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

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

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

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

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.    

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

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