of their career, were left on their own. Some national funders — such as the German research council DFG, the Humboldt Foundation in Germany and the French and Spanish governments — offered extra funding with grant extensions, but the European Commission provided none. As a result, the careers of junior researchers are being hindered by the negligence and short-sightedness of policymakers. It is time for them to fight for their future — and for senior scientists to support them. On 28 September, four days after the European Research and Innovation Days, the Initiative for Science in Europe, supported by Euroscience, hosted a press conference with the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers, the Young Academy of Europe and the Marie Curie Alumni Association. The three organizations described how COVID-19 is affecting the professional outlook for early-career researchers and how prioritizing investment in research and innovation is essential to support recovery and the next generation of researchers. They called for EU member states to provide extra funding to the European Commission. Budget complexity The complexity of addressing these issues can be explained by looking at the process of commission budget negotiations. In 2018, the commission proposed a budget for Horizon Europe, a research programme that will run between 2021 and 2027. In May this year, it proposed significant cuts. In July and early September, EU member states made further cuts. On 29 September, in the only change to the budget since then, member states chose to increase the MSCA budget by €200 million (US$235 million). Our campaign might have had some effect, but the community generally considered the increase to be a symbolic gesture. The European Parliament must still approve the final budget, and has some room to modify allocation. Horizon Europe is one of the 15 flagship EU programmes identified as top priorities by members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in late September. Nevertheless, there is a lot of pressure to agree on a budget quickly, so that the commission can plan its work from 1 January 2021. Campaign to influence policymaking So far, most junior researchers have not taken the initiative to fight for their future. This is due partly to the complexity of the processes, but mostly to the fact that academics keep the discussion in their community: there is no historical tradition of ‘getting political’ or reaching out to other communities, such as business and industry. This gap can be filled if researchers build up a movement to gain political weight. It is time for early-career researchers to look ahead and beyond the laboratory bench. Here are a few suggestions for taking the initiative and becoming more engaged. Prepare your arguments. Acquire evidence to support your case by conducting studies. These can include surveys; the Marie Curie Alumni Association and the Young Academy of Europe have both run surveys on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected junior researchers. An evidence base is useful for persuading policymakers of the validity of your arguments, and for making sure that your arguments are well thought out and stand up against scrutiny. Communicate with and reach out to the media. Be active on social media. You might not influence policymakers directly at first, but you will find potential allies. Make sure to tag a mixture of both in your posts. In our campaign to boost commission funding, we often tagged Gabriel, along with the ERC, the MSCA, the advocacy group Friends of the ERC and the European Universities Association. Foster conversation by organizing a webinar or conference session. For example, on 3 September, one of us (B.C.) ran a session at the 2020 EuroScience Open Forum virtual meeting on the impact of COVID-19 on the career development of researchers, and that led to media coverage. Contact journalists — local, regional and national, online and print — to cover your story. General engagement is important for building a relationship between the public and researchers. You will need to convince policymakers that your arguments not only are correct but also have support from the general public. Media coverage is very helpful in bringing such issues to the attention of the public. Articles on how COVID-19 affects junior researchers have been published in regional, national and specialist media outlets, including Nature. Conventional media often require a personal angle for their readership to empathize with your story. Many researchers in our network suffered from aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and protested against cuts to the MSCA, and their stories could be used in coverage. Get involved in the policy conversation. Find a political champion for your campaign. In this case, we approached several MEPs for support, including Lina Galvez Muñoz from Spain, who is vice-chair of the European Parliament’s committee on industry, research and energy. Take advantage of public consultations by policymakers to raise questions in a forthright but respectful way. For example, attendees asked many questions at the European Research and Innovation Days. Questions reached both Gabriel and Jean-Eric Paquet, the European Commission’s director-general for research and innovation. Remember that you are not alone. Form alliances with organizations representing early-career researchers. In this campaign, Eurodoc, the Young Academy of Europe and the Marie Curie Alumni Association all have a large membership including early- to mid-career researchers with aspirations of benefiting from MSCA or ERC, whose careers will be affected by COVID-19. Work with organizations representing research institutions. Researchers working abroad can find it difficult to influence political decisions in their host countries, but institutions have channels for communicating with ministries for science, research or education. The president of the Association of Universities in the Netherlands has advocated a higher Horizon Europe budget to the Dutch parliament; the parliament later passed a motion in favour of it. And form alliances with research funders. In our campaign, the ERC’s independence from the European Commission allowed it to campaign much more effectively than could any of the programmes directly under the commission’s oversight, such as the MSCA. And we were able to reach out to interim ERC president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon in a way that we could not have done with the head of any other EU-funded research programme. Bourguignon’s involvement attracted the attention of many journalists covering European research funding. Acquiring political weight is a long process that needs the participation of the research community throughout. Disengagement is the wrong strategy; only through active participation and interaction with all stakeholders can researchers show that their work matters. The debacle over the budget for Horizon Europe shows how little European policymakers think about research. We do not want this to happen again in the next framework programme. It is imperative that we unite and fight for what we consider crucial and essential.   Originally posted on nature.com on 4th November 2020 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03121-7

On 25 July, an experiment that Charles Cockell had spent years planning blasted into space. A SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida, heading to the International Space Station (ISS). It carried 18 bioreactors, each the size of a deck of cards, that would be used to study whether bacteria could mine useful minerals on the Moon, Mars or asteroids. Getting the experiment off the ground (literally) was “one of the most exciting things I’ve experienced”, says Cockell, an astrobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. But the process of getting from proposal to lift-off can be long and involved: Cockell’s biomining experiment was more than 11 years in the making. There are various routes to the ISS, but most go through one of the five space agencies — those in Canada, Japan, Russia and the United States, and the 11-nation European Space Agency (ESA) — that support the space station. These agencies periodically release calls for research proposals that can help to meet their space-science goals. GETTING SCIENCE INTO SPACE Each national space agency involved in the International Space Station (ISS) issues periodic calls for proposals for experiments that can be conducted on the station. More information can be found at the links here. NASA Calls for proposals are listed on the NASA Solicitation and Proposal Integrated Review and Evaluation System. The ISS US National Lab issues calls for proposals, but also accepts independent submissions at any time. Canadian Space Agency The Canadian agency’s research opportunities are listed on its website. European Space Agency (ESA) ESA’s ISS research programme is part of the European Programme for Life and Physical Sciences in Space. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency The Japanese agency supports research using its Kibo module on the ISS. Roscosmos Calls for proposals are listed on the Russian space agency’s website, in Russian. Commercial opportunities The space station is opening up to more commercial research, which can allow faster and cheaper access to space for experiments that have commercial applications. Proposals are still handled by NASA and ESA. Calls for proposals are listed on the NASA Solicitation and Proposal Integrated Review and Evaluation System. The ISS US National Lab issues calls for proposals, but also accepts independent submissions at any time. Canadian Space Agency The Canadian agency’s research opportunities are listed on its website. European Space Agency (ESA) ESA’s ISS research programme is part of the European Programme for Life and Physical Sciences in Space. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency The Japanese agency supports research using its Kibo module on the ISS. Roscosmos Calls for proposals are listed on the Russian space agency’s website, in Russian. Commercial opportunities The space station is opening up to more commercial research, which can allow faster and cheaper access to space for experiments that have commercial applications. Proposals are still handled by NASA and ESA. “Most of our research has an eye toward enabling exploration, but it can also have terrestrial benefits,” says Craig Kundrot, director of NASA’s Division of Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Application. The US portion of the ISS has been designated a national laboratory, meaning that it’s available for any research that would benefit from access to space, even if the project is not aimed at advancing space exploration. Cockell’s experiment is intended to study how future Moon or Mars missions could use bacteria to extract materials from rocks in space, including minerals and metals for construction, water for rocket fuel, and soil. Around 600 experiments are conducted each year on the station, which has extremely limited space, power and time allocated to astronauts to work on experiments. The payload specialists for research on the ISS — those who plan what to send and when — have to juggle all of these factors as they decide which experiments can go when, and how they will all fit together. “They’re playing tetris on a daily basis,” says Kundrot. Getting chosen by a space agency is just the start of the process. Then comes the tricky business of designing an experiment that can be packed into a rocket, blasted to the station and conducted by an astronaut who has hundreds of other responsibilities each day. It must also survive re-entry into the atmosphere and recovery, sometimes from hard-to-reach places such as the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Luckily, there are teams of engineering contractors and payload specialists that take the lead on making the experiment function within the limits on mass, size and power consumption. “As a scientist, you’re not responsible for getting it to work. There’s a whole team who support the technical aspects,” says Monica Driscoll, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. She was involved in a project running from December 2018 to January 2019 that used the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans to study the neurological effects of space flight. Depending on the experiment, the engineering challenge can be relatively simple or fiendishly complicated. Physical-science endeavours tend to take longer to plan because they need bespoke equipment, whereas those in the biological sciences can often repurpose gear that worked in other projects. Driscoll had the benefit of drawing on the experience of previous work on C. elegans in space, but Cockell’s bioreactors had to be designed from scratch — part of the reason for the long timeline. On the experimental-design side, the challenge is to keep the project as simple as possible while getting useful results. Something as basic as using a freezer, which wouldn’t require a second thought in a lab on Earth, can add another layer of complexity. The freezer on the ISS, which is designed to operate in microgravity, has a smaller storage capacity than a freezer in a domestic refrigerator, limiting the number of experiments that can use it. It has a waiting list, says Kundrot. Plus, you then have to work out how to keep the samples frozen during re-entry and recovery. That’s why Cockell’s team decided to forgo freezing its samples and instead opted to keep them in cooling packs for the return to Earth. “Even simple things are complicated,” says Cockell. “If you want an astronaut to turn a knob, it has to be in their schedule.” The experiment then undergoes several dry runs on Earth. One to verify that the science will work — for example, that Cockell’s bacteria were able to grow in the bioreactors — and then another, more detailed run-through of the operation of the experiment as if it was actually on the station. Once it has passed those tests to the satisfaction of the researchers, the space agency and the engineering contractors, the experiment goes to a launch site, such as the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, and is loaded onto a rocket. That, says Cockell, is when the excitement of what you are doing really hits home — as your work is readied to leave the planet. “The station is not actually that far away — just 400 kilometres up, less than the distance from Edinburgh to London,” says Cockell. “But it’s the frontier of physical difficulty.” Cockell’s experiment is now back on Earth, and he and his team are getting started on analysing the results. But they are already planning to go back to space. In two years, they will conduct another version of the experiment, this time bypassing the space agencies and using commercial contractors — Kayser Space in Didcot, UK, and its sister company Kayser Italia near Livorno, Italy. For £170,000 (US$207,000), the researchers have bought access to the ISS for their experiments, without having to rely on the ESA peer reviewers to approve their work. Cockell says that it’s “just like buying a plane ticket to do research in another country”. Opportunities like this are opening up space research in a way that would not have been conceivable just a few years ago, he says. “It’s exciting for future generations. Within the next few years, this is something that a lot more people will be able to do.” Originally posted on nature.com on 11th October 2019 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03097-z

Julie Gould and Elizabeth Pier discuss how the US National Institutes of Health grant review process works. Your browser does not support the audio element.   In this first episode of a six-part weekly series about funding, Julie Gould outlines the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant-review process and the extent to which reviewers evaluating the same applications agree or disagree. Is the current system the best way, she asks Elizabeth Pier, lead author of a March 2018 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Low agreement among reviewers evaluating the same NIH grant applications. Paid content This episode concludes with a slot sponsored by the European Research Council. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, its president, outlines the organization's role and remit as a grant funder. TRANSCRIPT Julie Gould and Elizabeth Pier discuss how the US National Institutes of Health grant review process works. Julie Gould: Happy 2019! I hope you’ve all managed to take some time to celebrate. As it’s a new year and new years often come with a makeover in one form or another, the Nature Careers team decided to give the podcast a makeover. As well as a new name, we’ve also got a new format. So, instead of our monthly episodes, we’re going to be producing more episodes in 2019 and grouping them together into different series, featuring six weekly episodes followed by a short break. So, here’s series one – funding – and as an added extra, each episode in this series will end with a ten-minute sponsored slot from the European Research Council. So, without any further ado, let’s go.... (Theme music) Hello, I’m Julie Gould and this is Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. Grant funding plays such an overwhelming role in the career of an academic scientist, and the funders are all too aware of it. Now, I know that all researchers spend many sleepless nights and cups of coffee writing grant proposals, so when I first started doing the research for this series, I wanted to find the best experts to give you the best tips on how to write the best grant proposals to make things a little bit easier for you. But then I came across a research paper that made me stop and reflect. In March 2018, Elizabeth Pier – who was then a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the Educational Psychology department – published a paper as part of her thesis in PNAS. The paper was entitled "Low agreement among reviewers evaluating the same NIH grant applications." When I first read this title, I thought, "Wait a minute, I thought the idea of the whole funding process was that the top proposals were being funded, the ones where everyone in the peer review system agreed that these were the best ideas supported by the best researchers to do the work." But clearly, this title shows that there’s something else going on in the background, so I wanted to find out more. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, which commissioned an independent study to examine the potential for bias to enter into the peer review process. The overarching goal of the whole project was to look for evidence of gender or racial bias, based on the characteristics of the PI or the application, and where in the process these biases might enter. Now, this particular piece of research from Pier is just one of the studies. It recreated a peer review panel to see how these meetings unfold and how they affect the decision-making process. Using previously accepted NIH project proposals, Pier explored this as part of her research. But before we go any further, it’s worth me outlining some of the basic steps of how the NIH proposal review system works. Now, just so you’re clear, these steps are the bare bones and they miss out a lot of the details, but they should give a flavour of what happens once you hit submit. So, the NIH uses a two-stage review process. In the first stage, between two and five reviewers individually evaluate each grant application, and they rate them using the NIH’s nine-point scale, with one for exceptional and nine for poor. They also record what they feel are the application’s strengths and weaknesses. The reviewers will then meet for what’s called a study section meeting to discuss their preliminary ratings. The discussion only looks at the top half of all the applications they have evaluated. The study section members then collectively assign a final rating, and this is averaged into a final priority score. So, that’s stage one. Then in the second stage, members of the NIH advisory councils use this priority score and the written critiques from the reviewers to make funding recommendations to the Director of the NIH institute or centre that awards the funding. So, given all that, I spoke to Elizabeth Pier who now works as a research manager at Education Analytics to find out more about her research. Elizabeth Pier: In this particular study, I was really interested in looking at the degree of agreement between different reviewers and what is even happening before the reviewers come together and how are reviewers going about scoring these applications based on their assessments. So, another way of putting that is: Are the reviewers agreeing not only on the score that they assign, but are they also identifying similar strengths and weaknesses in the critiques that they write prior to the meeting, and also what’s the relationship between that numeric score and the written evaluation? Julie Gould: So, there were some sobering results... Elizabeth Pier: We found that numerically speaking, there really was no agreement between the different individual reviewers in the score that they assigned to the proposals. We also found that when we were looking at the relationship between the strengths and weaknesses, written proposal, and the score that was assigned, we did see a relationship between the number of weaknesses that a reviewer would identify in their critique and the score that the reviewer assigned, but that relationship between the weaknesses and the score doesn’t hold up between different reviewers. Julie Gould: Another way of saying this is that the individual reviewers were really consistent – the more weaknesses they identified in the proposal, the lower the score awarded. But unfortunately, it appeared that each reviewer had a different idea of what a weakness is and what score that meant the proposal would ultimately be given. So, what this means is… Elizabeth Pier: ...we can’t really compare the evaluations of different reviewers and the degree of disagreement that we see in the scores seems to be a reflection of a different sense of calibration in what constitutes a bad score versus a good score. Julie Gould: The reviewers do come together for a meeting to discuss the papers based on the initial reviews, and in the meetings that Elizabeth Pier recreated… Elizabeth Pier: As you would predict and as people told us based on their intuition participating in these kinds of meetings, the range of scores does get smaller after discussions, so there’s a degree of consensus building within individual peer review panels, but the agreement between different panels actually got wider after discussion, and we had a unique opportunity here because we had four different panels that were evaluating the same applications. So in practice each application is only evaluated by one study section but for the purposes of this study we exploited that we had these four different groups looking at the same proposals. And so, in the process of building consensus within a given panel, different panels actually went further apart. Julie Gould: So really the outcome that you’re coming to is that it’s potentially better that these reviewers don’t meet? Elizabeth Pier: Our studies haven’t indicated any value or benefit in the sense of improving the consistency or reliability of the process. Julie Gould: But what about the variability in the quality of the proposal being discussed, doesn’t that make a difference? Elizabeth Pier: But we had to ask people to donate their applications and the summary statement that they received to us and the donations that we received just happened to be funded. And so, we tried to say that above a certain quality threshold, our results suggest that it’s essentially a random process and the meeting doesn’t seem to remove that randomness. However, I will say a caveat to that caveat is that the applications that get discussed in the meeting have already gone through triage, so only the top 50% of applications based on their preliminary score even get discussed in the meeting. So, what we are talking about is given that top 50% of proposals, after you’ve already excluded the ones that really have no chance of being funded initially, there really is a lot of randomness, but even more so, there’s already randomness such that the applications that have been weeded out so to speak and don’t get the opportunity to be discussed in the meeting might actually have a lot of merits. # Had it been assigned to a different panel with different reviewer it very well could have gone on to be discussed. Julie Gould: So, what you’re saying really is that luck plays a very large role in whether or not your research gets funded. Elizabeth Pier: Yes, that is what our results suggest. Above a certain degree, if you have a relatively competitive application, there aren’t any major issues that would immediately disqualify it to any kind of representative effort in the field, there’s a great deal of randomness and luck that we find in determining who does and does not get funding. Julie Gould: So, what does that mean for all those people who are spending all these hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on getting their funding applications organised and sorted and written up? I mean my heart goes out to them... Elizabeth Pier: Yes, my heart does as well. I mean it’s one of the reasons I studied this for my dissertation because it’s incredibly important for individual careers and also incredibly important for the progress of science, right? We want to make sure that the most deserving ideas are getting rewarded and funded and that it’s not just picking out of a hat. So, I mean there are a couple of pieces of silver lining. I think that we see evidence, especially as grants get resubmitted, that being responsive to reviewers’ critiques can play a strong role in conveying to reviewers improvement over time, and so there is something to be said for if you get rejected or you don’t get funded, having some tenacity and resubmitting that application and doing everything you can to address the reviewers’ critiques and feedback. It can make a potential difference. I also think that it’s important for folks not to take it personally. As academics, we definitely are used to rejection and used to plenty of times when we think we have really great ideas and reviewers of manuscripts or of grant applications don’t seem to agree with us, so I would encourage people to take a little bit of solace in that it’s not necessarily a reflection of the quality of the ideas but it’s more kind of a feature of the process. Julie Gould: How would you suggest then that the process is improved? Elizabeth Pier: There should be some assessments of whether what some scholars have called a "modified lottery system" could do. So, the idea being that there’s some initial screening process that experts do conduct to make sure, like I said, they’re kind of weeding out any really problematic proposals, things that are just wildly out of left field in terms of being feasible to complete given the budget or things like that. And then after that kind of initial screen then it really is just a random selection. And the reason I think that would be an improvement is because if the process is already random above a certain quality threshold, which our study suggests it is, we might as well save the money and the time involved to convene thousands of people and spend millions of dollars to have these meetings if the outcome is essentially the same as a random process. Julie Gould: Now, we’ll touch on the idea of a lottery-style funding system later on in the series, but what we can say now is that change is going to be slow – it always is in academia. Is there anything that can be done in the meantime, before this lottery style system or something completely different is created? Elizabeth Pier: Starting to accept the fact that it’s not a completely objective process, that humans are fallible, they are subjective, and when you’re asking experts to make very complex judgements about the potential likelihood of success of a project, that’s a really difficult decision that’s going to bring in a lot of heuristics and biases that go into their decision making. Julie Gould: My final question to Elizabeth was what advice have you got for anyone who’s currently writing a grant proposal to the NIH. Elizabeth Pier: One piece of advice, which is probably pretty obvious but I will say is backed by our findings, is that weaknesses are much more predictive of the score that reviewers will assign, rather than strengths. So, what that means is minimise as many weaknesses as you can. Julie Gould: So, after all of that, I’m intrigued. What do you think? How would you feel about a more lottery-style funding system? Please send in your thoughts to the Nature Careers team which you can do via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And over the next two episodes, I’ll be speaking to different experts on how to minimise the number of weaknesses within your funding application, in the hopes – fingers crossed – that you’ll have a bit more success and a bit more luck. Now, that’s all for this section of our Working Scientist podcast. We now have a slot sponsored by and featuring the work of the European Research Council. Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould. (Theme music) Jean-Pierre Bourguignon: So, my name is Jean-Pierre Bourguignon and my title is President of the European Research Council, which of course is supported by the European Union as through the European Commission. I’m a French mathematician, I should say. I spent most of my career in the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). My field was differential geometry, but did a lot of work actually at the boundary of theoretical physics, general relativity and Dirac operators and these kind of topics, but still always as a mathematician. The European Research Council is actually an interesting story. It was created in 2007, so it’s now 11 years of age, and it was a long process. Myself, the first time I heard about the possibility of having an ERC was 1995, and it was a long effort by the scientific community, and step after step we had to convince people in the Commission, people in the European Council – namely the countries – that they should support such a project, but still it has a lot of very specific characteristics, particularly the power which has been given to its scientific council is considerable. It really was an innovation and the council has the responsibility of deciding on how to spend the money and how to do the evaluation. This is unique in the setting of the European Commission, that a group of 22 scientists are given such a responsibility and of course as President of the European Research Council, I have some very specific ones, which is to confirm the list of people who are granted and really guarantee the quality of the work done. The mission of the ERC was really to make Europe more attractive, to be a place where science can develop really in the most ambitious way and to push the ambition, particularly of young people, upward, that is to make them independent early enough and to take their vision on board. You know, we are at the stage of giving 1100 research grants this year, which is of course a very significant amount of money. The budget is now really over €2 billion per year, and we are covering all fields of science – that is physical sciences, engineering, including maths, computer science, and so on, life sciences, social sciences and humanities. If you want to know what you are doing, you need to talk and meet and discuss with the people you are funding and so I do travel a lot, particularly in Europe, to meet the people we call our grantees – the people who get the grants from the ERC – and this part of my job is really extremely worthwhile and extremely rewarding because the selection process is a very tough one – the typical success rate at this moment is 13%. And it means that people have all proposed very ambitious projects that are conditioned to be successful at the ERC, high risk again, we need to encourage the panels who are selecting people to really accept to take risks. And that’s one thing I hear regularly from grantees, telling me, ‘I submitted a very similar project to my national agency but then I was not funded, it was considered too risky, then I submitted to the ERC, and then the ERC funds me,’ so it makes a big difference. Another component which is very important in our strategy is the fact that the clause, which has been put in place by the European Research Council. Really, we have three categories at the moment for the individual grants, which is the starting grants, consolidator grants and advanced grants, and it means timed to PhD. So, starting grants – to 2 to 7 years, consolidator grants – 7 to 12 years, and advanced grants – there is no condition, it just means people who are already confirmed, and while doing that it means that in the end we are dedicating typically two thirds of our budget to the younger people, people who are typically below 40 years of age. Very often people get the belief that really if you are not from one of the leading research institutions in Europe, then you have no chance. This is not the case. I mean the institution which is your host institution is not part of the evaluation, which is really the key for the evaluation is the project. You have to show that you have thought of what kind of resources will be needed, and you describe them, but this is not the institution as such which is very important. So, it means that in particular in terms of the support we give, part of it could be also buying expensive equipment if you need them and if it’s not available in your institution. So, we consider the project, not just as helping the people, but helping the people also to set up the environment which will make it possible to get the project through. So, this is sometimes one misconception that people have, that they get the feeling that if they are coming from a smaller place, they have no chance. The number of institutions the ERC has been signing with is close to 800 now, so of course it’s quite a significant number of institutions based in Europe and of course some of the leading ones got more grants than others, but definitely even small institutions have been very successful at the ERC. One of the key things that the ERC is doing is empowering researchers. This is something very, very important for us, and a very good example for this is one of the specific characteristics of the ERC programme which is called portability, but the host institution is not part of the selection criteria – it’s just here to make sure that there is a legal body that is able to receive the contract and it gives a lot of power to the researchers. And one of the typical powers, what I mentioned, portability, which means that the researcher can change the host institution if he or she feels that it’s not given the proper treatment, or maybe they could give other personal reasons to do that. This is the whole philosophy behind it – we really want the researchers in the driver’s seat at the level of the council but also at the level of how they run their contract, and of course there is an institution behind it because you want to be sure that there is a legal basis for this, but we really want the researchers to be able to do their research in the best possible conditions. The map I have in front of me, which is the map of the world, has on top of it one of our mottos which is ‘Open to the world.’ One of the conditions to be funded is that you have to spend at least 50% of your time in Europe, but you can be from any country, and we want to be sure that Europe is the leader to tackle some of the most challenging scientific problems. At the very beginning, we could notice that the percentage of women who were applying to the ERC was less than the percentage of women in the scientific community, and we felt this was definitely not adequate. Also, we had for the ones who applied, the success rate was definitely lower than the success rate for men. Through very sustained efforts, and identifying the issue from the very beginning, I think we made very significant progress. So, first of all, the percentage of women applying to the ERC has been steadily growing. We are now basically at the level where the percentage of women applying to the ERC is very similar to the level of the percentage of women in the age group of the different goals we have. So, from that point of view, I think we really achieved something which means that there’s no some kind of resistance or reluctance of women to apply, so this is one step. And then, of course very important but I think the two are linked – the fact that in recent years, the ERC women have been on average more successful than men. It’s a very slight difference but since we started the situation shows the opposite. We are very pleased that all the efforts we made, particularly to tackle complicit bias or various other things have been more or less successful. I’ve been visiting many, many countries in Europe, in particular countries in the "EU13," because I feel you need to understand the real situation people are exposed to in the various countries, and they are the ones who joined Europe the most recently, and most of them located in the eastern part of Europe and it’s very important to realise that actually that situation can be quite different from one country to the next. It has to do with teaching load, it has to do with the power structures in the institutes, it has to do of course with the support which is available to people, so for me it was very, very important to meet the researchers because that’s for me the key point. Also, to meet the authorities in these countries and to understand in which environment they are operating because I think that’s the very best way. We, at the level of the European Research Council, have also introduced some help, in particular by encouraging the various countries, could be also regions, to support possibilities of researchers in typically underrepresented regions (it could be EU13 countries) – to really give them some possibility of spending some time with the support of their countries or their region, in ERC teams, so that they understand what it takes to submit a proposal, but also to understand better, to really also test their ideas with other people so that then they have a much better idea what it takes to submit a proposal and therefore they are better prepared personally, not just intellectually, to really submit a proposal in good conditions because they have seen what a difference it makes and also what also kind of effort you have to put in if you want to be successful.   Originally posted on Nature Careers - 04 January 2019 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00016-0

When Kylie Ball begins a grant-writing workshop, she often alludes to the funding successes and failures that she has experienced in her career. “I say, ‘I’ve attracted more than $25 million in grant funding and have had more than 60 competitive grants funded. But I’ve also had probably twice as many rejected.’ A lot of early-career researchers often find those rejections really tough to take. But I actually think you learn so much from the rejected grants.” Grant writing is a job requirement for research scientists who need to fund projects year after year. Most proposals end in rejection, but missteps give researchers a chance to learn how to find other opportunities, write better proposals and navigate the system. Taking time to learn from the setbacks and successes of others can help to increase the chances of securing funds, says Ball, who runs workshops alongside her role as a behavioural scientist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Do your research Competition for grants has never been more intense. The European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme is the European Union’s largest-ever research and innovation programme, with nearly €80 billion (US$89 billion) in funding set aside between 2014 and 2020. It reported a 14% success rate for its first 100 calls for proposals, although submissions to some categories had lower success rates. The commission has published its proposal for Horizon Europe, the €100-billion programme that will succeed Horizon 2020. In Australia, since 2017, the National Health and Medical Research Council has been funding less than 20% of proposals it receives. And the US National Science Foundation (NSF) received 49,415 proposals and funded 11,447 of them in 2017 — less than 25%. That’s tens of thousands of rejections in a single year from the NSF alone. Being a renowned scientist doesn’t ensure success. On the same day that molecular biologist Carol Greider won a Nobel prize in 2009, she learnt that her recently submitted grant proposal had been rejected. “Even on the day when you win the Nobel prize,” she said in a 2017 graduation speech at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, “sceptics may question whether you really know what you’re doing.” To increase the likelihood of funding success, scientists suggest doing an extensive search of available grants and noting differences in the types of project financed by various funding bodies. Government agencies such as the NSF tend to be interested in basic science that addresses big, conceptual questions, says Leslie Rissler, programme director at the NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology in Alexandria, Virginia. A private foundation, however, might prioritize projects that inform social change or that have practical implications that fit into one of its specific missions. Pitching a proposal Before beginning an application, you should read descriptions and directions carefully, advises Ball, who recently pored over 200 pages of online material before starting a proposal. That effort can save time in the end, helping researchers to work out which awards are a good fit and which aren’t. “If you’re not absolutely spot on with what they’re looking for, it may not be worth your time in writing that grant,” she says. Experienced scientists suggest studying successful proposals, which can often be acquired from trusted colleagues and supervisors, university libraries or online databases. A website called Open Grants, for example, includes more than 200 grants, both successful and unsuccessful, that are free to peruse. Grant writers shouldn’t fear e-mailing or calling a grants agency to talk through their potential interest in a project, advises Amanda Stanley, executive director at COMPASS, a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon, that supports environmental scientists. For six years, she worked as a programme officer for the Wilburforce Foundation in Seattle, Washington, which supports conservation science. At this and other private foundations, the application process often begins with a ‘soft pitch’ that presents a brief case for the project. Those pitches should cover several main points, Stanley says: “‘Here’s what I’m trying to do. Here’s why it’s important. Here’s a little bit about me and the people I’m collaborating with. Would you like to talk further?’” She notes that a successful proposal must closely align with a foundation’s strategic goals. Each organization has its own process, but next steps typically include a phone conversation, a written summary and, finally, an invitation to submit a formal application. “Once you’ve gotten that invitation to submit a proposal from the programme officer, your chances of getting funded are really, really high,” Stanley says. Grants manager Cheryl Smythe (left) allows for IT glitches when submitting grant proposals.Credit: Dr Louisa Wood The write stuff Applicants should put themselves in the shoes of grant reviewers, who might need to read dozens of applications about complicated subjects that lie outside their own fields of expertise, often while juggling their own research. “Imagine you’re tired, grumpy and hungry. You’ve got 50 applications to get through,” says Cheryl Smythe, international grants manager at the Babraham Institute, a life-sciences research institution in Cambridge, UK. “Think about how you as an applicant can make it as easy as possible for them.” Formatting is an important consideration, says Aerin Jacob, a conservation scientist at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in Canmore, Canada. White space and bold headings can make proposals easier to read, as can illustrations. “Students are tempted and sometimes encouraged to squeeze in as much information as possible, so there are all kinds of tricks to fiddle with the margin size, or to make the font a little bit smaller so that you can squeeze in that one last sentence,” Jacob says. “For a reviewer, that’s exhausting to read.” Ball advises avoiding basic deal-breakers, such as spelling errors, grammatical slips and lengthy proposals that exceed word limits. Those kinds of mistake can cast doubt on how rigorous applicants will be in their research, she says. A list of key words, crucial for indexes and search engines, should be more than an afterthought, Ball adds. On a proposal for a project on promoting physical activity among women, she tagged her proposal with the word ‘women’. The descriptor was too broad, and her application ended up with a reviewer whose expertise appeared to be in sociology and gender studies instead of in exercise or nutrition. The grant didn’t score well in that round of review. To prevent a reviewer’s eyes from glazing over, Jacob says, use clear language instead of multisyllabic jargon. When technical details are necessary, follow up a complex sentence with one that sums up the big picture. Thinking back to her early proposals, Jacob remembers cramming in words instead of getting to the point. “It was probably something like, ‘I propose to study the heterogeneity of forest landscapes in spatial and temporal recovery after multiple disturbances,’ rather than, ‘I want to see what happens when a forest has been logged, burnt and farmed, and grows back,’” she says. Grants can be more speculative and more self-promotional than papers are, Rissler adds. “A grant is about convincing a jury that your ideas are worthy and exciting,” she says. “You can make some pretty sweeping generalizations about what your proposed ideas might do for science and society in the long run. A paper is much more rigid in terms of what you can say and in what you must say.” Getting some science communication training can be a worthwhile strategy for strengthening grant-writing skills, Stanley says. When she was reviewing pitch letters for a private foundation, she recalls that lots of scientists couldn’t fully explain why their work mattered. But when she received pitches that were clear and compelling, she was more willing to help those scientists brainstorm other possible funding agencies if her foundation wasn’t the right fit. Scientists who sent strong — albeit unsuccessful — applications were also more likely to get funding from the foundation for later projects. Science storytelling To refine project pitches and proposals, Stanley recommends that scientists use a free communication tool from COMPASS called the Message Box Workbook, which can help to identify key points and answer the crucial question for every audience: ‘So what?’ Scientific conferences often provide symposia or sessions that include funders and offer helpful tips for writing grants. And development officers at institutions can help scientists to connect with funders. “A good development officer is worth their weight in gold,” Stanley says. “Make friends with them.” Jacob has taken science-communication training through COMPASS, The Story Collider (a science-storytelling organization) and from other such organizations. She has learnt how to talk about her work in the manner of a storyteller. In proposals and interviews, she now includes personal details, when relevant, that explain the problems she wants to address and why she decided to speak out about conservation — an example of the kind of conflict and resolution that builds a good story. Jacob senses that the approach strikes a chord. “As a reviewer, you remember somebody’s proposal just that little bit more,” she says. “If you have a stack of proposals, you want to find the one that you connect with.” A clear focus can help to boost a grant to the top of a reviewer’s pile, Ball adds. In one of the first large grants that she applied for, she proposed collecting information on the key factors that prevent weight gain as well as designing and implementing an obesity-intervention programme. In retrospect, it was too much within the grant’s two-year time frame. She didn’t get the funding, and the feedback she received was that it would have worked better as two separate proposals. “While it’s tempting to want to claim that you can solve these enormous, challenging and complex problems in a single project,” Ball says, “realistically, that’s usually not the case.” Teaming up with collaborators can also increase the chance of success. Earlier this year, Ball was funded by the Diabetes Australia Research Program for a study that she proposed in collaboration with hospital clinicians, helping disadvantaged people with type 2 diabetes to eat healthy diets. Earlier in her career, she had written grants based on her own ideas, rather than on suggestions from clinicians or other non-academic partners. This time, she says, she focused on a real-world need rather than on her own ideas for a study. Instead of overreaching, she kept the study small and preliminary, allowing her to test the approach before trying to get funding for larger trials. It is acceptable — even advisable — to admit a study’s limitations instead of trying to meet preconceived expectations, Jacob adds. In 2016, she had a proposal rejected for a study on spatial planning on the west coast of Canada that would, crucially, be informed by knowledge from Indigenous communities. She resubmitted the same proposal the next year to the same reviewers, but with a more confident and transparent approach: she was straightforward about her desire to take a different tack from the type of research that had been tried before. This time, she made it clear that she wanted to listen to Indigenous peoples and use their priorities to guide her work. She got the funding. “I saw that if I tried to change it to meet what I thought funders wanted, I might not be accurately representing what I was doing,” she says. “I just wanted to be really clear with myself and really clear with the interviewers that this is who I am, and this is what I want to do.” What not to do Writing is hard, and experienced grant writers recommend devoting plenty of time to the task. Smythe recommends setting aside a week for each page of a proposal, noting that some applications require only a few pages while major collaborative proposals for multi-year projects can run to more than 100 pages. “It can take months to get one of these together,” she says. Scheduling should include time for rewrites, proofreads and secondary reads by friends, colleagues and family members, experts say. Working right up to the deadline can undo weeks to months of hard work. At the last minute, Jacob once accidentally submitted an earlier draft instead of the final version. It included sections that were bolded and highlighted, with comments such as, “NOTE TO SELF: MAKE THIS PART SOUND BETTER.” She didn’t get that one, and has never made the same mistake again. Add an extra buffer for technology malfunctions, adds Smythe, who once got a call from a scientist at another organization who was in a panic because his computer had stopped working while he was trying to submit a grant proposal half an hour before the deadline. She submitted it for him with 23 seconds to spare. “My hand was shaking,” she says. That proposal was not successful, although the scientist sent her a nice bottle of champagne afterwards. Grant writing doesn’t necessarily end with a proposal’s submission. Applicants might receive requests for rewrites or more information. Rejections can also come with feedback, and if they don’t, applicants can request it. Luiz Nunes de Oliveira, a physicist at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, also works as a programme coordinator at the São Paulo Research Foundation. In this role, he sometimes meets with applicants who want to follow up on rejected proposals. “We sit down and go through their résumé, and then you find out that they had lots of interesting stuff to say about themselves and they missed the opportunity,” he says. “All it takes is to write an e-mail message asking [the funder] for an interview.” Jacob recommends paying attention to such feedback to strengthen future proposals. To fund her master’s programme, she applied for a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), but didn’t get it on her first try. After requesting feedback by e-mail (to an address she found buried on NSERC’s website), she was able to see her scores by category, which revealed that a few bad grades early in her undergraduate programme were her limiting factor. There was nothing she could do about her past, but the information pushed her to work harder on other parts of her application. After gaining more research and field experience, co-authoring a paper and establishing relationships with senior colleagues who would vouch for her as referees, she finally secured funding from NSERC on her third try, two years after her first rejection. Negative feedback can be one of the best learning experiences, Rissler adds. She kept the worst review she ever received, a scathing response to a grant proposal she submitted to the NSF in 2003, when she was a postdoc studying comparative phylogeography. The feedback, she says, was painful to read. It included comments that her application was incomprehensible and filled with platitudes. After she received that letter, which is now crinkled up in her desk for posterity, Rissler called a programme officer to ask why they let her see such a negative review. She was told that the critical commenter was an outlier and that the panel had gone on to recommend her project for the grant, which she ultimately received. “I learnt that you do need to be tough,” says Rissler, who now helps to make final decisions on funding for other scientists. She emphasizes that whereas reviewers’ opinions can vary, all proposals undergo multiple independent expert reviews, followed by panel discussions and additional oversight by programme directors. Grant writing tends to provoke anxiety among early-career scientists, but opportunities exist for people who are willing to take the time to develop ideas and push past rejections and negative feedback, she says. “We can’t review proposals that we don’t get. Originally posted on nature.com on 20th December 2019 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03914-5

The US state of Washington, in the Pacific Northwest, was once the epicentre of the information-technology world, thanks to Microsoft and its founder, Seattle-born Bill Gates — until the dotcom boom sent investors down the coast to Silicon Valley. Now, Gates and other high-profile Microsoft alumni, along with other wealthy donors, are elevating the state as a major player in another sector: global health. One survey, from the Washington Global Health Alliance (WGHA), an industry body that encourages collaboration between global-health organizations in the state, revealed that 207 local bodies see some of their activities as pertaining to global health. Those groups provide a diverse array of job opportunities in all aspects of the sector. “In Washington state, we have organizations that do everything from lab-based research, vaccines, diagnostics, data collection, service delivery, disaster response, down to last-mile logistics,” says Dena Morris, president and chief executive of WGHA. “Everything from beginning to end, there’s someone in the state working on it.” Nathan Myhrvold was at Microsoft from 1986 to 2000, becoming the company’s chief technology officer in 1996. In 2000, he started the speculative patent firm Intellectual Ventures, based in Bellevue; this now has its own global-health branch, Global Good, which was set up with funding from Gates in 2012. Myhrvold says that the state has a range of specialist enterprises that make it particularly attractive to those involved in this sort of work. “The Seattle area is the Silicon Valley of saving the world,” he says. In 2000, Gates established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, which has been the most significant contributor to the state’s global-health efforts. It has launched and funded several institutes and departments, both at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and at Washington State University, in Pullman — the state’s two largest higher education centres — as well as funding global health organizations based in the area. In 2015, the foundation made US$4.1 billion in grants available globally. It estimates that, in the same year, it generated $1.5 billion in local economic activity, including some $340 million in direct grants to Washington-based research groups. Much of that money goes to the Seattle-based non-profit organization Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) and the University of Washington — both with a history of studying and fighting infectious diseases. The Gates Foundation, which employs 1,200 people in Washington in a $500-million, 84,000-square-metre campus next to the city’s iconic Space Needle observation tower, is the world’s largest philanthropic funder of scientific research in terms of endowment. It employs a further 300 people outside Washington. The hugeness of the foundation has generated criticism. Gates himself has asked why sharing wealth should be optional for billionaires, rather than mandated by government, through taxes or grants. Others have pointed to surveys showing that an increase in private grants for public health can remove incentives for local governments to invest their own resources in health care, precipitating an over-reliance on foreign aid. Still more have argued that the Gates approach to funding institutes over individuals has encouraged the global-health sector to behave more like a capitalist group than a charitable one, and have suggested that the foundation be overseen by an independent international body, such as the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The single biggest gift The Gateses aren’t the only big philanthropists in town, nor is philanthropy limited to global health. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died last October, was another big spender in the region. Most famously, he launched the Seattle-based Allen Institute, which is organized into separate institutes specializing in brain science, cell science and artificial intelligence, along with a grant-awarding body. Rob Piercy, a spokesperson for the Allen Institute, told Nature that Allen had committed more than $1 billion since founding the first institute in 2003. Warren Buffett is credited with much of the growth of the Gates Foundation. The businessman pledged $30 billion in 2006 — what Bill and Melinda Gates in their 2017 annual open letter called “the single biggest gift anyone has ever given anyone for anything”. That gift doubled the foundation’s resources. Health workers give Bill Gates a tour of their work in the village of Kicheba, Tanzania, in 2017.Credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty As the Gates Foundation grew, and started to tackle more diseases in more countries, it needed better data to track and respond to outbreaks, says David Wertheimer, director of community and civic engagement at the foundation. To this end, it launched the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in 2007 with a $107-million grant, and has continued to support the centre, which is part of the University of Washington. Wertheimer says that the university was a natural home for the institute. Like PATH, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2017, the university was addressing global-health issues “long before the Gates Foundation ever existed”, he says. The institute collects global data on diseases, mortality, morbidity and disability, which aids the Gates Foundation in planning its mission, Wertheimer says. “It will really help us allocate time, talent and resources to the challenges of global health.” William Heisel, director of global services at the IHME, says that the increased support of the Gates Foundation has helped the institute to grow from three people when it started to about 450 now. Seeds of collaboration What’s made the area so successful is how all these entities interact, he says. The IHME shares its data with local and regional organizations, and the Gates Foundation brings together a range of stakeholders; it has held more than 8,000 meetings since 2006, ranging from one-on-ones to conferences of hundreds. “It’s a very collaborative community here,” says Heisel. Public-health specialist Dorothy Thomas says she sees and benefits from that community spirit. Thomas manages logistics at the non-profit organization VillageReach in Seattle, which aims to provide remote communities in the developing world with health care, and is building a database to track the price of delivering vaccine components to different parts of the world. She is working with scientists at the Gates Foundation, PATH and the University of Washington, among others, to build a map of their costs. She’s been pleased with the spirit of cooperation for that project. “There’s an openness, an excitement when it comes to sharing the work that they’ve been doing,” Thomas says. Another characteristic of institutes in Washington is a focus on open-access publishing. The Allen institutes have remained committed to open-access research since they were founded, says Piercy. “No login, no password, no anything required to access the research,” he says. “It’s really the single biggest thing that sets us apart from other basic-science research institutes.” The Gates Foundation also maintains strict open-access policies for the research it funds. Work paid for by the foundation must be published without an embargo, and in front of a paywall, in any journal that’s willing to make the research accessible. This approach has been taken a step further by an international consortium of European research funders, which plans to forbid publishing in anything other than fully open-access journals. The initiative is being led Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission’s special envoy on open access, who cited the Gates Foundation as an inspiration. Washington’s combination of open data and open doors makes it easy to collaborate with a wide sphere of people, says Heisel. “You are rarely in a room where it’s just charitable organizations speaking to themselves.” Collaborations have emerged between academic, non-profit and commercial partners. For example, the IHME partnered with PATH to look at the effectiveness of immunizations by Gavi, a vaccine alliance based in Geneva, Switzerland. PATH provided on-the-ground insight, while the IHME collected and analysed data. “The ecosystem in Washington is ripe for this,” says David Fleming, PATH’s vice-president of public health. The state’s prosperity, paradoxically, causes some challenges, says Allan Jones, president and chief executive of the Allen Institute. Competition for talent is hot. For example, finding computational scientists can be tough with Facebook and Amazon often seeking similar skills. “We have to compete against that market and we do lose out,” Jones says. The same goes for property. Facebook, Google and Amazon have bought property in popular South Lake Union, where, along with the Allen Institute, the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute also have a presence. Lee Hood, president of the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology, worries that the institute might have to move in two years, when its lease comes up for renewal. The Seattle area’s property market has cooled in recent months, but is still one of the most expensive areas in which to buy a home in the United States (see ‘Paddle your own canoe’). Thomas shares a house with five people to beat the rental market. She says that the biggest downside to the state, however, is Washington’s five-month rainy season. “Moisture is coming from every single possible direction that you can imagine,” she says. “That can be pretty rough.” PADDLE YOUR OWN CANOE Clay Reid enjoys a quintessentially Seattle commute. He takes his kayak down a hill a few hundred metres from his house, launches it into Lake Union, paddles 2.5 kilometres, and parks it in a garage at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. The 30-minute journey illustrates the difference between cultures in Seattle, Washington, and Boston, Massachusetts, Reid says — he worked as a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston before joining the Allen institute in 2012. “You’re much more likely to discuss how you got to work than what you do at work,” Reid says. Conversations turn to hiking, cycling, camping, climbing and paddling — all of which can be pursued in and around Puget Sound, within an hour’s drive of the city. Reid even anticipated the location of the Allen institute, buying a house near Lake Union to make his commute possible. Now, he often has much of the lake to himself. Paddling is better than driving, because new offices for Facebook and Amazon are bringing more traffic into the South Lake Union area — a problem that will only increase when Google expands its own campus there. Demand for housing has pushed property prices to record highs, with median home prices in the Seattle area hitting US $830,000 last spring. When Reid was looking for a house, he found himself competing against local tech millionaires offering above the asking price and paying in cash. He and his wife settled for a smaller dwelling and later extended the property. Reid has one characteristic that sets him apart from most Seattlites, however — he prefers decaf to regular coffee. When he orders, he sometimes incurs the disdain of snobby baristas. “In Boston, people can be judgemental about what you do for a living,” Reid says. “In Seattle, people can be equally judgemental about how you take your coffee.” Paul Smaglik Up the coast from the valley There is no shortage of global-health problems whose solutions involve advanced technology. For example, Global Good is developing a microscope that can automatically detect diseases such as malaria. The team uses machine-learning technology and pattern-matching software to enable the identification of pathogens that the human eye might miss. This improves the often poor quality of malaria microscopy, which plagues malaria management and elimination programmes; and it could greatly improve the effectiveness of malaria research worldwide, Myhrvold says. The global-health ecosystem in Washington makes such inventions possible, he says. For example, if Global Good needs a biosafety laboratory to study tuberculosis, or mosquito samples to examine malaria, he can usually find collaborators. The sheer number of global-health organizations, combined with their willingness to work together, makes Washington state — and Seattle in particular — a special place to work, he says. Many fellow technology specialists agree, Myhrvold says, and have joined him in moving to the sector. “They like working on some of this stuff. It’s fun. It makes you feel good about yourself, about the impact you have.”    First published on Nature Careers on 16 Jan 2019

In November 2017, a proposal was moving through the US federal legislature that would have increased the amount of taxes payable by graduate students across the United States by up to US$10,000 per year. As a fourth-year MD–PhD student who would have been affected by the proposal, I e-mailed my US representative, Jim Cooper (Democrat), to ask him to oppose the tax. We met at his home office in Nashville, Tennessee, the following month, although my inexperience in lobbying meant that the conversation largely consisted of the congressman helping me to understand how I could advocate more effectively. He explained the importance of community participation (through phone calls and letters) and of bringing a larger coalition to policy discussions with legislators so that they wouldn’t see a lone graduate student as the only person fighting for an issue. A month after our chat, I got a phone call from a member of Cooper’s staff, who told me that I had left my wallet under the conference-room table. Of course, that revelation came long after I had already replaced my driver’s licence and all of my credit cards. It wasn’t an auspicious start. Still, I remained convinced that petitioning the federal government to improve support for research was my duty as a scientist, and I continued to look for ways to bring about that change. Then, I got lucky. The US Society for Neuroscience (SfN) announced its year-long Early Career Policy Ambassadors programme, which included ‘advocacy’ training. I leapt at the opportunity, joined the course and learnt that there is no magic to advocating effectively — all it takes is preparation and practise. I met extensively with legislators and their staff members in Washington DC during the training. And my efforts have paid off. I’ve been able to get Cooper, as well as staff from the offices of three US senators, into my laboratory to see federal research dollars in action. As a result of my advocacy and that of many others, legislators rejected the tax proposal in 2017 and repeatedly increased annual federal research funding through the US National Institutes of Health up to its current $39 billion. Here are eight takeaways from my training and advocacy efforts: Form or find a team. Join your national research society: it assists and coordinates scientists who want to get involved with advocacy. Many societies manage effective proposals or platforms across the research community (such as those calling for specific funding increases or regulations related to research); the unified message helps policymakers to know what legislation to support. Begin with the end in mind. Spell out your goals, then lay out a plan for presenting your arguments. Before meeting with a legislator, divide up key topics among group members. You’ll each need to assemble relevant facts and concrete information on your assigned topic that you can reel off in two or three minutes. Once in the meeting, each member of your advocacy group should introduce themselves using their name, institution, constituency, career stage and area of research. Develop effective ‘asks’. ‘Asks’ are the policy requests that you make to legislators. Make sure to hit three points: the precise amount of funding that your group is requesting; the specific agency or initiative that will receive this funding; and the time frame for funding distribution (this year or next year, for example). Identify the appropriate legislator. Find out who is responsible for appropriating funds for research in your area by searching government websites. In the United States, for example, the federal government funds the majority of scientific research through agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Elsewhere, both national and international agencies might provide research grants. The governmental bodies that oversee these funding agencies dictate their resources. Determine who your representatives are in these governmental bodies because those people are likely to be the most responsive. Get to know whether your lawmakers are involved in any funding-related committees, and concentrate your efforts on the legislators with the most influence. Learn their legislative and budgetary priorities, along with their personal interests, to prepare for potential questions. For example, in a senate office with a National Football League player on staff, I spoke about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (which is caused by repeated blows to the head and consequently is of concern to American-football players), and this helped our case. When you’re trying to set up a meeting with a legislator or a staffer, e-mail and phone calls are a good way to make initial contact. If you have already communicated with the office, reply to the last e-mail rather than starting a new chain, to provide context and increase the likelihood of a response. Include your professional title, any scientific society (such as SfN) or advocacy group affiliated with your coalition, the number of group members, the proposed advocacy activity or request, and any planned meetings between students or researchers and the legislator. Contact your national society or investigate online to establish which decision makers are involved in the government’s budget in its current phase. I recall a senate staffer — from an office that is a key gatekeeper for research investment — becoming particularly interested in our asks when we transitioned our discussion to the funding bill that he was actively working on and emphasized its concrete implications for research. By making your requests timely and relevant to ongoing legislation, you can increase the likelihood that your input will gain traction. Choose advocacy activities deliberately. Advocacy activities have different levels of impact. The more personal the activity (for example, individualized versus mass e-mails), the more weight it will hold with the legislator. These types of interaction, such as phone or face-to-face discussions, are more effective than electronic communication. Public forums, expert panels and lab tours are ideal ways to share information with lawmakers. Tangible experiences offer lasting memories for legislators or staffers and provide them with positive stories to discuss with their colleagues while they work on legislation. If you cannot meet in person, call your legislator’s office. Staff members tally the number of phone calls that they receive on an issue. While waiting for a member of Congress in his office, I overheard staffers start to talk about taxes, after a few constituents had phoned in to express related concerns. Calls are more effective than generic e-mails, not only because they are more personal, but also because computer algorithms cannot sort through them — which ensures that a staffer will engage with your topic. Either way, refer to particular proposals or legislation because specifics provide actionable follow-ups. Refine your presentation. Remember to tailor your narrative to the legislator. Your explanations should be polished and devoid of jargon. Politicians find information most compelling when it directly affects their constituents. In my presentations, I often link my addiction research (and federal funding) to the explosion in Tennesseans battling substance-use disorder. Analogously, I advocated alongside a prominent diabetes researcher who invited patients, physicians and researchers to in-person meetings to bolster the narrative. And you’ll need to rehearse — a lot. Ask a non-scientist to act as the legislator, and practise everything you plan to do and say. Concise delivery will help lawmakers and staffers remember you and convey your asks to others. Keep focused. You might get a variation of this question: “I love science and research, so what should I cut to make room for your funding increases?” Answer by focusing on the importance of research — and remember that it is not your role to make other specific budgetary recommendations. Follow up with the office. Maintain communication to make sure that your issue continues to get attention. The easiest meeting for politicians is one that has no follow-up. Your ongoing contact with the office will help to underscore the importance of the issue to the constituents of your district or region. Within two days, send a thank-you note that summarizes your message.    

Universities often tout their commitment to public outreach. But a new study of the internal guidelines for faculty tenure and promotion suggests that institutions don’t always put much value on public engagement. “There’s a huge disconnect,” says lead author Juan Pablo Alperin, who studies scholarly communications at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. “Universities talk in a grandiose way about fulfilling the public mission. But when we look at the documents, they aren’t necessarily walking the walk.” Alperin and his colleagues examined 864 documents used for review, promotion and tenure decisions (also called RPT documents) at 129 universities in the United States and Canada. The documents covered a wide array of disciplines, including life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics and social sciences. The team published their results1 on 1 October as a preprint in the Humanities Commons repository. Words matter The researchers looked for keywords including ‘community’, ‘public’ and ‘impact’, and the context in which they appeared in the documents. The team found relatively few direct references to public outreach, a broad term that includes activities such as community-involved research projects or communications aimed at general audiences. But they did find a large emphasis on publications and citations, the usual metrics of achievement. Grants, journal articles, books and other conventional scientific outputs were mentioned at least once in 90% to 95% of RPT documents from the universities (see ‘Measuring up’). In terms of context, the word ‘community’ showed up in every document from universities with the most research activity. But it appeared most often within 15 words of the terms ‘university’, ‘service’, ‘faculty’ and ‘professional’, in that order, suggesting that the focus was largely on the academic community. The word ‘impact’ also appeared in 94% of RPT documents from top research universities. And it was most associated with the words ‘research’, ‘candidate’, ‘work’ and ‘faculty’, in that order. ‘Public’ was number 88 on the list of terms likely to be within 15 words of ‘impact’. Taken together, the word groupings suggest a preoccupation with research-related impacts rather than the public-engagement ones, the authors conclude. Alperin says word frequencies provide an empirical measure of the priorities of university departments and hiring committees. He acknowledges, however, that words do not always equate with action. The analysis found plenty of hedge phrases such as ‘typically include’, suggesting that hiring committees had much leeway in their decisions, Alperin says. “These guidelines are written in a way that is purposefully vague.” Priorities The use of ‘community’ in the documents underscores a long-standing issue at universities, says Emily Janke, an education and community engagement researcher at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Research projects that are conducted with input and guidance from members of the public are often seen as service not science, which automatically demeans the work. “RPT guidelines mainly value scholarship that can be counted and assessed within established academic conventions,” she says. Most universities haven’t even started the conversation about weighing the importance of community involvement, says David Moher, a clinical epidemiologist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Canada, who has studied the process of assessing scientists for promotion2. “Universities need to engage in more discussions with their local communities to ascertain what’s important to them,” he says. “These discussions are more likely to happen if university leadership promotes such dialogue as important and relevant to the institution’s growth and development.” Alperin notes that any change in the system generally requires a change of incentives. Words only go so far, he says, and altering the wording of the guidelines won’t necessarily give different outcomes. Universities of all types rely largely on public funds to support research, Alperin says, so the motivation to improve public outreach should already be apparent.   First published on Nature Careers on 4 Oct 2018

Julie Gould discusses some radical alternatives to the current grant funding system to help address bias and better support early career researchers Your browser does not support the audio element.   In the final episode of our six-part series on funding, Feric Fang, a professor in the departments of laboratory medicine and microbiology at the University of Washington, Seattle, describes how a two-tier "modified lottery" could be a fairer process, with grants randomly prioritised to applications that had some merit but did not attract funding first time round. New Zealand's Health Research Council already operates a similar system, says Vernon Choy, the council's director of research investments and contracts. Its Explorer Grants panel does not discuss rankings but instead judges if an application's proposals are viable and if they meet an agreed definition of "transformative." These applications then go into a pool and a random number generator is applied to allocate funding based on the budget available. Because applications are anonymised, Choy says there is no bias against a particular institution or research team, allowing young and inexperienced researchers to compete more fairly against senior colleagues. Johan Bollen, a professor at Indiana University's school of informatics, computing and engineering, describes how a Self Organising Funding Allocation system (SOFA) would work, removing the burden of writing grant applications. "What if we just give everybody a pot of money at the beginning of the year and then redistribute a certain percentage to others?" he asks. Paid content: European Research Council "We are open to the world" says European Research Council president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon. Its grantees straddle 80 nationalities and the organisation has signed collaboration agreements with 11 countries, including China, India, Brazil, Australia and Japan. Helen Tremlett, who leads the pharmacoepidemiology in multiple sclerosis research group at the University of British Columbia, Canada, spent time in the lab of an ERC grantee at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany. This experience, along with the publication of a 2011 paper in Nature looking at how the gut microbiome may be influential in triggering the animal model of MS, had career-changing consequences, leading her down a new research path. TRANSCRIPT Julie Gould discusses some radical alternatives to the current grant funding system to help address bias and better support early career researchers Julie Gould: Hello, I’m Julie Gould and this is Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. This is the final episode of our series on funding, but just a quick note, don’t forget that there’s also a final ten-minute sponsored slot at the end of this Working Scientist podcast from the European Research Council. Now, throughout this series, we’ve heard a lot about funding – what’s the best way to prepare for writing a grant, how to write that grant, how to make sure it gets read, how to prepare for an interview should you have one, and then we looked a little bit broader at the funding environment. Now, one of the things that I found really interesting, if we look back at the very first episode, is something that Elizabeth Pier said about what her research suggested.... Elizabeth Pier: Given that top 50% of proposals, after you’ve already excluded the ones that really have no chance of being funded initially, there really is a lot of randomness, but even more so, there’s already randomness, such that the applications that have been weeded out, so to speak, and don’t get the opportunity to be discussed in the meeting, might actually have a lot of merits. Had it been assigned to a different panel with different reviewers, it very well could have gone on to be discussed. Julie Gould: So, what you’re saying really is that luck plays a very large role in whether or not your research gets funded. Elizabeth Pier: Yes, that is what our results suggest. Julie Gould: And then add to that what Michael Teitelbaum mentioned in our fifth episode, that the NIH has experienced a period of flat funding for the last couple of decades, which has added stress to the system. Michael Teitelbaum: In the 1990s, was a decision by the US Congress and the presidential leadership of both parties to double funding over a five-year period for the National Institutes of Health, a massive increase for five years, averaging about 14% per year, that then was followed by flat funding for subsequent years. Julie Gould: As Michael mentioned, it’s difficult to tell whether or not you’re going to be in a boom/bust cycle when you’re actually in it, but this prolonged period of flat funding might not be part of a cycle at all. It might be a new norm. Ferric Fang: And I think for a long time, people thought this is going to be cyclical, and things are good and then they’re bad and then they’re good again, and we just have to wait. But I think it’s gradually dawned on people that it’s not cyclical in any kind of an orderly way, and that it may be the new normal for scientific funding, where there’s a shortage of funding for the size of the workforce and there’s a problem with job opportunities for new trainees, and this is something that I think is belatedly being addressed. Julie Gould: So, that was Ferric Fang and he’s a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and he, like many others, is concerned that the current funding system in the United States isn’t working. So, in a time when there’s inadequate funding for the size of the scientific workforce and the researchers are spending increasing amounts of time applying for this funding, what is the best way of allocating not-enough money to more researchers than the system can support? So, Ferric and a colleague of his, Arturo Casadevall, suggest that a modified lottery system, like the one Libby Pier suggested in the first episode of this series, could be the answer. Ferric Fang: And we came up with the idea of a two-tiered lottery system where initially there could be a review to divide grants into these two hypothetical stacks of high-quality grants and then the others, and the other grants could be sent back to be revised and hopefully improved and many of them could come back and eventually enter the lottery. And then you would have the other grants which are all judged to be of high enough quality to be supported, and then you would see how much funding was available, and you would randomly then prioritise the grants and you would fund accordingly. And you could introduce lots of nuances into the system, in terms of the number of grants that any given investigator could have in the lottery. Julie Gould: Now, as well as the benefits of reducing the amount of money and time spent on peer review, Ferric and Arturo argue that it could have wider implications for the entire funding environment. Ferric Fang: And a school that had a large number of researchers could be reasonably certain, based on laws of probability, that they would get a fairly predictable amount of funding based on the meritorious work that their researcher were doing, even though there would be little fluctuations. I think because of the large numbers it would even out. Another thing you could do is go to policymakers and say this is the amount of meritorious proposals that our scientific enterprise is producing and yet we’re only funding a small percentage of them, and this could be the basis for making more rational assessments of how much research funding should really be allocated in a budget. Julie Gould: I asked Ferric what he thought people might think of this modified lottery-style funding. Ferric Fang: I think a lot of people’s initial reaction to it would be that it would be leaving the future of the scientific enterprise to chance. But it’s no more irrational than trying to hedge your bets when you’re trying to invest economic resources for your future and trying to figure out how to make a diversified portfolio. We really want to make sure that our blind spots, in terms of our biases, aren’t preventing us from funding ideas that could really be transformative for society in the future. Julie Gould: Now actually, this modified lottery system does already exist. So, to fund any innovative and transformative research, the Health Research Council in New Zealand set up their explorer grant, which operates as a modified lottery system. Vernon Choy, who’s a director of Research Investments and Contracts at the Health Research Council, told me a little bit about their system and how it’s working for them. Vernon Choy: So, the way that it works is we do use a panel, but the panel does not discuss the ranking of the applications that come through to us. What they do is they provide us with an opinion on whether the application is transformative and we do have a particular definition of transformative. So, they must decide whether the application is transformative and they must also decide whether the application or the research proposed is viable. So, having reached the point where the panel agree that an application is fundable and meets the requirements of the explorer grant guidelines, then those applications go into a pool or thunderball and then we use a random number generator to allocate the funds to those applications using the random numbers that are then ranked, and then we fund according to that random rank to fit within the budget available for that particular round. Julie Gould: And how has this particular mode of allocating funding been received by the scientists and the health researchers in New Zealand? Vernon Choy: Well it’s surprising. At the time, we felt that this was going to be highly controversial, and in some respects, it was and still is, and obviously there has been a continued interest internationally in the explorer grant, but from our point of view, our researchers have accepted both the way that we allocate the funds and also the way that we determine eligibility or fundability. We did a survey back in 2017 of people that had applied for the fund to gauge their thoughts on both the format, the allocation method, the processes overall, and basically, we had quite good from everybody. One of the things – and I haven’t talked about this – but one of the things that we do is the applications are anonymised so that in determining whether an application is eligible, there’s no bias against any particular institution or against any particular team of researchers. When the process was first announced and we had a huge number of applications, and one of the reasons we were told was well this was a fund that allowed young, inexperienced researchers to compete against senior researchers and because there was no bias towards the experienced researchers. The other thing that we’ve investigated is the gender balance in the applications because of the anonymisation, and I would like to say that there was no gender bias in these applications, but from our initial look at numbers, there is still a slight bias towards men – not a huge one, only 3-4% – but it’s still slightly different between men and women. So, that’s difficult to say why that might be. Potentially it could be the style of text and the way that people write, but apart from that we’re quite happy with the explorer grant so far, and I’m expecting that the funds that we have available to allocate this way will increase. Julie Gould: So, time will only tell whether or not this is really a great system, and maybe expanding it further will give people a better idea of how it will work across a larger research system. But there are others who are taking different approaches, and one of these was by Johan Bollen who’s a professor at Indiana University. He and his colleague Marten Scheffer, out of sheer frustration with the time-consuming and expensive funding system that’s currently in place, thought well what if we just give everybody a pot of money at the beginning of the year, and then implement a rule where everybody has to redistribute a certain percentage of their money to another scientist. So, they’ve called it ‘self-organised funding allocation’ or SOFA for short. And here’s Johan describing how it works. Johan Bollen: Essentially, you’re a young researcher, you’ve just been hired as an assistant professor and at the end of the year you receive a fixed and unconditional amount of base funding in your research funding account at the university, and you know that the re-donation fraction is 50%, which means that you can keep 50% of that and then the other 50% you’d have to donate to other researchers of your choosing. You log into a website that could be run by the National Science Foundation and you enter the names. There could even be a pull-down list. There could even be, I wouldn’t call it a recommendations system, but an order completion system where you enter the names of the scientists that you would like to donate a fraction of that 50% to, and when the system has determined that you have completed the list of names and the relative fractions and it adds up the 50% of the money you have received, you hit submit and you’re done. The next year you receive the same base amount and perhaps funding from other scientists that saw you speak at a conference or that read your paper and really liked the work that you do and would like to support it. You add it all up, again you take 50% for your own research needs and the other 50% again, you log into the website and you enter the names of the individuals and how much money, or percentage of the money that you’re supposed to donate, that you wish to donate to them and then hit submit, and you’re done for another round. Julie Gould: But how would you then decide who to give your money to? I mean so you want to get rid of the time-consuming grant proposal writing – yes, I know it can be a painful process – but then how does a person decide who to give their money to if they don’t have all these grant proposals to read. Johan Bollen: This question is asked lots – how do you know who to give your money to – and the thing is that as scientists you’re supposed to know who does the most exciting work in your area. I mean that’s how we write our papers. If you look at the bibliographies in our papers, our references etc., they’re essentially a testament to the obligation that we have to stay abreast of the developments in our area. You’re not very good as a scientist if you don’t know about the work that’s happening in your research area. And so that same assumption is true if people would have to make decisions about who to pass their money on to, and so you can actually show mathematically that under the right conditions, this process of the money being passed from one person to the next could lead to convergence of funding across the entire community that reflects all of the knowledge in the system, not just of one particular individual, but of all individuals that participate in the system. Julie Gould: What would stop people from just funding their colleagues, their collaborators or even their friends? Johan Bollen: First of all, I don’t know whether that’s such a bad thing to begin with. People do collaborate and they don’t just collaborate within institutions, they collaborate externally, but if you’re really concerned about it, you could very easily enforce the exact same kind of conflict of interests rules that we have right now with respect to the submitting and review of proposals. For example, you could introduce a rule that you couldn’t donate to people within your same institution and, for example, that you couldn’t donate to the same people more than two years in a row. You could even mandate that a given fraction of your money goes to underrepresented groups. So, there’s a lot of social distortions that you could fix very easily by limiting on the basis of very reasonable arguments who to donate the money to. Julie Gould: And what about the early career researchers, those researchers that are just starting off in their career in science. How do they promote themselves in order to get some of the funding from other people? Johan Bollen: Well, first of all, everybody receives the same amount of funding regardless of your merit or how well-known you are, everybody receives the same base amount, so all of those young researchers have the base amount to begin with. Then of course there’s a challenge in getting your name out and convincing the community at large that you’re doing good work. That involves going to conferences, giving presentations, getting in touch with your colleagues. These are the kind of things that young researchers do anyway, but now of course it would be crucial to getting their name out. So, I think it would benefit the overwhelming majority of early career researchers. Julie Gould: Nobody really knows how this scientific funding system is going to organise itself over the coming years, but I would be really keen to hear your thoughts. What do you think of this concept of a self-organised funding system or even the modified lottery system which is already in place in New Zealand? Or have you got any experiments or paradigm-shifting ideas of how the funding system could be changed? If you have, get in touch – we would really like to hear from you. Something else we’d like to hear from you about is what series would you like to have on the Working Scientist podcast? So, we’ve now finished our series on funding, but what else do you want to know about? Each series will have five or six different episodes with a variety of experts on that particular topic, but we’d like to get your input into how to shape our future series. So, if you have any thoughts or burning desires about what you’d like to know more about then get in touch with the Nature Careers team. I want to give one final thank you to everybody who has contributed, so that would be Johan Bollen, Vernon Choy and Ferric Fang from this episode, as well as Michael Teitelbaum, James Wilsdon, Peter Gorsuch, Anne-Marie Coriat, Jernej Zupanc and Elizabeth Pier. Thank you again for contributing your thoughts and ideas to this series. And that is the end of this series on the Working Scientist podcast, but before you go, just a reminder that there is another last sponsored slot by and featuring the work of the European Research Council, and in this slot we hear from the President of the ERC, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, and then also from Professor Helen Tremlett from the University of British Columbia in Canada. Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould. Jean-Pierre Bourguigno: My name is Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, and my function is to be the President of the European Research Council. I’ve been in this position for five years now and I still have one year to go in my mandate. The search for my successor has started. So, in the sense that when you have reached such a level of success, the first priority is of course making sure that you still are in a good position to continue with this success, and the main priority of 2019 will be to revisit basically every way we do the evaluation because we know we have some challenges. For example, for some of the panels we have reached a size which means that we have to think of organising slightly differently because to do a good job as evaluators, you cannot have too many applications because then you cannot dedicate enough attention to them. So, we are really going to go through a very, very thorough check of all our evaluation systems, of course, taking advantage of all the knowledge accumulated with the scientific people who are members of our panels for evaluation, but also really trying to get advantage over not being too frozen, too rigid or too persistent on the way we structure these… I’ve said we cover old domains of science, but science is changing all the time, so you want to be sure that you adapt to the new emerging fields quickly enough that you bring on board all the right competent people. So, this is really for the immediate future because that’s a priority for 2019, and we want also to announce the new way we want to do the evaluation early enough so that the scientific community will be ready for when it will be put in place in 2021, and the scientific community has absorbed these changes, understood them, and can really adopt them and in particular that we will be able to continue to convince the very best scientists in the world to participate in the evaluation. Well, first of all, I mean ‘open to the world’ is one of our mottos. It means, of course, already that we have on board scientists from I think about 80 nationalities, so it means it’s not just Europeans who are a part of it. But of course, another part is for the ERC to interact with agencies in other countries in the world. We have already 11 countries with which we have signed agreements. For the moment, these agreements are of the type that researchers from these countries funded by these agencies can visit and spend time in some of the ERC teams. Helen Tremlett: So, my name is Helen Tremlett. I’m a professor in the faculty of medicine and neurology at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and I’m Canada Research Chair in Neuroepidemiology and Multiple Sclerosis, and I’m a British citizen and a Canadian citizen. I’ve been here since 2001. I was part of a programme between the Canadian government and the ERC, which enabled Canada Research Chair holders to spend time in the lab of someone who holds ERC funding. So, it was a great opportunity to bring together individuals who have complimentary skills and can learn from each other and develop collaboration over the long term. And it was a wonderful opportunity. I was based at the Max Planck Institute on the edge of Munich and they were focused on the gut microbiome in multiple sclerosis. It was so exciting. So, 2011, I can even remember that day. Nature published a paper and they were looking at the animal model of multiple sclerosis and how the gut microbiome may be influential in terms of triggering the animal model of multiple sclerosis. I had no idea that people were even thinking about this, and this led me down a whole new research path and now I’m actually coordinating principal investigator on a study where we’re collecting stool samples from children with multiple sclerosis and controls across Canada and across the US, and so it was thrilling for me to spend time in the lab whose work had really pushed me onto this path, so it was a lot of fun. So, there’s no additional funds attached to it, but it just meant that it was a formal opportunity and your salary was continued as such without a break. You didn’t have to take it as a sabbatical leave or anything like that. And I was just there for two months, but it was a really great two months. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon: During my time we have signed agreements with China, with India, with Brazil, with Australia, with Japan, so of course, these are countries which worldwide play a very critical role. I should also mention South Africa with which we have also developed a very interesting collaboration. Still, we want for the future to actually have more tools. For example, for the moment, the tools we have are only the ones I describe – namely visits by scientists from these places to visit ERC teams. We hope that in the next framework programmes, some more agility will be given to the scientific council, and having the possibility to also accompany researchers from our teams who want to visit abroad. One of the very simple principles of international collaboration is typically reciprocity – that is what you make possible in one direction should be possible in the other direction. For the moment, as you heard, the only possibility is people from these countries to come and visit Europe. We would like also to help and accompany researchers from Europe who have got the ERC contracts to also be helped when they want to visit researchers from other countries outside Europe. Something we reintroduced very recently are the so-called Synergy calls, so it’s a different call from the other ones. They are really for individual principal investigators, as we name them. In the case of Synergy, it’s really to encourage more ambitious, more global projects with two, three or four PIs (principal investigators). Of course, the idea is not to create a consortium. It’s really the idea that people come up with a truly challenging scientific problem they want to address, and we call it Synergy because we want them to really convince us that they are really the right group of people to tackle this. So in particular, we see this as a very specific place where interdisciplinary work can be developed. So, in a sense we wanted to create such a space where really people who need resources and skills and knowledge, expertise from different fields, can come together to tackle a very well-identified problem and to do that together. And so, this has been we have run only one such call so far for the year 2018. We just published the results. So, 27 projects have been supported. I didn’t mention globally the number of projects we have supported – we are typically at 9,000 projects overall supported – but the Synergy project is for very interesting new challenges. So, this is another dimension that ERC and the scientific council wants to tackle – that is to acknowledge the great importance for the future development of research of interdisciplinary work, that people need to learn how to work together but the way we do it is again under the very strict bottom-up philosophy. We just want people to come up to us, come forward with ambitious projects and very challenging problems they want to tackle and to try and convince the evaluators that they are the right people to do that and that they have assembled really the people who can do that in the best possible way. So, this dimension of Synergy is also that we want to be sure that Europe is the leader to tackle some of the most challenging scientific problems. Originally posted on Nature Careers - 08 February 2019 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00525-y

An updated version of an 11-year-old treaty between researchers at UK universities and the institutions and government bodies that fund and employ them aims to improve the work–life balance and career development of scientists. The Concordat Strategy Group, a collection of researchers from around the United Kingdom, created the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, which updates a previous treaty released in 2008. Participation in the agreement is voluntary, but its effects should be far-reaching, says Katie Wheat, head of higher education for Vitae, a scientist-advocacy group based in Cambridge, UK, that provided support for the project. “The principles outlined in the concordat are not just good for researchers, they are good for institutions, the quality of research, and for the supply of talent beyond academic research,” she says. “All organizations should want to sign up.” The concordat targets staff members who are primarily employed to do research, including postdocs, contract researchers and technicians. The update addresses important trends that have affected scientists in the past 11 years, including the surge of fixed-term contracts for researchers and the growing awareness of mental-health issues in this group. The new agreement reflects input from nearly 600 individuals and institutions who responded to a Vitae survey earlier this year. Respondents made a clear call for unity. As one wrote, “The new Concordat must have buy-in from all partners, be they Government, HEIs [higher-education institutions], funders, institutions, Royal Societies, organisations and perhaps most importantly — the postdocs themselves.” Respondents almost unanimously agreed that scientists need more support for development of their research and career goals. To that end, the document suggests that researchers should be able to devote ten days every year to free professional-development training. Funders are expected to make this a requirement for all grants, and researchers are expected to take advantage of the opportunity, even if that means stepping away briefly from the laboratory. As of 24 September, the Concordat had 15 signatories, including the London-based charity Wellcome, the largest non-governmental funder of research in the United Kingdom. Another notable signatory is UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a non-governmental agency established in 2018 to direct funding and boost cross-disciplinary research. Signatories are expected to uphold the tenets of the concordat and produce a publicly available annual report that shows the steps they’ve taken to uphold the treaty’s mission. Signatories agree to promote an ‘equitable environment’ when it comes to grants and grant reporting — a goal that received attention at a conference held by UK postdocs on 13 September at Queen Mary University of London. David McAllister, associate director of research and innovation at UKRI, said at the conference that the concordat should help postdocs to get much-deserved recognition on grant applications. He said that it is “morally unacceptable” that postdocs are unnamed on most grant applications even though 60% of UKRI’s funding goes to their salaries. Owing to reports of high levels of stress, anxiety and depression in researchers, the concordat also calls on institutions to “promote good mental health and wellbeing through, for example, the effective management of workloads and people, and effective policies and practice for tackling discrimination, bullying and harassment”. A UKRI spokesperson says that, as part of its commitment to the concordat, the organization will provide funding to 17 UK universities in 2020 to support the mental health and well-being of postdoctoral researchers. UKRI says that it supports all of the principles of the document and is already working on plans to put them into action.     Additional reporting by David Payne, a managing editor at Nature Careers

During my postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge, UK, I reached the final round of applications for a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship, offered by the research charity Wellcome in London — but my research proposal was ultimately rejected. After getting over my initial disappointment, I chose to seek out less obvious funding sources. I realized that the major sources of financial support for early-career researchers are hugely competitive: success rates usually range from 10–40%, and failure is deflating and time-consuming. So, I looked elsewhere. Over the next few years while still at Cambridge, I managed to secure funding from a wide variety of sources, including smaller charitable bodies, pharmaceutical companies, life-science publishers, university departments and research societies. I received travel grants from several organizations — Thrombosis UK, a charity based in Llanwrda, west Wales; the University of Cambridge School of Biological Sciences; The Company of Biologists, a charity in Cambridge; and Cayman Chemical, a biotechnology company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I also won early-investigator awards — including the Thrombosis & Haemostasis society of Australia and New Zealand in Darling, Australia; the Frontiers in Cancer Science conference; Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge; and the British Society for Haematology in London. These individually modest awards generated a cumulative body of evidence of my ability to find and secure funding — eventually just more than £50,000 (US$66,000) over 6 years — to support my progression from unfunded, newly qualified scientist to funded research-faculty member. There are several reasons to apply for money from unusual sources. Perhaps you don’t have enough time to complete a full proposal for a major funding scheme. Or maybe you are attempting to bolster your CV before applying for a promotion. There doesn’t have to be a specific rationale; your choice might just be a good place to apply. But this is not to say that established funding sources should be ignored, or that it is easier to gain funding through less obvious sources. In fact, by no means were all of my attempts successful. Applications to alternative funding sources can provide valuable training in grant writing; in my case, my improved grant-writing skills contributed to the receipt of a career development award from the American Heart Association, based in Dallas, Texas. It is difficult to say whether early-stage research awards from less apparent sources will change the course of a career. Regardless, in my experience, these four principles could improve your chances of a successful career: 1. Be transparent. Talk to your supervisor(s) and give them with details about the application. Perhaps offer to provide the information that you would like to be included in a letter of recommendation. If necessary, politely remind them of the reasons you want to apply, and that your success would reflect favourably on their laboratory. Fortunately for me, my supervisors have been supportive of my applications — but many group leaders might not have enough time to go through all your applications in detail, and could even question the value of applying for such awards on a regular basis. Hopefully, they will at least be willing to provide you with permission to apply. 2. Cast a wide net. Funding schemes can be identified using online search engines, such as Research Professional and Funding Institutional. Researchgate also offers a search engine for funding competitions for US-based members. Other useful resources for identifying non-standard funding schemes include the acknowledgements sections of academic papers and presentations, as well as your colleagues and peers. Universities and their departments often provide schemes for seed funding, research exchange placements or other internal funding. Pharmaceutical companies might advertise collaborative grant opportunities aimed at researchers in translational sciences (such as the opnMe schemes from Boehringer Ingelheim in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany) or travel awards that can be used when presenting work at academic conferences (the Cayman Chemical travel grants, for example). Financial support to attend international meetings is commonly available through competitions from the organizing body of the meeting (such as the travel scholarships from the Keystone Symposia in Silverthorne, Colorado), and even from publishers or individual journals (for instance, the Disease Models & Mechanisms travel grant). 3. Pay attention to details. Identify the funding opportunities that are appropriate for your career stage. Funders’ eligibility guidelines for their schemes will help with this. It is usually possible to find a published list of award recipients, whose positions you can compare with your current career stage. And note that, the layout and presentation of your application is almost as important its scientific content. An audience will be impressed by a tidy, well-organized and well-presented piece of writing, as well as by what the words themselves say. 4. Learn from your mistakes. Peer-reviewed funding schemes are competitive; researchers will probably experience rejections more often than successes. Although these rejections can be disheartening, don’t let them demolish your confidence. The peer-review process is subjective, and the opinions of one reviewer do not necessarily represent those of the scientific community. At the same time, do not ignore your reviewers. In fact, carefully read the reviewer comments and incorporate their suggestions into your next submission — which should improve your proposal. Finally, remember that the same, or a slightly tweaked, proposal can sometimes be used to apply for more than one award. In the end, most investigators are likely to obtain the majority of their funding from the larger national funding bodies. However, the lesser-known funding sources can be useful when attempting to accumulate evidence of scholarly performance and productivity, even for those who will eventually leave academia. FINDING FUNDING There are many places to check for funding sources apart from major national agencies. Examples of search engines for funding sources: Research Professional Funding Institutional ResearchGate Examples of fellowships and research grants: Boehringer Ingelheim opnMe collaboration proposals Cambridge British Heart Foundation Pump-Priming Grants Parke Davis Exchange Fellowship Wolfson College Cambridge Junior Research Fellowship Wolfson College Oxford fellowships British Society for Haematology grants Lurie Children’s Hospital internal funding opportunities Examples of travel grants: Thrombosis UK grant opportunities Disease Models & Mechanisms Conference Travel Grants Cayman Chemical Conference Travel Grants Thrombosis & Haemostasis society of Australia and New Zealand travel grants American Association for Cancer Research travel grants American Heart Association travel grants Keystone Symposia scholarships European Respiratory Society grants   Originally posted on nature.com on 20th December 2019 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03873-x

Julie Gould and Michael Teitelbaum discuss the highs and lows of funding cycles and how to survive them as an early career researcher. Your browser does not support the audio element.   In the penultimate episode of this six-part series on grants and funding, Julie Gould asks how early career researchers can develop their careers in the face of funding's "boom and bust" cycle and the short-termism it engenders. Governments are swayed by political uncertainty and technological developments, argues Michael Teitelbaum, author of Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent. In the US, for example, space research funding dramatically increased after Soviet Russia launched the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957, ending after the 1969 moon landing. Similar booms followed in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, says Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York. But he argues that they are unsustainable and can have a negative impact on the careers of junior scientists and their research. Will Brexit trigger a funding downturn, and if so, for how long? Watch this space, says Teitelbaum. Sponsored content: European Research Council (ERC) Retired Portuguese Navy Captain Joaquim Alves, a principal investigator at the Centre for the History of Science and Technology, University of Lisbon, leads the European Research Council project MEDEA-CHART, dedicated to the study of medieval and early modern nautical charts. He describes his career and the support he has received from the ERC. TRANSCRIPT Julie Gould and Michael Teitelbaum discuss the highs and lows of funding cycles and how to survive them as an early career researcher. Julie Gould Hello, I’m Julie Gould and this is Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. Welcome to the fifth and penultimate episode of our series on funding. In the previous episode, we looked at a recent major upheaval in the UK science funding environment, with the creation of UK Research and Innovation. This time, we’re looking at some of the processes that determine how funding decisions are and have been made in the past, and what impact that these decisions can have on careers in scientific research. But before we go on, don’t forget that at the end of this Working Scientist podcast, we’ve got a ten-minute sponsored slot from the European Research Council. Right, so funding – how do governments decide where to put their money? Professor Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, has studied how funding has been allocated in the US since the world wars, and he’s found that funding comes in cycles, and he calls them "alarm/boom/bust" cycles, and I asked Michael to give us a quick, simple introduction into what these cycles are. Michael Teitelbaum Government funding for basic research often runs in cycles. Politicians and governments decide that there needs to be more funding for basic research and they often will raise the funding quite rapidly to show a significant effect, but then are unable to sustain that rate of increase. Sometimes the funding even declines subsequently. So, you get a cycle of boom followed by bust, over a period of perhaps a decade. My conclusion is that this is quite unhealthy for basic research, which is a quintessentially long-term kind of activity involving long study periods to become fully professional, followed by long careers in basic research. If the funding increases sharply and then doesn’t continue to increase or declines, that is very destabilising for both basic research itself and for career prospects in basic research. Julie Gould And why do you think the governments react in such a way by actually putting quite considerable sums of money towards whatever basic research they’re aiming to fund? Michael Teitelbaum It’s not universal, but it’s common that governments are convinced by industry or by academic institutions that they have been funding basic research insufficiently, and they tend to over-respond to that kind of representation by increasing funding at levels that cannot be sustained over the longer term. Julie Gould Why would you say that these cycles are destructive towards the careers of researchers? Michael Teitelbaum Well, the problem is that basic research and careers in basic research are fundamentally long-term propositions, and this kind of funding which is for a period of years and then disappears is destabilising to a system that requires many years of graduate and advanced study and research to become a professional in basic research. And research projects that take many years to develop, you can’t really achieve a great deal in basic research in only a few years, and if you study for 8-10 years or more to become a research scientist, you might find yourself, with these short cycles of funding, you might find yourself finishing your studies just in time to face a very poor career situation in those fields. Julie Gould In his book called Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, Michael explored some of these "alarm/boom/bust" cycles in the US from the past century. Now one of the examples he uses in the book is the shock of the successful 1957 Soviet Union launch of the first satellite, Sputnik 1. Michael Teitelbaum This led to what I would consider to be a near political panic among leaders of the US government, especially people such as Lyndon Johnson who was then majority leader in the US Senate, and led to an enormous increase in funding for space and rocketry and controls for catching up with the Soviet Union in space. That cycle ended with the success of John F Kennedy’s promise to successfully land humans on the Moon and return them to Earth safely by the end of the 1960s. When that spectacular achievement was achieved, the political system tended to lose interest in the massive funding for the space programme and there was a bust. The third cycle in the 1980s was stimulated by then President Reagan’s so-called Strategic Defense Initiative - critics called it the Star Wars Initiative - which led to massive funding, but only short-term for that initiative. And then the final two cycles that I identify in the book were different in the sense that they weren’t military, they weren’t strategic in that sense. The first was the internet, the boom resulting from the internet becoming a commercial activity rather than a research or academic activity and the expansion therefore of the internet and other kinds of booms in the 1990s. Again, that was in the private sector not in the government sector. And finally, overlapping that was a decision by the US Congress and the presidential leadership of both parties to double funding over a five-year period for the National Institutes of Health. A massive increase for five years, averaging about 14% per year that then was followed by flat funding for subsequent years. Julie Gould So, what cycle are we in at the moment? Michael Teitelbaum One of the characteristics of a cycle like this is you don’t know it’s a cycle until it finishes, so we can’t be sure at this point that we’re in an ‘alarm/boost/bust’ cycle. We could just be in an alarm and boom cycle without a bust to follow – we will have to come back and talk in five years to see if there is a bust that ensues at the end. But the current boom situation is in information technology, in social media, in fields that are largely created by industry and particularly by firms in Silicon Valley and in the Seattle area, led by Intel and Microsoft in particular. In terms of their lobbying, they argue they cannot find the skilled personnel they need to remain competitive internationally, that there’s a shortage of skilled personnel in these fields. It’s not a new claim. It’s been a claim that was common in all of these other booms and busts over the previous half-century. But their goal is not to encourage a funding boom from the federal government for their fields because they are in the commercial sector and they’re profit-seeking firms. What they’re looking for – and they’ve been successful in their lobbying efforts – is large-scale access to temporary workers coming from low-wage countries, largely via visas with hot names like H1B and L1 and so on. They’ve been quite successful with getting these short-term, temporary workers – large numbers of them in the hundreds of thousands – claiming that otherwise they would not be able to continue to be competitive internationally. And then there’s also parallel lobbying from higher education groups. Their goals are indeed to increase research grant funding because it’s a very substantial source of revenue for them, but also to continue to have easy access to large numbers of international graduate students who pay full tuition. Julie Gould How can early career researchers keep track of these cycles and see and feel what’s happening and learn to navigate them? Michael Teitelbaum I think the key words would be pay attention and be flexible. If you’re an early career researcher or aspiring to be a researcher in one of these fields, you need to keep track of what we are discussing here in terms of increased funding from government sources or decreased funding, increased numbers of temporary visas or decreased numbers of temporary visas. All of these things will have some impact over time on your personal experience. So, you need to pay attention, for example, to the trajectories of key science funding agencies. I would say a way to do that is to pay attention to reports from credible publications that do report in an objective way on what is happening in the politics, if you will, of funding and of temporary visas. You would have to pay attention to the budget requests of key agencies and assess whether those requests are likely, if they are responded to positively, are they likely to be sustainable over the longer term, or are they likely to be short-term pulses of funding, which would be destabilising. And then those who are already doing research and are funded by government agencies need to be cautious in responding to requests for proposals that seem to be short-term pulses of funding or boom-type funding. They need to build a portfolio, I would say, of different funding sources, rather than depend on a particular source that seems to be flush with money at the moment but may not be in the future. In other words, the same kind of advice that any investment advisor would give to a client – that they should diversify their commitments and thereby reduce their exposure to risk in the future. Julie Gould Speaking of the future, the impact that political systems have on scientific funding and thinking back on the previous episode with James Wilsdon on the UK scientific funding environment, I asked Michael what he thought might happen - or not - with Brexit - or not. Michael Teitelbaum If that were to happen – I know there’s a great deal of concern in the UK among academic institutions in terms of whether they would be able to apply what has become quite a large amount of basic research funding from the European Union – I think that’s all up in the air now so I don’t think we can make any forecasts or projections about what will happen, but it’s an issue that I think should be watched. If I were a young scientist engaged in pursuing a career in basic research in the UK, I would be paying a lot of attention to this. Julie Gould Okay, well let’s chat again in five years’ time. Michael Teitelbaum Laughs. I don’t think we need five years for that one, that’s probably two years, but it’s not now – we can’t do it now. Julie Gould So, what does this all mean? Well, the long and short of it is we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but what I think we can say is that the funding environment at the moment is a difficult one to navigate, so the more skills and tools amassed for writing grant proposals will be vital for survival in the scientific workforce. In the final episode of this series, we’ll hear more about some alternative ways of distributing scientific funding that may alleviate some of the pressures that researchers face in the current, very competitive climate. Now, that’s all for this section of our Working Scientist podcast. We now have a slot sponsored by and featuring the work of the European Research Council. Joaquim Alves Gaspar tells of his work in cartography and with the European Research Council project MEDEA-CHART. Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould. Joaquim Alves Gaspar My name is Joaquim Alves Gaspar. I was born in Lisbon, Portugal 69 years ago. I joined the Portuguese Navy when I was 19, and I served for about 40 years. In 2006, that is 12 years ago, I started a PhD programme on the geometric analysis and numerical modelling of old nautical charts, which I completed in 2010. In my thesis, I have proposed and tested a series of cartometric methods, that means geometrical methods of analysis and numerical modelling, aimed at a better understanding of how old charts were constructed and used at sea. As soon as I got the degree, I was invited to become a member of a research centre in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, where I am now and where I have been working for eight years, first as a postdoctoral researcher and now, after winning the grant, as a principal investigator. Most of what I know about the technical and the scientific methods related to the history of nautical cartography, I learned it from the Navy. I am not only referring to the theoretical background which people can study from the books, but also to the actual experience of contacting a ship at sea, and using nautical charts for the planning and the execution of navigation. It was this knowledge and this experience that gave me the capacity to fully understand old charts, not only as historical artefacts, but images of the world, which is a traditional approach, but also and mostly as instruments to navigate. This is something that a traditional historian of cartography is not prepared to do. By looking into those charts with the eyes of a cartographer and of a navigator and with the assistance of the analytical and modelling tools that I have developed, I could establish a meaningful connection between the methods of chart construction in all kinds, of course, as described in the historical sources and the practice of navigation. This development has opened new and promising lands of research. That is what my ERC project is about. I applied to and I won a starting grant in the section S6 – that is the history of the human past. It was at that time the first ever Portuguese proposal to be accepted in that particular section. It was the first ever grant that was considered to a project on the history of cartography and also, as far as I know, no one is using these kinds of techniques to study old maps. The total amount of the grant is about €1.2 million, to be applied during five years. The funding will be mostly used to pay the six grantees now working with us to cover travel expenses and to buy some equipment. We have a team of eight members: the PI (myself), a retired Navy officer, a senior researcher who is a physicist who converted to the history of science and he is now the head of the department of history and philosophy science, a postdoctoral researcher who is also a physicist by education, three PhD students, a junior computer expert who is developing our information systems and a project manager and she is a neuroscientist by education. Of these, only one of the PhD students is an historian by education. This tells us something about what I have called the multidisciplinary nature of my project. The general objective of the project, as stated in my proposal, is to solve a series of questions which have, should I say, eluded historians of cartography for a very long time, pertaining to the birth, the technical evolution and the use of nautical charts during the Middle Ages and also the early modern period. For example, we want to clarify when, how, why and where the first nautical charts were constructed. This is a very popular subject among the international community of historians of cartography. Not only we have been very successful in bringing many of them to the discussion, but also significant progress has been made in the last year. For example, it is now consensual among us that the oldest nautical charts were constructed using navigational information collected by the pilot at sea. Certain distortions affecting the old charts were caused by the use of magnetic compasses to navigate, which as you know, don’t point exactly to the geographical north. The difference is the so-called declination, magnetic declination. The novelty in my project is that we intend to provide good answers to those questions by using what we call a multidisciplinary approach including a novelty of techniques of geometrical analysis, numerical modelling, carbon-14 dating and multispectral analysis of the old parchments, which will complement, of course, the traditional methods of historical research. So far, one and a half years after the project started, the results are promising. Aim the highest possible and don’t just give it a try – do it using everything you’ve got. Don’t be humble. ERC grants are intended to be given to the very best researchers proposing the best projects. If you are confident that you have an excellent idea, one that will make the panel members raise out of their chairs, and that you are the right person to make it work, then don’t be shy. Go for it. However, having made the decision of proceeding to the next stage, you will now need a great deal of humbleness to be able to create the best possible proposal. The reason is that you will have to engage into an extremely competitive process with highly competent and motivated people. In other words, you will have to work hard and be professional. It took me a full year to write the proposal, despite my experience and background. Let me elaborate a bit on this. You know you have a wonderful idea, otherwise you wouldn’t have engaged in the process. The job now will be to organise each idea into a meaningful and visible project, and of course, to convince the evaluation panel that you are the best possible person to make it work. Don’t leave anything to fortune or chance, so that you won’t blame yourself for not taking into account all the variables. That’s all I have to advise. One of the unwritten goals of the project is to pass the message. I won’t live forever and I want my methods and my techniques to be passed and to be used again by other people, and Portugal is the best place because I also want to give a push to the research on the subject of Portugal.   Originally posted on Nature Careers - 01 February 2019 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00403-7

As part of a broad mission to prepare science students for careers outside academia, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has expanded a funding initiative to support master’s and PhD students for six-month internships in companies, government laboratories and non-profit organizations. The INTERN supplemental-funding opportunity, launched last year for select departments within the NSF, will now be open to almost every graduate student supported by an NSF grant, says Prakash Balan, programme director in the NSF’s Directorate for Engineering. At a time when available US industry positions far outnumber job openings in US academia, the internships can give students real-world training for their futures, he adds. “Opportunities like this give students exposure and experience at a time when it matters most,” he says. The programme also fits in with the agency’s overall agenda. “NSF has a long-term vision to foster the growth of a competitive and diverse workforce,” Balan says. “We want to advance the science and innovation skills of the nation at large.” The expanded programme provides up to US$55,000 to support a student for six months. The sum is meant to cover travel, tuition, stipends, materials and other expenses. The student’s supervisor can use up to $2,500 of the award to visit the site hosting the internship and co-mentor the student. The NSF has pledged to support up to 200 students in each of the fiscal years 2019 and 2020, although Balan says that more awards could be provided if the demand is great enough. To be eligible, students must have completed at least one year of their master’s or PhD programmes. Jennifer Weller, programme director of the NSF’s Directorate for Biological Sciences, says that she expects to receive many applications from biology students. “I’ve already had 20 phone calls asking for more details,” she says. Weller explains that she worked for five years in industry (at the biotechnology company PE/Applied Biosystems) before eventually returning to academia. Fostering the flow of talent and ideas between academia and industry should be a top priority for the agency, she says. Interest in the INTERN initiative goes both ways. The programme began after corporations contacted the NSF asking for help finding student interns, Balan says. Those requests encouraged the agency to think how best to connect graduate students with industry. To apply for an INTERN award, students must provide a letter from their supervisor and from the prospective company or other host organization, and must make a convincing case that the experience would help them to achieve their overall training and career goals. “It’s not something that can be pulled together with a casual contact,” Balan says. “The host organization and the university have to put their minds together to create something very powerful for the student.” In another outreach effort, the NSF is seeking submissions for its 2026 Idea Machine, a competition to elicit big ideas for future research projects. The agency is looking for ambitious visions within the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “We’re crowdsourcing the best and brightest ideas so we know what the community’s thinking,” Balan says. The agency plans to award two to four winners $26,000 each, with the possibility that the winning entries would trigger long-term NSF investments. The competition, which is open to members of the general public as well as to scientists, will accept suggestions up to 26 October.   Originally published on Nature Careers on 11 September 2018 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06641-5

A well-equipped laboratory stocked with reagents and supplied with uninterrupted electricity and unlimited water might seem like a basic requirement for conducting research. But scientists who work in regions that have limited resources or that are riven by conflict cannot take such amenities for granted. They must perpetually seek scarce grants, publish their own journals, form their own scientific societies and — crucially — draw on their deep reserves of resilience. Nature asked five such researchers how they run productive labs in the face of electricity shortages, border-checkpoint closures, poor Internet connections and other challenges. Marlo Mendoza: Engage with stakeholders Forestry researcher, University of the Philippines, Los Baños For the past 13 years, I have been profiling the contamination of the Marilao, Meycauayan and Obando River System (MMORS), which was on the ‘Dirty 30’ list of the most polluted places in the world in 2007, according to the non-profit organization Pure Earth. There are many polluting industries upstream, including the largest lead smelter in the Philippines, gold smelters, jewellery workshops and tanneries. Downstream are fish farms. We found elevated levels of heavy metals in the water, in the sediments and in fish, especially shellfish, which are sold in the local markets (M. E. T. Mendoza et al. J. Nat. Stud. 11, 1–18; 2012). At least 100,000 people in the municipalities of Marilao, Meycauayan and Obando, and in the metropolitan Manila area, are eating contaminated fish. There are no toxicologists in the area who can accurately diagnose illnesses connected with heavy-metal ingestion. So when we looked at medical records, there were no entries for heavy-metal poisoning. If we cannot prove that these metals are causing harm to people, it’s very difficult to convince policymakers and local executives to take action. We have no local laboratories that can analyse heavy metals found in fish, or in water or blood samples. Local officials, the governor and some of the mayors were really antagonistic because the fishing industry is a major source of income for these municipalities. I have been very careful, even from the outset, to always update the mayors on our projects, and I am accompanied by local and regional government representatives whenever I do my monitoring activities. I do nothing without their consent and am very transparent in my work. One of my strategies was to build a network of stakeholders — including national agencies such as the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources — that share my concerns. I also built a good rapport with people who live in the region. There are several associations for fishers and leather-makers in these areas, and we work with them and include them in consultations and meetings about water-quality management. Our project helped to have the area declared as a legally designated water-quality management area. That’s why we’re able to continue our work. We used funding from Pure Earth to do regular longitudinal sampling in sections of the river system, including of sediment, water, fish and other aquatic life. There’s a problem collecting data and samples, because it is costly and the national and local governments have limited funds. There is also no single repository of data with which monitoring can be more effectively planned and analysed. Our monitoring results were included in a Pure Earth database that was shared with other stakeholders, including regional environmental-management offices and local government units. In turn, this encouraged those agencies to conduct studies to complement our work and to share their data. So I was able to get money from the Asian Development Bank, Green Cross Switzerland and the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, as well as a small amount from the Coca-Cola Company, to conduct environmental monitoring — including assessment of heavy metals in selected aquatic organisms. Emmanuel I. Unuabonah: Use available resources Materials chemist, Redeemer’s University, Osun State, Nigeria Potable water is a challenge for us here in Africa and across the world: around 1.8 billion people worldwide get their drinking water from a source that is polluted with faeces. As part of our work, we are developing hybrid clay composites to adsorb enteric bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella species and Vibrio cholerae, from water. We also use composites made from readily available materials such as kaolinite clay, papaya seeds and plantain peels to extract heavy metals from water. We are not funded by the government. On average, for close to 100 days a year, we have no electricity. We have an alternative utility on campus, so when the power goes off at the national grid during work hours, the generator comes on. If we get lucky with timings, we are guaranteed 36 hours of uninterrupted power to run experiments. But when the generator isn’t running and the grid power has gone off, we just have to wait. Sometimes I use my salary to fund my research and to keep our students. Then I have to struggle to write international grants. I’m so grateful to The World Academy of Sciences in Trieste, Italy; the last grant it gave in 2014 (for US$63,230) took care of stipends, school fees and research expenses for the students, and we used part of it to buy equipment. A colleague at the University of Edinburgh, UK, sent us a $600 bacteria-testing kit last year, but we can’t use it now because a related microscope part was damaged by a power surge. We have a lot of wonderful ideas, wonderful theses just hanging about the shelves, but nobody’s utilizing them. Some young scientists developed cheap electrical power systems from electronic waste materials, but they don’t have the money to develop them further. Nigeria has a thriving oil industry, but the government’s Petroleum Trust Development Fund uses oil-industry proceeds mostly to fund scholarships for Nigerian students abroad, and spends very little on scientific research. Kalulu Muzele Taba: Aim for the possible Organic chemist, University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo Our research seeks to solve problems that have societal impacts, such as malaria, which is endemic in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). People in the poorest areas of Kinshasa are growing about 55 different plants, including citronella and papaya, to try to treat the symptoms of the disease. We thought, why not investigate these plants? We tested eight of the most-used plants and showed that extracts and metabolites had considerable antimalarial activities. We have a small booklet in French and in the local language, Lingala, that we send to people to explain how to use these plants more effectively. We are also studying plant extracts that can be used to treat antibiotic-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (K. B. M. Jose et al. Med. Clin. Rev. 4, 5; 2018), using a grant from The World Academy of Sciences. We don’t get money from the state. In our lab, we don’t have equipment. We don’t have money to buy solvents. Water is available between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., so we have a container that collects water at night, and during the day we have a pump. For electricity it’s much harder. In the middle of the day, it can come and go many times, and you hope it won’t go while you’re working. We used to have a small generator as a backup for computers, but it’s broken. We don’t fold our hands and cry and say that things will get better. We do whatever we can. Most of the time we buy our own reagents and solvents with our salaries. We try to motivate our master’s and PhD students by finding a way to collaborate with the outside, writing to foreign labs to see whether our students can get overseas fellowships. One student, Joséphine Ntumba, went abroad three times, to the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. She has completed her PhD and teaches at the University of Kinshasa. I did my PhD at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and then went to the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. It was hard to come back. It was not only material, but mental too. I knew that some things would be impossible, but I feel that I have to contribute and inspire young people in science. For the past five or six years, I have been the editor-in-chief of the journal Congo Sciences, which I co-founded. We started it because we wanted to bring visibility to research done in the country. The journal was financed for some time by the Academy of Research and Higher Education (ARES) in Brussels. The academy has stopped funding it now, but we are still publishing the journal. For the past ten years, I’ve been trying to create an academy of sciences for the DRC, similar to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC. We have to try to get scientists together and to speak as one voice, and then perhaps the state can start understanding that financing research at the university is important. These are some of the things that make me feel happy that I came back home. Maybe I lost a lot as a scientist, but as a Congolese, I hope I can do something for my place, and for the world. To scientists working in comparable circumstances, I would say that although it’s hard, it’s not impossible. Know that you should find maybe not the best solution, but the least-worst one. GGateway students on the training scheme in information technology funded by the Basque government.Credit: Mohammed Safia Rasha Abu-Safieh: Choose the positive Computer engineer and co-founder of GGateway, Gaza Strip I co-founded GGateway, a social-enterprise company in the Gaza Strip that provides outsourcing services for information and communications technology (ICT) around the world. We offer training and employment to recent university graduates in Gaza with ICT degrees. Our main goal with GGateway is to help people to have a source of income. With the shortage of clean water, the polluted sea and the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt since 2007, living conditions here are dire. We came up with the idea of GGateway in 2012. In November 2013 we launched a pilot, and in February 2015 we got the green light from the Korea International Cooperation Agency for a $1.3-million grant to fund our plan. That was one of the biggest, happiest things that ever happened to us. We were running a pilot project for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), but in July and August 2014 we had the 50 days of conflict with Israel. That was difficult: the bombing went on all day, there was no electricity and we had limited access to water and food. There was no safe zone, no safe area. So we had to stop our first project. Two days after a ceasefire ended the conflict, we wrote up another eight new concepts for different projects, and the UNRWA agreed to operate three. We could either be positive or cry all day. We chose the positive side and to move on. The cables that we use for all our technical networks are on the list of items that Israel does not allow to enter Gaza. With the support of the UNRWA, it took us nearly four months to bring them in from Israel. Without the UNRWA, it would have taken us a year or more. We also use a generator because most days we get electricity for two to four hours. The overall unemployment rate among graduates in Gaza with ICT degrees is 70%. Among female ICT graduates, it’s 92%. We applied for grants that focus on vulnerable women, and got one from the Basque government in Spain to train 60 female graduates for jobs. We also got a grant from the US-Middle East Partnership Initiative to empower and train 300 ICT graduates to become professional freelancers, and won a $3-million grant in June from the World Bank to train students and software engineers. We have contracts with UN Women and UN Habitat. We are able to travel outside Gaza only two to three times a year, maximum, and sometimes not at all; we need to apply for an exit permit from Israel with support of the UNRWA. Sometimes we are accepted, sometimes rejected; no reason is given. We often lose opportunities if we are registered for a conference, for example, or for training. When we see what we are doing — that it’s changing people’s lives, despite all of the difficulties around us — it makes us feel good. Elizabeth Tilley: Focus on small but crucial changes Sanitation economics researcher, University of Malawi, The Polytechnic, Blantyre I came to Malawi in 2015 after 9 years as a project officer and PhD student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Dübendorf. I had worked on sanitation projects in Nepal, South Africa, Tanzania and Nicaragua. Most of my work in Malawi now is teaching and supervising master’s and PhD students on such projects as making fuel briquettes out of dried faecal sludge. We work on ‘shit-flow diagrams’ — trying to map and understand where excreta is being generated and how much of it is being treated. We have a very bad Internet connection, and it’s a barrier to downloading files or making Skype calls. We don’t have subscriptions to journals. We have 30 computers for 4,000 students. Paper and photocopying are very expensive. We go days without water to even flush the toilets. At the university, we don’t have toilet paper, so I bring my own each day and I keep a secret bottle of soap. The research agenda in Malawi is driven by big donors from the global north, including national governments such as Norway and Japan, and private donors and non-governmental organizations. Very little funding goes to African researchers for work on topics that they’ve identified themselves. The fact that northern countries offer funding opportunities to those in the global south is an excellent form of development. But some proposals call for the participation of a southern partner with no requirements for the division of funding. This means that the southern partner is sometimes given a limited budget for limited work that has limited impact. I would encourage northern researchers to think about doing sabbaticals in African universities. It gives the southern researcher a chance to focus on publications or research, to be exposed to new ideas and methods, and to connect with a broader network, and the northern researcher can learn how things operate in the south and appreciate what works well at home. When you start to think about how crushing the whole system is, you can go crazy. I had a student who just wrote to tell me that he got into a master’s programme in the United States, and to thank me for the reference letter. He’s so excited, and that’s the kind of thing I can hold on to for a couple of months. First submitted on Nature Careers on 24 July 2018 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05768-9

The day after she submitted a grant proposal last November, Sarah McNaughton listed all the tactics she could think of to boost her chances of success next time. “I expect to be rejected,” says McNaughton. “It is the exception to get funded, not the rule.” Publishing key papers and forging new collaborations were on her list, as was collecting preliminary data. McNaughton, a nutrition researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, studies dietary patterns to find ways to improve public health. For the next phase of her work, she wants volunteers to use wearable cameras to capture what influences their food choices in real life, so she can determine how those vary depending on a person’s nutrition knowledge and cooking skills. After McNaughton had sent off her grant application to Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), top of her to-do list was launching a pilot study. “If we can show that people will wear the cameras, and they capture the data we need, that would really strengthen the application,” she says. A good idea is no guarantee of grant success. At the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2017 — the most recent year for which data are available — proposals worth a total of almost US$4 billion were rejected simply because they were beyond the organization’s budget, even though reviewers had rated them as very good or excellent. At the US National Institutes of Health, the aggregate success rate for research grants was 20.5% in 2017 (the most recent data available). At the biomedical-research funder Wellcome in London, roughly 50% of applications make it through the preliminary stage. Of those, around 20% were funded in 2017–18. And the NHMRC Investigator Grant category that McNaughton applied for had a success rate of just 7% in the previous round in 2019. “Given the low success rates of funding around the world, the odds are stacked against you in winning that one proposal,” says Drew Evans, an energy researcher at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, and former deputy chair of the Australian Early- and Mid-Career Researcher Forum. “Work towards a portfolio of activities,” he says. Aiming for different strands of funding to cover various aspects of a researcher’s work is a safer bet than seeking one major grant, he adds. McNaughton applies the same strategy to any research for which she is seeking funding. “I think about how I can split it up and target it to other organizations,” she says. It’s the first step towards applying to different funders without having to start from scratch each time — and you can work on it while waiting for the outcome of one application. “Rather than writing eight different grants, you are building an area — calling on the same literature and on your same publications,” McNaughton says. Planning for rejection is a crucial part of the granting process, say those who have been through the wringer (see ‘More on rejection recovery’). The limited pot of research funds worldwide means that competition is fierce. “We receive many more proposals — many more very good proposals — than we can possibly fund,” says Dawn Tilbury, a mechanical engineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who is head of the NSF Engineering Directorate, which funds basic research in science and engineering. MORE ON REJECTION RECOVERY It’s painful when your grant application is rejected, but here are some further thoughts on helping you to work productively after you’ve recovered from your disappointment. • You’re not alone. Average success rates are around 20% among large funders, so grant rejection is common. “Don’t lose heart,” says Shahid Jameel, chief executive of IndiaAlliance, a biomedical-research funder in New Delhi and Hyderabad. Rejection doesn’t mean that your work is flawed. • Give yourself time. Allow a week or so to recover, says Candace Hassall, head of researcher affairs at the biomedical funder Wellcome in London. “When people are turned down, they are angry and upset. Let that play out,” she says. Put the application to one side for a few days before you consider your next steps. • Share your setback. Discussing the grant rejection with colleagues, mentors and others can provide emotional support in the short term, and give you constructive feedback to help you to reapply for the grant when you are ready. “People whose grants have been rejected might not want to tell anybody, but getting advice and input can really help,” says Karen Noble, head of research careers at Cancer Research UK, which funds scientists and health-care professionals working on cancer treatments. • Look for ways to improve. Tackling the concerns of the reviewers who rejected your grant is important. “But don’t assume that just by addressing the issues outlined, you will necessarily be successful next time,” says Noble. It is unlikely that the same reviewers will see your application again, so look at it holistically and strengthen it for the next round. This might involve incorporating key new data, learning a crucial technique or forming a fresh collaboration. • Get feedback. Your revision needs review by a broad, diverse group of people, including colleagues, mentors and members of your network. You should also circulate the revision to scientists who don’t specialize in your field. Rejection hurts Rejection can be a bruising experience, say veteran grant-writers, and applicants need to give themselves at least a week to get through the initial pain. “Take a deep breath, close your computer, go home. Talk to your partner, or pet your cat,” says Tilbury. It’s a rollercoaster that Evans has ridden plenty of times. “You go through the various stages of emotions — anger, disappointment, despair, grieving almost,” he says. “Having time to digest, to get upset and angry — you need to go through that process, because you need a clear mind to come back to it constructively.” But grant-seekers can develop tricks to handle rejection better, says McNaughton. “Part of the reason I make a to-do list is to pull back my expectations,” she says. “Once it might have taken me a week or two to bounce back. Now, it’s 24 hours.” During the emotional recalibration process, researchers should share the setback with others, including colleagues and other professional contacts, says Evans. “It is your network that is going to give you the support and encouragement to keep going,” he says. Peers and mentors can help to put the rejection into context. They might also know of other funding opportunities that can help to bridge an immediate financial shortfall, or of potential collaborators who might be able to bring a researcher into a larger funding opportunity. Ask the funder After working through the emotional component, applicants should next seek feedback from the granting organization. The level of feedback sent out with rejection letters varies drastically, depending on the organization, the scheme applied for and the stage the application reached before rejection. For smaller funders, feedback might not be provided as a matter of course. “That takes a bit of effort to put together,” says Kristina Elvidge, research manager at the Sanfilippo Children’s Foundation in Australia. The charity, based near Sydney, funds up to Aus$700,000 (around US$472,000) annually on research into treatments for the rare genetic disorder Sanfilippo syndrome, which causes fatal brain damage. “I always give feedback to rejected applicants if they ask — but they very rarely do,” Elvidge says. For researchers whose work might align closely with the mission of a small foundation, seeking feedback can be the first step in starting a dialogue and building a relationship with a potential long-term funder. Megan Donnell, the foundation’s executive director and founder, says that the organization welcomes such efforts. Discussing grant rejections with peers can help to put them into context, advises Drew Evans (left), shown talking to early-career researcher Nasim Amiralian.Credit: Drew Evans For applicants to a larger organization or agency, such as the NSF, a rejection typically comes with some feedback — but that doesn’t mean the researcher can’t seek more, Tilbury says. “The programme director might be able to fill in some of the blanks,” she says. The feedback can contain many comments, criticisms and suggestions, and often the grant reviewers do not agree with each other. The programme director can help the applicant to peel away superficial concerns and make sure that she or he understands the proposal’s underlying weaknesses so as to address them in a potential revision, Tilbury says. “It’s one of the things programme directors enjoy doing — mentoring junior faculty members and trying to help them in their grant writing.” Some funders will not have the resources to provide feedback. But researchers should not fear tainting their reputation if they ask, says Candace Hassall, head of researcher affairs at Wellcome. “A funding agency won’t think badly of anyone contacting them for advice, even if we can’t give it.” Get feedback on the feedback Once a researcher has gathered constructive criticism, he or she should candidly appraise the strengths and weaknesses of their application. It is important to avoid taking feedback personally, says Shahid Jameel, chief executive of IndiaAlliance, a large research funder in New Delhi and Hyderabad. It supports biomedical and health research in India, and is itself funded by Wellcome and the Indian government’s Department of Biotechnology. “You have to get out of this mindset that there is either something wrong with you, or that people are against you,” Jameel says. “Reviewers really want you to do well — that is why they are spending their time reviewing your grant and providing feedback.” Reviewer feedback often seems less negative over time, McNaughton says. “I often colour code my reviewers’ comments — green for good and red for bad — and then realize that actually, there are a lot of good things in there as well,” she says. “These little things can make the process a bit easier.” And getting reviewer feedback is certainly preferable to not getting any, she adds. For her most recent rejection, she received only numerical scores on various components of her grant. “Then it is very difficult to know how to improve the application,” she says. Unsuccessful applicants should also seek input from colleagues and others whose opinions they value. “Talk to your peer group and your mentors — they will have been through the process and they can help you interpret the letter,” says Karen Noble, head of research careers at Cancer Research UK in London, which funds work on cancer treatments. Researchers can ask colleagues whether they agree with the feedback, whether they think that the reviewers missed an important point because it was not fully explained in the proposal, or whether they consider the proposal’s argument to be flawed. Researchers also need to determine whether they should reapply to the same funding scheme or seek alternatives (see ‘Rejection resources’). If an application fell at the first round of screening — in which reviewers assess the overall suitability of an applicant and proposal for that particular scheme — an alternative funder could be a better fit. For example, some government-supported agencies, such as the NSF, give grants for only basic research, whereas others, such as the US Department of Energy, are mission-focused and fund more-applied projects. “It is also important to consider funders that are not in one’s own nation,” says Jameel. REJECTION RESOURCES Every grant writer will experience rejections. Here are some resources to help you find alternative funding and boost your chances of success. • Seek help from your peers. Blogs run by academic researchers often contain useful career advice and information about the challenges of winning funding. Examples include The Research Whisperer in Australia and US-based blog The Professor Is In. Some are dedicated to research funding in specific regions, such as Research Fundermentals, which covers UK grant news. • Find another grant scheme. It might be that your chosen funder wasn’t the best fit for your proposal. Searching portals such as www.grants.gov in the United States and the funding-opportunities database SPIN (run by US firm InfoEd Global) could reveal schemes you hadn’t previously encountered. • Consider different funders. If your application for a government grant was unsuccessful, try obtaining funds from industry. Also look at small foundations — their remits vary widely (see, for example, http://fdnweb.org/eppley) but your work might align perfectly with one foundation’s mission. • Do some training. Look for short courses aimed at writing grant resubmissions so you can learn the most effective ways to reapply. • Network. Join a group of early- to mid-career researchers to gain advice and support. This might be a national organization or one at your institution. Grant-writers should keep industrial funders in mind, Evans says. He notes that applicants might be able to reshape a proposal to show its value to a particular business, adding that scientists who engage with businesses can diversify their grant portfolio and boost the resilience of their research income stream. Exploring potential applications of one’s work to industry could keep a researcher going until the next round of funding agency grants. “Industry partnerships are now one of the hot topics around the water cooler,” he says. Nailing the details Rejection also lurks after the preliminary screening stage when a grant application enters peer review. “If there’s a particular approach the reviewers don’t like, sometimes you may just need to explain it better — but sometimes there’s a mismatch,” Tilbury says. She adds that many early-career scientists seek to apply a technique or expertise they honed during a postdoc to a new area of research. If the reviewers weren’t sold on the idea, the grant-writer needs to think carefully about the proposal, Tilbury says. “Are the reviewers right? Am I using the wrong hammer to pound this nail?” If a grant-seeker is certain that their proposal — and their expertise — do fit the grant scheme, they need to make that clear to reviewers. “A common reason for rejection is that the applicant has made assumptions about what the reviewers know about them,” Hassall says. “If a technique or method is critical to what you are proposing, you have to include it. Make it easy for people to get the information that they need.” Similarly, if referees rejected a grant because the applicant had no experience in a particular technique, it pays to get it and include that information in the next round. Before reapplying, researchers should seek collaborators who are experts in that area or technique, or spend a week working in the collaborator’s lab to gain experience. It is the applications that just miss out on funding that can be the hardest to revise, Noble says. “Sometimes there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with somebody’s application. It just didn’t make it to the top of the list. Those can be the harder ones to try to repackage and put in again.” Yet perseverance is key, says Mariane Krause, a psychologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and president of the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) in Chile, which funds research in the country. She encourages researchers to refine their applications and continue to apply. “I have many young researchers who get a grant the third time,” she says. Reapplying to the same organization for funding can work if the funder allows it. “The success rate of reapplications is significantly higher than for first-time applications,” says Alex Martin Hobdey, head of the unit at the European Research Council (ERC) that coordinates project calls and follow-ups. For example, new applicants to ERC grants have a 9–10% success rate. “For people reapplying, the success rate goes up to 14 to 15%. We have people who got their first grant on their seventh application,” he adds (see go.nature.com/2vrfugk). Some schemes impose a specific hiatus period before accepting applications, or have an annual or biannual application deadline. Others, including Cancer Research UK, don’t impose specific limits. But programme officers recommend resisting the temptation to rush in a revised application as quickly as possible. “Take time — don’t knee-jerk,” Noble says. “Will you really be in a better position to reapply in a month?” Nature 578, 477-479 (2020) doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00455-0 Originally posted on nature.com on 18th February 2020 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00455-0

It's the details that make a difference in a grant application and oral presentation, Julie Gould discovers. Your browser does not support the audio element.   In the third episode of our series about funding, Peter Gorsuch, Chief Editor at Nature Research Editing Services, tells Julie Gould about the all-important details to include in your grant application. Jernej Zupanc, who runs visual communication skills training for scientists, talks fonts, colours and other ways make your application easier to navigate. And Anne-Marie Coriat, Head of UK and Europe Research Landscape at Wellcome Trust, London, describes how to prepare for a grant application interview presentation , including answers to some difficult questions Paid content: European Research Council Alina Bădescu describes her research at the Faculty of Electronic, Telecommunications and Information Technology, University of Bucharest, and her experience of successfully applying for an ERC grant. Bădescu, an associate professor at the university, was invited to the ERC's HQ in Brussels for an interview as part of the application. TRANSCRIPT It's the details that make a difference in a grant application and oral presentation, Julie Gould discovers. Julie Gould: Hello, I’m Julie Gould and this is Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. Welcome to the third part of our series on funding. And as with episodes one and two of this series, at the very end of this episode we'll also conclude with a third sponsored slot featuring the work of the European Research Council. In the second episode, we heard from Anne-Marie Coriat and Peter Gorsuch on how to best prepare for writing a grant proposal, and the conclusions were: plan ahead, ask questions and get feedback. And these are a great starting point, but I wanted to get into the nitty gritty of the grant writing process, and as luck would have it, during one of our conversations, Peter talked about just that – the nitty gritty details that the grant reviewers will want to see in a proposal. Peter Gorsuch: They certainly need to know what you’re planning to do. That seems very obvious – that’s the whole point of the application is to say this is what I’m going to do – but actually some applications that I see succeed in this more than others, and there are certainly applications that are like, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this and that and we’re going to learn to study that,’ and how are you going to do these things, and are you proposing work that’s feasible? Is this something that you’re capable of delivering? And those questions sometimes remain unanswered, simply because of a lack of detail. And most funding bodies, if not all, expect quite a lot of detail about actually how you’re going to do this in practice, so what machine are you going to use for things that require specialised machines, the analyses that are particularly difficult. There might be some, you know, you’re going to apply machine learning approaches to some things. Well, do you have the expertise to do that and if not, who are you going to collaborate with, or how are you going to obtain the skills and the tools necessary to do that? So, it’s that kind of really practical sort of down-to-earth thinking that the funding panel would be looking for because if you’ve got great ideas and great objectives but it’s out there in terms of the practicality, then actually that could be something that would worry the panel. Julie Gould: When we’re talking about specifics and practicalities, you’re talking at a granular level, really going down to the details of, I’m going to do this experiment three times, and I’m going to run it twice a week for x weeks. Are you talking that level of detail? Peter Gorsuch: Exactly that level of detail. Julie Gould: Okay. Peter Gorsuch: And also, another thing that ties in with that precisely is the idea of risks, the idea of back-up plans. What happens if, for example, you’re doing some fieldwork that’s in extreme conditions or that kind of thing, that it’s tricky to do or you’re planning to produce a mutant that has such and such a quality as part of your work. What do you do if that doesn’t succeed? I don’t think you need to do that for every single step of the work, but you need to think carefully about what is the thing about this which is most likely to not go the way that I’m planning because the panel will know that as well, and they’ll be looking for a plan that accounts for those risks and that minimises them where possible but comes up with back-up plans. Julie Gould: Once you’ve got the grant written, the next challenge is to make sure that the reviewer reads more than just that all important abstract. Jernej Zupanc is the founder of Seyens, a company through which he runs visual communications workshops for scientists. On top of that, he’s also been a consultant for small businesses applying for Horizon 2020 funding, and he said that when you’re writing the grant proposal, you really need to put yourself in the shoes of the reviewer and think about what it is that they are seeing. Jernej Zupanc: Well, the most important thing is that whenever you are writing a grant proposal, you have to understand that on the other side of the table there is somebody who is also a human being, which means that they have their subjective ways of determining wants to fund and what’s not to fund, which means that you have to prepare the proposal in such a way that that person is not going to struggle with what you’re trying to explain, so you have to present it in such a way that is going to be understandable. They shouldn’t think more than necessary about what you’re trying to explain. So, I think that that would be the first thing to discuss with people who apply for grants. Then the second thing which is I think is more of a visual nature, is that you have to enable what is called skimming or scanning, which means that a person can look at your page and they can go over it in let’s say less than half a minute and they have to understand which topics you’re addressing on that page, what the main messages are. And then if there are visuals, when they see the visual, they have to understand what the main message of the visual is, what the purpose is, which means that when a validator is reading through the proposal and they can come, for example, to a paragraph, if it’s just completely dense, flat text, then they will have to read every word of it. But if you, for example, use approaches such as topical sentences, which means that the first sentence of the paragraph actually states the message which that paragraph then develops, then the validators will be able to read the first sentence, they will see whether there is something already familiar with, and then in that case they might skip it and they will focus on the parts of your proposal which are things that are of higher importance to them. Then the second thing I think is of fundamental nature is that you have to get to the point as fast as possible. If the validator is looking at your grant and then for the first three pages they just understand the background but they have no idea about what you’re going to do about it, then they’re in a way losing interest into it. So. what I usually propose is that if the grant applications allow you a format where it’s not so strict, that you start with something which is called a graphical abstract and make an executive summary, which means that the validator can just on one page go through the most important things about your proposal and they get this kind of walkthrough, they get this overview, this big picture about what’s going on. And then once they have that big picture in their mind, then they can use the details you provide in the following pages to somehow fill in all the questions they might still have to answer, but in general the big picture should always come before the details. Julie Gould: So, one thing that many people I have spoken to in the past have commented on, especially when I’m discussing this idea of skimming when it comes to a CV, is that people aren’t keen on using things like boldface type or colours in their CV. What is your perspective on using that type of tool for a grant proposal? Jernej Zupanc: When I’m writing grant proposals for businesses, those are not as conservative documents as we are used to in science, which means that in scientific grant proposal writing I think the approach would be a little less modern or a bit more traditional. However, if there’s one thing that I think can be introduced into scientific proposal writing really cleverly, it’s bold text. Of course, not overwhelming amounts of bold text, but just here and there, some things that should just not be skipped, I think that’s okay. When it comes to colour, it’s much more difficult. If I really, really summed up, use colour to add meaning, use colours to amplify and not to fancify because usually people just pick colours so the colour makes everything colourful, but this is really a waste of colour. It is in a way too overwhelming for people when they’re reading, so if you’re using colour it has to be really, really meaningful. Julie Gould: Can you go into a little more detail about the use of colour when it comes to graphic representation and font and texts and things like that for scientists who might be wanting to use that in their funding proposal? Jernej Zupanc: This goes across all types of applications, but one thing that you can do with is colour is that if there is a concept or something that you’re dealing with in your research that’s going to appear constantly, you can associate the colour with that, and then you use the same colour in your schemes, you will use the same colour in your gantt chart, you will use the same colour in the bar chart, then use the same colour in, for example, the charts like data visualisations which means that when somebody is going over 20 pages of your proposal, whenever they come to a colour they will have already associated that concept with that colour. Julie Gould: So, fingers crossed, all these tips combined will improve your chances of getting that funding proposal accepted, but something else to think about is that some funding bodies will actually need candidates to give an oral presentation as part of their application. Anne-Marie Coriat from the Wellcome Trust said that these are actually a really great opportunity for a candidate to update the review panel on any work that has been done since the grant proposal was submitted. Anne-Marie Coriat: It can be 3-6 months before an interview takes place, especially if there’s a triage process involved. So, there is an opportunity to see fit and update, and then to also provide some of the richer narrative around the application that you weren’t able to put in either because the page limits were restrictive or because actually you hadn’t covered that when you were thinking about putting your application together. So again, the key for any interview process is know what you have flexibility to do and practice, and practice with people who are used to doing this themselves. So, often in the institutions you will have people who are on panels that do interviews themselves. There will be people on promotion panels, people who do all sorts of interviews. Very often, universities will have the chance for individuals coming for interview for a grant application to have mock panels. There are some lovely little resources on the internet – Medical Research Council have got one, as have others – where they show physically the process of an interview. So, get to know what your funder is after and what they’re offering you, and then the critical thing is practice, practice, practice. And think of the worst questions you could possibly be asked and try and answer them as succinctly as you can. If you’re given the opportunity to present a slide or more than one slide, make sure that it is clear and that it isn’t cluttered – the usual advice that you get – and if you’re given the opportunity to provide a bit of richness around the proposal, make sure that you tackle those, ‘I realise that stage x in my proposal will make or break the direction in which I travel’, ‘If it works this way then I will be fine, if it doesn’t then these are my back-up plans.’ So always anticipate the worst thing that might happen in your own research proposal, don’t wait for somebody else to tell you because then you’ll be on the backfoot. Try and anticipate where people might think your research could fail or could be derailed potentially, and think about how you might respond to that so that essentially what you’re doing is you’re giving a very clear view that you not only understand the field, you understand what others are doing globally and you know how the experimental approaches that you are proposing might work or might not, and what you might do if there’s a problem. Julie Gould: At this point I want to thank our experts Elizabeth Pier, Peter Gorsuch, Anne-Marie Coriat and Jernej Zupanc for speaking to me for this series on funding. From them we’ve learnt that it’s really important to perfect your grant writing skills. But it’s equally important to understand the funding landscape within which you are working. So, stay tuned because that’s exactly what we’re going to be exploring in the next few episodes of this funding series on the Working Scientist podcast. So that’s it for this section of the podcast, but we’ve now got a slot sponsored by and featuring the work of the European Research Council. Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould. Alina Bădescu: So I am Alina Bădescu and I’m an associate professor at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, and I’m working in the Faculty of Electronic, Telecommunications and Information Technology. I am a radio engineer. That is my bachelor degree that I obtained, after which I did a Master's in Sweden in Chalmers University. I received a scholarship from the Swedish Institute whom I thank right now. And after the masters, I returned to Romania and I did my PhD in the same university where I currently work. Since then I have been working here in the Telecommunications Department, continuing in the radio field. So, the science world in Romania is progressing and when you live here, you can see year by year things are improving. Of course, one has to be realistic and if you look, for example, at the ERC results, the grantees, you’ll see that eastern Europe is still far away from western Europe when it comes to results, but things are really beginning to change right now. I would say the scientific world is going on the right way. We are hopefully improving and I think those results will show up in the near future. ERC grants are very hard to obtain, as you know. I mean the success rate is very, very small. I would say that I was kind of worst to apply for an ERC grant in the sense that in Romania, the grant competitions are sparse so when I applied actually I had no other choice but to go for the ERC grant because I really needed the money and the equipment to do some projects, some work, that I was really interested in. So, this is how I got to apply for the ERC grant. Okay, so the ERC grant that I received is a starting grant for two years, and the amount was €180,000, and it concerns detection of cosmic neutrinos in salt mines. It’s a subject that I started working on in my PhD, and I got to a point where I needed to do experimental work. The grant has a very long name. It is ‘Radio wave propagation in heterogeneous media: implications on the electronics of Cosmic Neutrino Detectors’. We are a team of six, out of which three are postdocs and one a PhD student, and the salary covers our wages and also I have purchased the equipment necessary to do measurements in a few Romanian salt mines and that’s it. I mean we are a small team. So, the ultimate goal of a neutrino detector in a salt mine would be to trace the highest energetic sources in this universe, which could be supermassive black holes or gamma ray bursts or anything extremely energetic. As a general comment, you can do that by observing the source, well let’s say pointing your radio telescope towards that source or you can observe it indirectly. And one such method to study energetic sources is to observe and measure what they produce. One of the products that we are interested in our neutrinos, and why is that? Neutrinos are some particles which can travel the universe without being deflected by the magnetic field. So, if they travel in a straight line, let’s say, if one detects a neutrino on Earth and reconstructs the direction, we will know for sure that in that direction we have a high energetic source. So, one needs a huge volume of high density material just to enhance the interaction of the neutrino. One such medium is salt reservoir, salt mines. But when a neutrino will interact in a salt mine, it will produce a radio wave because salt allows propagation of radio waves on large distances. And we need that, we need propagational large distances because we need more detectors to measure the same radio signal, and once we have more radio stations which detect the same radio signal, we can reconstruct the direction where a high energetic source is, so location of a supermassive black hole. So it’s kind of astronomy done with detection of neutrinos, and nowadays, as far as I know, we are the only group in Europe which is studying the effect of cosmic neutrinos in salt mines. The universe is formed by many black holes and very massive black holes are of interest because people are ultimately interested in the evolution and what the universe is made from. So, I wrote the proposal in 2015, and I think in April 2016 I received an email in which I was informed my grant passed to the first evaluating stage and that I will be invited in Brussels for an interview for the second step. I think it was in June when I went to Brussels for the interview and I had to present my project to the reviewers. And after that, I waited for two more months I think, and in August I received a congratulating email in which it was announced that my grant will be financed. I read the email and I couldn’t believe it. It was really, really good. I mean I was more than surprised. To be honest I didn’t expect to receive the grant because of the high competition so anyway I was very, very happy. Well, as I always say, if you don’t apply then you won’t get the grant. Well the first step in obtaining the grant is to apply for a grant. And as hard as it may sound, it’s not impossible. I mean if I could do it, anybody can, so I would advise as many researchers to apply for it. I would advise Romanian researchers to apply for it, and in Romania, for example, if you pass the first evaluating stage but your project is not financed, the Romanian state will give you I think half of the money that you applied for initially, to do this project and of course this is a measure to encourage applications for such grants. So, good luck everybody.   Originally posted on nature.com on 18th January 2019 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00197-8

Anne Marie Coriat and Peter Gorsuch tell Julie Gould how advance planning and a well-worded summary can make your grant application stand out. Your browser does not support the audio element. It's best to start planning for a grant application at least 9-12 months before the submission deadline, says Anne Marie Coriat, Head of UK and Europe Research Landscape at Wellcome Trust, London. She outlines the preparatory steps you need to take. Also in the second episode of this six-part podcast series on funding, Peter Gorsuch, Chief Editor at Nature Research Editing Services, highlights the importance of your grant application summary statement. A clearly worded document can help to convince a funding panel that you are the right person for a grant, he says. Paid content This episode concludes with a second sponsored slot featuring the work of the European Research Council (ERC). Alejandro Martin Hobdey, who manages the unit in charge of receiving applications and coordinating the ERC's two-stage evaluation process, describes how his team supports both successful and unsuccessful applicants. And panel chair Maria Leptin, a research scientist at the University of Cologne and director of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in Heidelberg, Germany, explains how she and her expert colleagues evaluate individual applications. TRANSCRIPT Anne Marie Coriat and Peter Gorsuch tell Julie Gould how advance planning and a well-worded summary can make your grant application stand out. Julie Gould: Hello, I’m Julie Gould and this is Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. So, welcome to part two of our series on funding. In the first episode, we heard from Elizabeth Pier whose research showed that a lot of the funding allocation within the National Institutes of Health in the USA is down to luck. Now, understandably this may be a little bit sad given the hours and hours and hours and hours and hours that people spend on writing their grant applications. But whilst I was speaking to Elizabeth, she did give me a little clue as to how you can improve your chances of being one of the lucky ones. She told me that as part of her dissertation work, she looked at the strengths and weaknesses of grant proposals that are predictive of scores that are assigned. So, using some text-mining software, she analysed the written critiques of the reviewers. Now, it’s restricted to biomedical sciences but the lessons can be applied to all fields. Elizabeth Pier: The severity of the problem under study is often something that’s pretty predictive, so reviewers will identify if the problem that’s being studied is something really deadly or severe or something that’s fatal that doesn’t have a lot of research out there to support interventions or to support treatment. So, I think really targeting expressing how the problem that you’re trying to tackle is a really important one, is something that reviewers talk about a lot. And having strong preliminary data was also really important, and I recognise as a researcher myself the challenge of getting strong preliminary data without funding and so just as a strategy to think about smaller funding initiatives to obtain preliminary data that can then be used for a larger grant, like an R01, is pretty instrumental in being able to show the viability of your ideas. Julie Gould: This might seem like a lot to think about, but one way to minimise and organise that workload is to think ahead. Anne Marie Coriat, the Head of UK and Europe Research Landscape at Wellcome Trust, has the right advice. Anne Marie Coriat The bottom line is that it’s never too early to start planning. Julie Gould: So, here we are – ready to start planning. Now, depending on what stage of your scientific career you’re at, there might be a few different things you can do in preparation for applying for a grant. Anne Marie Coriat: Depending where you are in your career stage, then there will be different forms of evidence that you can bring to bear to demonstrate your capability, your experience, how you might fulfil that vision, but also there are some absolute similarities, both in terms of how you make the arguments for the area of study that you’re promoting and also making sure that actually what you’ve got is a breadth of disciplinary support, if you need that to tackle the problem. Julie Gould: So, can you just give me a bit of an idea of how you would advise someone to plan for their funding application to make sure that they have everything they need before they start writing, and what are the things they would need? Anne-Marie Coriat If you’re submitting an application, essentially you probably need to leave 9-12 months, I would have thought – sometimes people advocate for longer – before your submission, because preparation is absolutely everything. The great idea and the vision for it is one thing, but then it’s critically important that what you do is understand the nuances of the different funders that you might be applying to. All funders have got very clear or reasonably clear guidance on what each type of scheme involves and the sorts of things they’re looking for, and understand the deadline first, and then work back from there. I would encourage individuals to think quite carefully about testing and scoping their ideas for their application with colleagues, with people who they may know who are not in their discipline, and then you’re looking for all the usual things in relation to is the experimental design robust, are the materials and consumables costed, have you got the right people, have you got the right collaborators, are you able to articulate what would go wrong in these experiments, what might go wrong, and if it does how would you have a plan B? Julie Gould: Anne Marie says that the difference funding bodies all have different applications schemes, and it’s definitely worth reading the application guidelines for all the funding bodies that you want to apply to. But there are some similarities between the different funding documents, says Peter Gorsuch who’s the Chief Editor at the Nature Research Editing Service. Peter Gorsuch Generally what you would have is a funding document would start off with a summary, and that is very heavily used by the panel, and then there will be some kind of background information section, which will set the context to your work. There might be a separate section for your own previous work or there might not. There might be a separate section for preliminary work which directly informs your project. Then the main bulk of the proposal would usually be a detailed explanation of what you’re actually going to do, and then usually it ends up with funding information about the funds you’re requesting and then also there are all kinds of other more administrative documents like CVs which are actually part of the funding decision, I should clarify, and other details that the funding body needs. Julie Gould: The summary is often very heavily used by the panel that is reviewing the application, so this clearly is a very, very important part of the funding application. So how would you suggest that people go about tackling that summary statement? Peter Gorsuch: It needs to tell the panel what the point is, where it came from, why it’s important, and then the main elements of what you’re actually going to do. So, it does need to be a distilled version of the main scientific argumentation that you put in the main project. It needs to be informative though – it can’t just be, you know, it needs to be a summary, you can’t give that much detail, but it does need to give the panel useful information about what you’re actually doing and why you’re actually doing it. Julie Gould: Obviously the summary, as you’ve said, is a very important part of applying for funding because really what you’re wanting to do is you want to tell the funding body, the panel that’s reviewing it, why you are the best for this particular project, why they should be giving you the money. So, apart from using that summary statement, how else could people really make sure that they are clear about why they are the best? Peter Gorsuch: You’re right, it’s a very important part of the application as a whole, and in fact, one of the messages that you need the panel to get from your application, is that not just this is a good idea, it’s actually this person is a really good person to put this funding in to deliver this project. So, in terms of how that’s communicated, in the actual main document itself there are quite a few different ways that it can be presented. First of all, where you have previous publications that are relevant to this grant application, you’ve got to cite them. You’ve got to also say, ’We previously showed,’ or, ‘I previously showed or in a collaboration with researchers from x institution’, ‘I was involved in a project that demonstrated…’, and be really clear – use phrasing to clearly say this is my contribution to the field. Also, any preliminary work, usually grant schemes will expect you to explain what preliminary work leads up to the research. It’s very important to be able to do that to show that you had a contribution to a range of different work which has led to the proposed work. Another way of doing this is to make sure that the information you provide about yourself, so the CV, any supporting information like that, is also tailored to the application, that you’re including information that is relevant to the work that you’ve got planned, and that it’s also making a strong case that supports you being a suitable person to deliver the work. And that will give you the power of confidence that this proposal will succeed because they know that they’re putting their trust in the right person. Julie Gould: I’ve asked both Anne Marie and Peter to give me their top bits of advice on how to plan for your funding application. Anne Marie would encourage… Anne Marie Coriat: All people thinking about applications to make first point of contact with their grants office, sometimes they’re called research and enterprise offices, sometimes they’re grant support offices, but essentially there’s an administrative team at the university which oversees all applications. Julie Gould: And Peter’s top bit of advice… Peter Gorsuch: ...is the idea of presenting yourself as being the appropriate person, that you can actually deliver this in practice, you’ve got the skills, you’ve got the experience to succeed. Julie Gould: I hope all of this advice is useful to you, and I hope that this is going to encourage you to listen to our third episode of the series, when we will hear from some more experts who can help us with funding applications. Now that’s it for this section of our Working Scientist podcast, but now we have a slot sponsored by and featuring the work of the European Research Council. Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould. Alex Martin-Hobdey: My name is Alex, Alex Martin-Hobdey. I’m a Head of Unit at the European Research Council in Brussels, and I manage a unit that’s in charge of receiving the applications from the scientists and organising their evaluation, and later on of course the sending out of the results. Yes, I’m somebody who has worked in science. I studied physics and then I did atomic physics, later physics, applications of lasers. Fundamentally I’m a physicist by training, but over the years I’ve seen many, many others things – in social science, in humanities, in life science – so it’s a way of widening your scientific background, and that’s something that I like about where I work right now. I manage a unit within the ERC, and this unit organises and coordinates the scientific evaluation of the applications that arrive, and it also – once the projects are funded – this unit organises and coordinates the scientific follow-up to see what people are doing, how they’re progressing etc. And so, what my unit does is when the applications arrive, we take a look at them, we assign them to various panels, these panels are run by scientific officers in other units, and we set everything up, the evaluation proceeds, we monitor it, and when the evaluation is finished, we take back the results, communicate them to the scientist – unfortunately they’re not always good results. We can end up funding about 1 in 10, so unfortunately in the end we have to send out 90% of not so good news. And typically, we get 2000-3000 applications for each of the individual investigator-type grants – that’s the Starting, Consolidator and Advanced. For Synergy grants we get a bit less, we get more like 300. So, we follow a two-step process, in which the first step is to get the applications, and the first part which is a five-page summary – so it’s not incredibly long – and we send it to panels. We have 25 panels of what we call ‘generalists’, which cover all areas of science, all areas of knowledge. That’s one of the special things of the ERC is that we don’t have predetermined topics. We fund anything from science to engineering to social sciences etc. So, the first step is these top-level scientists on the panels look at the proposals and they reduce them to about a third, they evaluate them all, they write written comments on them all, and about a third go on to the second step. So, two thirds get a written review, they get comments back, they get ideas to help the applicant improve the project or for the applicant to understand why it didn’t go on to step two. So, the panels are really one of the key aspects of our evaluation. The scientific council has defined 25 different panels. In some sense, the way they start is by defining panel chairs, and then around them a group of 12, 13, 14 top-level scientists in Europe, that all of them together will now cover the knowhow that they need, at least as generalists, to start looking at these applications. And our scientific council are very high-level scientists who have the ability to attract top scientists to participate in our panels. Maria Leptin: I’m Maria Leptin, I’m a research scientist with a professorship in genetics at the University of Cologne. I also have a lab here in Heidelberg at the European Molecular Biology Labs. I was a member and then chair of the LS3 (Life Sciences 3) panel for the advanced grants, and it’s really a great pleasure to work on the panel for a number of reasons. The other scientists are fun, they’re interesting, they’re interesting colleagues and one spends two or three days with them, so that’s always fun, but the main reason of course, is that the research that is proposed is so interesting. It’s hard work, but I think most panel members really like doing this work. So, if we look at how grantees are chosen, one has to remember the panel consists of about 12 people, and that panel gets some – depending on which panel it is – anywhere between 50 to 100-and-something applications. The applications are distributed among the panel members by area of expertise, and each initial application is read by several panel members – 3 or 4 or 5. And then they are graded and they’re graded on a number of criteria. One is the researcher and the other is the project itself. So, the reason for judging the researcher is mainly to figure out whether the person who’s proposed a bold, a daring, an innovate and an interested research proposal, somebody who’s proposed such a project, to figure out whether they are likely to be in a position to do it. So, one looks at the past of the researcher to see have they done bold and interesting and brave things before, but then the main concern, the main issue, really is how interesting and how good is the proposal. So, that’s what’s judged in the first round – the idea for the proposal, the originality of it, the feasibility as well, as far as one can tell from that part of the application. And then the grades are given, and based on these grades, the proposals are ranked. It’s certainly not sufficient to be a superstar scientist. In fact, our committee has had to reject many superstar scientists because what they wrote wasn’t necessarily convincing, not sufficiently well thought through, or maybe not sufficiently well explained. That’s the first step. It’s very, very, painful because one has to reject so many good applications. Alex Martin-Hobdey: About a third of these proposals then go on to step two, which is where we have the interviews for the young people. The other role of these panel members is now to select specialist reviewers around the world, anybody in the world, we don’t have a restricted list of reviewers, so the panel members in step one, they look at the best applications and they now look for specialists in exactly this topic anywhere in the world, and one of the jobs of the agency is to now get these applications and through our IT systems, contact these specialists anywhere in the world – United States or Europe or Japan or Canada – and ask for detailed reviews. And so, we have a gap of about 2-3 months between our step one panel meetings and the step two interviews, and during that time we’re gathering these specialist reviews and we’ve contacted the applicants to tell them that you’ve been chosen for interview and so they can go and clear their calendar, we give them the dates. And this is really very unique to the ERC, for starting grants and consolidator grants, which are the younger people, we do interviews, and typically we have 800-900 interviews per scheme, so it’s a very, very big endeavour. We end up interviewing 1800 people. We bring them to Brussels from all over the world. It doesn’t matter where they are at time of application. So, the top third are brought for interviews, and we are really probably the only scheme – at least that I know of – in the world, that’s interviewing people at this level. But in front of them, the panel members also have the external reviews. So, typically in step two, during the interviews we have about four reviews from panel members and several, up to four, five reviews from specialists around the world. So, many of our applications end up having 8 or 9 reviews, and then you have the interviews themselves. The interview is considered important. It’s to see the PI, to make sure the ideas are of the PI. So, these applicants are brought to Brussels in the starting and consolidator and interviewed one by one, and from there, of the people who are brought to Brussels, about a third or a half finally get the award. So, what we’re trying to do the best we can is get the applicants to realise how rigorously we look at the proposals, and by them coming to the panels and getting questions by the reviewers, they can see that the reviewers have read their proposals and have understood them. So, part of our purpose is to give this image that their ideas are really being appreciated. And so, in the end out of 3000 applicants in a call we will fund about 300, so it’s about 10 to 1. Once those are selected, we send them a letter and they get a grant. Those grants are typically for five years, as I said they get a large amount of money, especially for young people to get €1.5 million at that level of their career is a generous grant, and they have a lot of freedom about what to do with it later. They use it to fund their ideas, their dreams. It’s what we call frontier research. Maria Leptin: Of course, one wants to encourage everyone to apply. One should just give it a try. We all need grants anyway, and these are both prestigious as well as huge, so they provide a lot of money, they provide a lot of prestige. It’s a lot of work to write such a grant, but I think everybody who’s written big, difficult grants agrees that the grant writing itself is also worthwhile, so one should just go for it, and the money that each panel gets is proportional to number of grants that come in, so it’s not even as if one somehow reduces one’s chances by having many people apply. It’s just a good thing. People should be brave and apply. They should do their very, very, very best though to make it an excellent grant – well written and well thought through.   Originally posted on Nature Careers - 11 January 2019 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00103-2

The freezers were stuffed and their racks encrusted in ice, with a thin blanket of snow covering all the sample boxes inside. Such was the state of the cold-storage system in Hopi Hoekstra’s laboratory a decade after the evolutionary biologist and her team started studying the genetics and behaviour of deer mice there. Kyle Turner, manager of the lab at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was about to spend more than US$10,000 on a new ultra-low-temperature (ULT) freezer. Then he heard about a competition called the North American Laboratory Freezer Challenge, which had been launched in January 2017 by two US non-profit organizations — My Green Lab, in Los Gatos, California, and the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories (I2SL), in Annandale, Virginia. The challenge, which is now international, urges labs to reduce energy consumption and improve equipment life through various measures. Some of those include defrosting freezers, to eliminate crusty ice and provide more space for samples, and raising the temperature set‑point on ULT freezers from −80 °C to −70 °C, to cut electricity demands. The Hoekstra lab won first place in the individual-laboratory category for an academic institution. Lab members also freed so much space in their two existing ULT freezers that, despite accumulating new research materials, they haven’t yet needed to buy a third. The energy savings helped to cut Harvard’s electricity bill by around $2,500 a year, according to My Green Lab, and slashed annual greenhouse-gas emissions by the equivalent of 4.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide — roughly what would be saved by taking three cars off the road. It also meant that Hoekstra’s lab could spend the funds earmarked for a new freezer on other science-related expenses instead. Hoekstra likens it to “a free $10,000 grant” — and is using the money to send some trainees to this August’s Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Montpellier, France. The funds will also help to support a high-throughput gene-expression analysis of brain cells from two related species of deer mouse. Campus sustainability initiatives are usually framed as ways for scientists to shrink their carbon footprints and bring down energy costs (see Nature 546, 565–567; 2017). But the Hoekstra lab’s experience shows that there are other reasons to pool surplus reagents, share equipment or keep better tabs on lab chemicals to avoid duplicate purchasing. “These exercises are about helping science as much as they are about helping the planet,” says Peter James, director of S-Lab, a UK initiative based in London that promotes sustainable lab practices. “They free up resources that can be applied for scientific purposes.” Bounty hunters One increasingly popular way to cut lab waste and operational costs is through exchange programmes for surplus resources. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for example, more than 230 research and teaching laboratories now routinely share leftover chemicals, equipment and materials through a campus-wide recycling and reuse initiative. “Before this programme, these were thrown in the trash or disposed of as hazardous waste for a price,” says Sudhakar Reddy, who co-ordinated the university’s sustainability efforts until his retirement last December. Now, he estimates, more than one-third of all unexpired and unused lab resources get passed on to other researchers, who leap on the surplus bounty — saving themselves a combined total of more than $250,000 a year. One new recruit, pulmonary-health researcher Benjamin Singer, freely acquired two high-end microscopes — valued at more than $6,000 apiece — which he now uses to study donated human-brain specimens for molecular signs of injury after a critical illness. A second researcher, cell biologist Anthony Vecchiarelli, saved more than $10,000 while kitting out his lab with free peristaltic pumps, circulating water baths, slide warmers and consumables. “I check the website almost weekly for goodies,” says Vecchiarelli. “It is a valuable resource for a new investigator.” Not all academics have such a website at their fingertips, however. Garry Cooper didn’t when he was a postdoc studying neurophysiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. And it was while he was helping to clean out a lab freezer one day in 2015 that he realized there was a need for such a platform: he’d been handing a PhD student some expensive reagents, but still throwing away bagfuls of antibodies, a common, yet pricey, research tool for identifying proteins. He decided to create a company to reduce wasteful spending and promote trading among colleagues. He envisaged it as a kind of eBay, Craigslist and Ask.com rolled into one, providing lab scientists with a valuable service at a time when research funding is increasingly hard to come by (see ‘Too much of a good thing’). He called the start-up Rheaply, a portmanteau of ‘research’ and ‘cheaply’.   TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING Before launching Rheaply, an online platform where scientists can buy, sell, trade or donate surplus labware and supplies, Garry Cooper surveyed 120 academic researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, to learn more about why reagents and equipment go unused, and whether scientists would be willing to donate surplus supplies. Most respondents said they had extra lab provisions that they would gladly give to colleagues. Here’s a summary of Cooper’s findings: Top reasons for reagents and equipment going unused or remaining in surplus • Initial/pilot experiments failed (71.6%) • Initial experimental needs changed (63.6%) • Original purchaser leaves lab (56.8%) • Starting quantity too large (54.5%) • Items stored in secluded areas (18.2%) • Double ordering (15.9%) Types of reagents and equipment that go unused or remain in surplus • Chemicals (80.2%) • Antibodies/biologics (38.4%) • Kit reagents (37.2%) • Glassware (27.9%) • Imaging dyes/agents (25.6%) • Tools (16.3%) • Tissue/cell-culture items (15.1%) • Tubing (12.8%) • Microscopy equipment/accessories (10.5%) • Computer software (8.1%)   After developing a web-based platform, Cooper and his company launched a pilot programme at Northwestern’s medical school last year. In its first 6 months, around 300 researchers — close to one-third of all lab scientists on the medical campus — created Rheaply accounts. According to Cooper, who remains a visiting scholar at Northwestern, those users collectively posted around 200 items, ranging from pipettes and glassware to chemicals and biological probes; at least 55 items were passed on, saving labs across the campus more than $25,000 and keeping those resources out of landfills. Khalid Alam is one Rheaply user. Just last month, he got hold of an $800 vacuum pump for his postdoctoral research into RNA engineering — although in general, he says, “there’s not a tonne of stuff on there”. That’s one of the main problems with any environmentally minded programme aimed at scientists, says Michael Blayney, executive director of the Office for Research Safety at Northwestern. “The challenge is: how do you encourage and motivate people to interact with it?” Tangible benefits Amorette Getty is involved in a number of waste-reduction initiatives. One is at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she co-directs a programme called LabRATS (short for Laboratory Resources, Advocates and Teamwork for Sustainability) that encourages shared use of surplus chemicals and instrumentation. She says that scientists are most likely to pitch in for those efforts that offer them personal, tangible benefits — although these needn’t be directly monetary. “Any time I can connect the things I’m trying to do to increase safety and research efficiency, or get better storage to protect samples — that’s when I have my greatest successes,” she says. Credit: Claire Welsh/Nature That same ethos underpins moves by three institutes at the University of Aberdeen, UK, to centrally manage ULT freezers and raise the operating temperature to −70 °C. The initiative, says Peter McCafferey, a brain researcher who previously led the university’s Freezer Protocol Group, is as much about research resilience and reliable sample preservation as it is about energy efficiency. “We have all the freezers together, which makes it easier to keep an eye on,” he explains. But Cooper reckoned that people would need more motivation before adopting such practices. To help Rheaply catch on, he devised a point-based system that rewards online engagement and activity. So far, Cooper has convinced a handful of large academic and private clients to sign up, and he hopes to close deals soon with several prominent universities and government research agencies, including the US National Institutes of Health. Expanding that idea of collective action offers additional opportunities for cutting costs. Most universities already have core facilities for specialized equipment, technologies and services, but a few are now taking this centralized approach further in how they set up their labs. Take cell-culture work, for example. This line of research requires fairly basic equipment — laminar-flow hood, incubator, cell counter, microscope, centrifuge, cryostorage tanks — all of which is priced within the budget of a typical lab. According to a survey of biosafety officers at member institutions of the Association of American Universities, 86% of cell-culture spaces remain private, used only by individual labs. But at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Biochemistry Cell Culture Facility is shared by 70 users from 16 labs, all of whom chip in to pay the salary of a single facility manager. A case study of the collaborative research space, published earlier this year, compared the facility’s approach with a hypothetical situation in which all the labs worked on cell culture independently. The study found that centralizing media preparation and other tasks, instead of getting graduate students and postdocs in each group to perform these jobs, saved each lab more than nine hours a week. Other savings, achieved through bulk purchasing and the use of recycled ethanol, for example, helped the biochemistry department and individual labs to collectively cut their expenses by around $195,000 per year, the analysis showed. Their efforts saved the university a further $71,000 each year by reducing energy bills and lowering the costs of ventilation and lab maintenance. “There’s so much cost avoidance,” says Kathy Ramirez-Aguilar, programme manager of the university’s Green Labs Program, who conducted the study with her deputy, Christina Greever. Robert Kuchta, an enzymologist who uses the facility, points to a less obvious, environ-mental benefit of the sharing system. “It dramatically reduces liquid-nitrogen usage,” he says. That’s because containers used to store liquid nitrogen are typically cylindrical, and many small cylinders, of the type that might be used by individual labs, have a larger collective surface area — and thus a higher rate of nitrogen evaporation — than does a single, large cryopreservation tank of the same volume that can store samples in one place. Even without access to a joint facility, individual labs can still realize some of these gains by taking advantage of laboratory-management software. An automated inventory system can free money that would otherwise be spent on paying someone to keep tabs on the thousands of reagents commonly used by large chemistry labs. And it can save researchers from making wasteful purchases because they can’t find existing stock on the shelves. What’s more, just as members of the University of Colorado’s shared facility can pool their hazardous junk for disposal — reducing the number of times sterilized autoclaves are inefficiently run half-empty, and getting a better deal from waste-disposal companies — so, too, can individual labs that share a common chemical-tracking system. “You find ways to pack the same waste together — and it’s quite often the same price, because you’re disposing of one package,” says Marcus Phelan, a chief technical officer and dangerous-goods safety adviser at Trinity College Dublin, where chemistry labs all use a cloud-based inventory system called LabCup. A new light dawns As well as benefiting from campus-wide initiatives, scientists can take individual action that will simultaneously save money, the environment and the integrity of their research. For example, labs with fluorescent microscopes can replace mercury lamps with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which are less toxic and more energy-efficient. According to Allison Paradise, executive director of My Green Lab, LEDs are better for science because they provide a more consistent light source than do mercury lamps, which degrade over time and make it hard to quantitatively compare images from different time points in an experiment. Buoyed by the success of the freezer challenge, Paradise says that she is in discussions with sponsors to set up a similar initiative, this time aimed at eliminating mercury from microscope lamps. If she’s successful, that effort will launch later this year. Ultimately, it might take a greater attention to sustainability and efficiency across the entire research enterprise for the biggest benefits to accrue, both financially and environmentally — in which case, scientists and funding agencies must band together to make that goal a priority. Individual labs might not have to pay the energy bills out of their own research grants, but facilities fees are part of the funding infrastructure, through what’s often referred to as ‘indirect costs’. Bringing those costs down could make more funds available for salaries, travel, equipment and other expenses that more directly support scientists and their research projects. So far, there’s little incentive for individual scientists to do their part. However, with many funding agencies emphasizing the need to justify the broader impacts of proposed research, Ramirez-Aguilar argues that implementing energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable lab practices can be a smart way for researchers to make their grants stand out. It might seem a small detail, but having such procedures in place could make all the difference to the success of your application. “If it makes your proposal look better,” she says, “you’re more likely to get funding.”    Originally published on 7th February 2018

Microbiologist Rebecca Shapiro faced a daunting task after starting a tenure-track job at the University of Guelph in Canada: building a laboratory from scratch, on a tight budget. She inherited some equipment from retiring faculty members but much of it was broken — dangerously so in a few cases. In one instance, she almost burnt herself on a used heating block donated by a colleague, because the whole device became red-hot when she turned it on. “I was like, ‘OK, that’s going in the garbage,’” she recalls. In June 2018, 6 months into her new job, Shapiro applied to the Canadian and Ontario governments for a Can$200,000 (US$152,000) infrastructure grant. The funds would help her to buy most of her equipment, including a Can$40,000 plate reader, a Can$40,000 shaking incubator and a Can$20,000 ultra-low-temperature freezer. But she has also turned to online auction sites such as eBay, BidSpotter and BioSurplus to find deals on functioning heating blocks and other smaller items to get her lab operational. “My lab thinks I’m weird as I’m constantly on my phone going, ‘Oh no, we’ve been outbid,’” Shapiro says. But the exercise paid off. She estimates that, so far, she’s bought most of her gear — pipettes, vortexes, centrifuges, pH metres, hot plates and more — at a markdown of 60–90% from typical catalogue prices. Most new principal investigators (PIs) face budget constraints and need to be shrewd about securing lab equipment. They might have start-up packages that, in real terms, are very large sums, but just a few pieces of high-end kit can quickly eat up those funds. Meanwhile, science labs in countries with fewer resources might operate on a shoestring, and new PIs in the developing world often struggle to procure even the most basic supplies. Fortunately, money-saving deals and inexpensive workarounds abound. Scientists just need to know where to look for them. It takes extra work to find bargains: some PIs even resort to begging for and borrowing old equipment from other labs, or they work out ways to share things. Yet even the most cash-strapped new lab leaders can usually get their research spaces up and running quickly. They can scour discount online sites, check out businesses such as hardware stores or restaurants that might have similar or identical equipment to sell, and hold off on buying immediately from vendors, who might offer a lower price later on if the item has not already been sold. As an added bonus, says Shapiro, fitting out a lab on the cheap can provide a personal sense of accomplishment. “It can actually be really fun,” she says. “I recommend it.” Economical sharing One way to save on big-ticket items is to avoid purchasing things that are available already for communal use at core or shared-research laboratories — facilities in which scientists can either book time on state-of-the-art equipment or pay staff to perform technically demanding experiments on their behalf. At Imperial College London, for example, the department of materials offers a range of top-of-the-line technologies, including electron microscopes and focused-ion-beam instruments — both things that condensed-matter physicist Ben Britton knew he needed for his research into the nature of metals used in the aerospace and energy industries. When Britton was considering whether to take a faculty position in the department, he made sure the job would give him ample time to access these machines affordably. Before accepting the post, he negotiated unlimited free access to the equipment until he secured external funding. Britton estimates that the arrangement saved him an extra £20,000 (US$26,500) annually in his first few years as an independent leader, a sum he used instead for computing equipment. Microbiologist Rebecca Shapiro says fitting out your own lab on the cheap “can actually be really fun”.  Credit: Jehoshua Sharma Thinking beyond core research facilities, chemist Paul Bracher recommends setting up less-formal arrangements with nearby labs. This can save researchers from having to buy equipment that’s integral for their work, but that doesn’t get used every day. Bracher, who started a lab five years ago at Saint Louis University in Missouri, studies the origin of life. His research involves some chemical synthesis — but not a lot. So he managed to avoid buying a $5,000 rotary evaporator, a device that removes solvents from samples, by arranging to borrow one when necessary from a colleague. For Bracher, each dollar saved was another dollar available to buy something else for his lab. To work out what he needed, he created a spreadsheet and sought advice from other junior faculty members who had been in a similar position, and from equipment vendors who had worked with other new PIs. Among the spreadsheet entries were everyday lab items such as hammers and paraffin film — things that typically include huge markups when bought from lab supplies companies. Instead, Bracher popped down to his local hardware store and shopped online. A $70 hammer was available at one-tenth of the price. On Amazon, a $100 roll of paraffin film sells for around $25. But it’s not just household goods that are sold by alternative vendors. Sometimes it’s worth thinking across industries. Bracher’s research, for example, often involves setting up reactions in humidity-controlled chambers that are designed to mimic the conditions in primordial times. A good-sized chamber can run into the tens of thousands of dollars — much more than Bracher had budgeted for. Restaurants and catering businesses, however, use practically the same item — known as a ‘holding cabinet’ — for keeping cooked food hot and ready to eat. Those run for about $5,000 apiece. Bracher picked up three of them. And although the food-grade cabinets might not be quite as precisely fine-tuned as the lab-grade ones, they’re more than adequate for his research purposes. Bracher also used crafty negotiating tactics for items he could get only from specialized lab suppliers. For instance, he knew he wanted an expensive type of mass spectrometer for analysing trace metals, but he didn’t need it right away. So he put in a few low offers and waited for vendors to meet his price. Months later, a a sales representative called. He was trying to meet a manager’s quota, he explained, because it was the end of a fiscal quarter, and he could now offer the instrument for almost as low a price as Bracher had initially offered. “It often helps to wait,” he says. But haggling to the point of annoyance can backfire, warns Kevin Ryan, who until he retired in April co-owned and operated W. Nuhsbaum, a microscope dealership headquartered in McHenry, Illinois. Purchasing an expensive microscope or some other costly piece of lab gear might seem a bit like buying a car, he says. But whereas any mechanic can change a car’s oil and rotate its tyres, the sales representative who sells a large lab instrument to a PI will be the researcher’s point of contact for servicing and upgrades for years to come. “It’s a fine line with discounting,” Ryan says. “You don’t want to be too hard on the salesperson because you want to build a long-lasting relationship.” Besides, there’s often no need for aggressive negotiation tactics; most suppliers will accommodate reasonable requests to secure the business of a newly hired faculty member, notes Lisa Witte, president of Fisher Scientific, a lab-supply company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That’s because early-career investigators have decades of purchasing ahead of them, and vendors want to build brand loyalty early on. As Witte points out: “We want to earn that repeat business.” That’s why Fisher Scientific created its New Lab Start-Up Program, and why other suppliers — including MilliporeSigma in Burlington, Massachusetts, and VWR in Radnor, Pennsylvania — offer something similar. Fisher Scientific’s scheme works like a coupon book for lab supplies, with 100 money-saving offers across a broad range of products for new PIs. “We really try to help the PI stretch those precious research dollars as far as they can,” Witte says. The more a PI spends, the more they can save, she adds, “because if it’s one big bulk order, we’re generally able to give additional discounts”. Chemist Rupika Delgoda’s lab group unpacks lab equipment donated by Seeding Labs at the Natural Products Institute at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica.Credit: Rupika Delgoda via Seeding Labs Money problems Even with heavy discounting, however, some researchers still can’t afford even the most basic labware. Plant biologist Muvari Tjiurutue completed a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before taking a job in 2016 at the University of Namibia in Windhoek. There, she had no shakers or stirrers, let alone any of the more sophisticated analytical instruments that she had come to rely on in graduate school. “I haven’t actually been able to do my research because of lack of equipment,” Tjiurutue says. “It is very frustrating.” Seeding Labs, a non-profit organization in Boston, Massachusetts, came to her rescue. It collects millions of dollars worth of surplus equipment from Western universities, companies and government agencies. It then offers this inventory to institutions in low- and middle-income countries that show potential to advance cutting-edge research — if only they had the gear. Tjiurutue applied to Seeding last July, asking for equipment that she estimates was worth more than 5 million Namibian dollars (US$365,000). A shipment full of chromatographers and basic lab staples is now due to arrive before the year’s end. Tjiurutue’s department only had to pay N$33,500 to defray some of the costs of obtaining, handling and shipping the equipment. Rupika Delgoda, a chemist at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, received her own delivery of lab goods from Seeding Labs in October 2017, but not before struggling for years to launch the university’s Natural Products Institute. “We had to build counter-tops and start from scratch,” says Delgoda, who heads the institute. Her strategy was to ask former colleagues for unused equipment. Her ex-lab mates from the universities of Oxford and Leicester, UK, where Delgoda had trained, came through with boxes of free gear. “They were happy to know they found a good home,” Delgoda says. Others also find ways to get by without buying anything. Evolutionary geneticist Santiago Castillo Ramírez returned from a postdoc in the United Kingdom to start a lab at the Center for Genomic Sciences in Cuernavaca, part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Because he had a minimal start-up package that barely covered the cost of a couple of computers, he decided to form collaborations. Initially, he partnered with teams in Germany and the United States, working with genomic data sets they’d previously amassed on sexually transmitted infections and tick-borne pathogens. Then he joined forces with Miguel Cevallos, an experimental microbiologist also working at the Center for Genomic Sciences. Together, they established a research programme studying the rise of new kinds of drug-resistant bacteria in Mexican hospitals. Cevallos does the lab work and Castillo Ramírez sticks to the genomic analysis. “It was a win–win situation for both of us,” Castillo Ramírez says. Make do Scientists with access to a 3D printer and a bit of engineering know-how now also have the opportunity to make their own lab equipment — with detailed assembly instructions and open-source software available through online repositories. “It’s a very efficient way of getting things done quickly to a fairly high standard,” says Tom Baden, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Baden’s lab uses an Ultimaker 2, a compact desktop machine that costs around £1,800 new, but alternatives exist for a few hundred pounds. And although it takes a little longer to build this kind of gear in-house, he notes, the material and electronics that go into 3D-printed labware typically cost a fraction of what commercial platforms would charge. Last year, for example, Baden detailed the design blueprint for making a pressure ejection system for precisely delivering minute volumes of liquid using off-the-shelf components and 3D-printed parts (C. J. Forman et al. Sci. Rep. 7, 2188; 2017). It cost him around £400 in materials, he says; commercial models are at least five times as much. His group has also developed and produced other custom-built gear. “Anything mechanical that doesn’t need to be micrometre-precise tends to be 3D-printed in our lab,” Baden says. Through a non-profit organization that he co-founded, called TReND in Africa, Baden now runs workshops in Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa and elsewhere to train scientists in this kind of do-it-yourself approach to low-cost labware. Oluwaseun Faborode, a neurophysiologist at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, attended one of those courses and quickly put his newfound skills to use, programming a microcontroller to aid him in studying rodent models of depression. “It’s just a basic timing indicator,” he says — but it helps to reduce the chance of human error and investigator interference in the experiments. By building his own equipment, Faborode says, “I’m upping my game.” But relying on homemade gear or second-hand lab supplies has its downsides. There’s a chance of something being faulty, and there’s no money-back guarantee from the manufacturer. On the other hand, “you don’t have an unlimited pot of money”, notes Bracher, so one must be strategic about where to cut corners and when to pay full price. Shapiro draws the line at her plate readers, instruments she uses to measure simultaneously the growth of dozens or hundreds of yeast strains to probe drug resistance. “You’re running some risk of the equipment not working very well, and it’s not under warranty,” she says. “I’m not willing to run that risk on some $40,000 sensitive piece of analytical equipment, but I am willing to run that risk on a basic centrifuge or vortex.” One scale that she bought on Bidspotter came without its charging cord. And the electronic multichannel pipette from eBay needed to be recalibrated. But Shapiro got both items working eventually. And the added hassle? “It’s easily worth it,” she says.   Originally published on 9th July 2018

Researchers hoping to start their own labs face long odds. A dramatic rise in the number of PhDs awarded each year has significantly reduced the chances of landing a permanent academic contract (see ‘Long odds’). Data are sparse, but in the United States, for example, the number of available faculty biomedical positions has fallen since 1980, whereas the number of people who have graduated with a PhD has increased by 60% (N. Ghaffarzadegan et al. Syst. Res. Behav. Sci. 23, 402–405; 2015). The resulting competition for jobs breeds intense pressure that can take its toll on mental health. A paper published in Nature Biotechnology earlier this year reported that graduate students are six times more likely than the general population to experience depression or anxiety (T. M. Evans et al. Nature Biotechnol. 36, 282–284; 2018). And Nature’s 2017 graduate survey found that 12% (of 5,700 respondents) had sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their PhD studies (see Nature 550, 549–552; 2017). Source: go.nature.com/roysoc The usual advice for people seeking permanent academic positions is to get a good mentor, build up a solid network, publish plenty of papers and hope for a healthy dose of good luck. That advice, once intended to help potential new faculty members gain an advantage, are now minimum standards. A tighter job market demands some updated approaches. Nature asked six young faculty members for their advice on how to prepare for a permanent position in academia, and how to make the most of one when it comes along. Credit: St Francis College VICTORIA RUIZ: Design and follow a strategy Biologist at St Francis College, New York City. Consider the type of academic you want to become: would you prefer to work in a research-focused institution, where most of your income is funded through external grants, or a teaching-focused institution, in which your salary is paid only if you teach alongside your research? Pick a postdoc position that aligns with that professional goal. If you are interested in teaching, you will need to demonstrate knowledge in pedagogy. Acquire a teaching certificate, a teaching assistantship or a part-time adjunct position on a fixed-term contract. If you already know you are interested in both teaching and performing research, you can apply for career-development awards that provide mentored postdoctoral research experience alongside teacher training. Before beginning your job search, prepare statements about your research and your teaching. The research one should include details of your accomplishments and current work, as well as what you would like to achieve in the future. Distinguish your work from your mentor’s because it will be difficult to obtain grants if your proposals are too similar to theirs. The teaching statement should discuss your academic mission and educational values, as well as provide an overall narrative of your tutoring style and process. The search for an academic position is overwhelming, and can be discouraging. For me, however, that career path is one of the most satisfying. Following a strategic plan can help to make it happen. Credit: Toby Gibson KIRAN RAOSAHEB PATIL: Work out your numbers Systems biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. When struggling to find funding for my new lab in 2007, I decided to make life simpler for evaluators trying to compare my application with scores of others. I summarized my research in simple numbers: putting it in terms of publications, citations and the number of times someone requested software I had made. Don’t forget to include the less-obvious achievements. For example, when I was applying for my first faculty position, I had just finished my PhD and I didn’t have too many publications. It was unlikely that I would stand out from my publication metrics alone, so I highlighted the number of different research areas in which my PhD work was being used. Numbers can also act as motivators. Contrast “we aim to quantify a large number of metabolites” with “we aim to quantify 1,000 metabolites”. The 1,000 not only gives a better idea of the project to the evaluator but also provides motivation — a sense of challenge and adventure — during the actual execution. And this motivation momentum is a fabulous thing to pass on to your team. Not everything can be counted, of course, and there is more to research than numbers. But any fractional advantage can make a difference in the current competitive landscape. May the numbers be with you. Credit: Laura Taverna, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia AGNIESZKA WYKOWSKA: Ride the wave of uncertainty Principal investigator and leader of the Social Cognition in Human–Robot Interaction laboratory, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova. Academic life is a bit like surfing. A surfer’s lifestyle provides excitement in pursuit of a never-ending summer and the perfect wave. A scientist’s career can also be fuelled by fun, as we explore curiosity-driven questions and travel from conference to conference. The parallels continue when one looks beyond the positive. Both surfing and academia require extremely hard work, a lifetime of training and commitment, and a huge dose of passion. Succeeding in both requires talent and dedication. But there is one more crucial skill that characterizes both academics and surfers: the ability to ride an uncertain wave. For scientists, the uncertainty lies in day-to-day practice as much as long-term planning. In the day-to-day, scientists must learn to cope with the unpredictability of experimental results — whether they come out as expected or not. This might affect scientific output, such as publications. This, in turn, affects evaluations and grant proposals that determine the next job contract. Those short-term events can make the future uncertain. A young academic needs to accept leaving comfort zones over and over again. They are like nomads — moving from country to country to continue with their science, uncertain of the form and frequency of communication with friends and family. It can certainly be fun to move between countries and experience new job environments. It is a great experience to meet new people, work in different labs, learn about new cultures. But as time goes by, we also long for some stability and being able to plan more than two years ahead. Rather than fighting the academic uncertainty, young scientists should try to embrace it. Stability is on the horizon as one becomes more senior. But to reach that goal, as a young academic, it is better to be ready to surf the scientific waves. Courtesy of Muireann Irish MUIREANN IRISH: Make peace with rejection Cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia. Because preparing a publication represents years of hard work, rejection often feels like a personal attack. In my field, journal acceptance rates hover around 20%, and success rates for the two major national government funding bodies are no better. Statistically speaking, rejection is the norm. I’ve developed methods to process rejection and learn from it. First, I give myself time. Some scientists — myself included — will need to read the letter, get angry and then complain privately and bitterly about the reviewers until they feel better. After that, I do nothing for at least a week — I simply try to let the dust settle and wait to review the comments when things are calmer. Rejection is not personal. Perhaps we misjudged the suitability of a paper for a particular journal, over-interpreted the novelty of our findings, or attempted to publish prematurely. There are similar reasons for rejections of funding applications. Once the emotional reaction has subsided, discuss the review with your peers. In my lab group, we share our peer-review experiences, which helps to normalize the rejection. By openly sharing that my papers have been, and will continue to be, rejected, I hope to send a clear message to my students that rejection is part and parcel of academia and the world does not end when a paper is rejected. Finally, never allow your self-worth to be determined by metrics. Academics by nature ascribe to high standards, and to be informed that your work is not good enough can feel like a personal failure. So many factors influence decisions on papers and funding applications, including timing, journal space, funding priorities and, sometimes, just pure luck. Rejection is the norm, but it is not the end. Credit: Vanderbilt University KEIVAN STASSUN: Build more than good science Physicist at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Like all people, I think that scientists are at their best — both in and out of the lab — when they feel that they are living lives of passion, purpose and meaning. Of course, for many of us, the science itself is a passion. But there is also something to be said for having a mission to accomplish something bigger than publication, tenure or even research. In my own life and career, I have made diversity and inclusion my extra calling. As a first-generation Mexican American from a very-low-income background, working to open doors for others who are underrepresented in science is deeply fulfilling. Even so, there are times when doing so goes against the advice of colleagues, who worry that I am doing that work in place of my science. But I am convinced that having both focuses has made me a better, more fulfilled person as well as a better, more productive scientist. While I built my lab I also created links between Vanderbilt and nearby Fisk University, a historically black university, through which more students from under-represented groups could gain access to PhD courses. In a sense, I then had two opportunities — in my research and outside of it — to experience progress, and this doubled the reasons for being excited to go to work every day. Passion and persistence together can lead to the greatest reward of all. Soon after I was awarded tenure, a mentor told me that while I had up to then been focused on building my reputation, now it was time to begin constructing my legacy. That advice has stayed with me. I can see even more clearly now how my two missions working together can make purpose and meaning — and ultimately legacy — possible. Credit: Wellcome Sanger Institute, Genome Research Ltd GOSIA TRYNKA: Allow yourself time Leader of immune-genomics group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK. Last August, as I planned a seminar for PhD students, I panicked when I realized how little I needed to update my slides. My research had not progressed since the previous year’s session. The next day, I shared my dismay with my PhD supervisor. “That’s OK,” she said, “give yourself five years to evaluate your performance.” She was right. It takes time to start a group, recruit scientists, set up experiments, analyse data and publish. There are many factors that need to come together before a group is productive. For me, finding the right people was essential. Because I wanted to venture into large-scale genomics work on immune cells, I needed to build an interdisciplinary group that would combine expertise in immunology, epigenetics and population genetics. It takes time to find good people. Once you’ve recruited, it takes more time to learn how to manage people and navigate a new host institution. Attend leadership courses and seek advice from your senior colleagues if necessary. Finally, learn to manage expectations. Split tasks into smaller chunks, by setting intermediate goals and working towards achieving them. They will all add up to an overarching goal. My group is now four years old. The pressure is still present, but I am more in control of it. I now have confidence that my group can design interesting projects, execute experiments, generate high-quality data and analyse them. Evaluating myself a year from now still worries me, but when the time comes I’ll be better prepared.   Originally published in Nature 562, S49-S51 (2018)