Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. Today we'll talk about preparation of a research grant. The research that you have done today has been organized by your PhD supervisor or your principal investigator, your team leader. So they actually applied for the research. They got the grant and you're employed to work on that. However, if you're working and advancing well in your PhD, sooner than later, you will have to write your own research proposal. Especially if you want to apply for a research grant or a fellowship, or if you want to apply for another job, you will have to demonstrate that you can write your own research. Before you put pen to paper or even consider applying for a research grant, there are a number of questions that you need to ask yourself. If you are satisfied with your answers, then you need to think about considering applying for a grant. It is important to understand that committing to writing a grant is a big thing. Grants are extremely competitive. They need a lot of preparation, a lot of work, talking to others, developing the idea, expanding on that, writing the methodology, polishing again and again. You have to be committed that you want to actually go through that route. Also, one of the questions that you need to make yourself is, is it worth it? Do I really need to get that grant in order to do the research? You should certainly think about the planned research funding application in the whole context of your professional career, as you don't always need to get money to do your research. So there are a few further questions that you need to ask yourself before even considering writing a research grant. What is the relationship between your aspirations to do research and the availability of funding? Why are you applying for funding? Why do you need funding? What is the minimum funding you need to ensure the success of the research project you're asking to be funded? When you are satisfied with your answers to these questions and you understand that applying for a research grant is a major task, it will take a lot of time, only then you should start to prepare your application. It is essential that you are really, really believing in the proposed idea and the potential of doing research in this area. So in that case, you can also convince your peers. If you don't believe in it, don't even consider applying for a grant. That's the main difference between papers and grants. Until now, I've spoken a lot about writing papers. There, you don't really need to convince anyone about your research. You're doing the research and you're presenting it in a good way. Here, there is no research. You need to convince the reviewers of your grant that this is a legitimate, this is a very good idea. There is a methodology. It's a challenging problem, but it can be solved. On top of that, you need to show to the reviewers that you need a significant amount of money in order to do that research. You need resources and those resources, they better go to you rather than to someone else in another institution. So it's kind of a competition that you have to indirectly present and that you are the best person in order to find the solution for that very, very significant problem. In other words, you need to put down a very convincing business case. Other questions that you should answer is, why now? Why yourself and your institution? What kind of resources do you have? Not only the skills and expertise, but also the resources. What is going to happen if that significant problem is not solved? What are going to be likely the follow-up problems if this is solved and where the industry will head after that being solved? So now you need money and you need to find where you can get this money from. That's a very tricky task. Most countries, they have national agencies and funding bodies that they support the research within the country. There is a German research agency, DFT, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the National Science Council of Taiwan, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the British Research Councils and the US NSF, as well as the National Institute of Health. Usually their websites and portals are very comprehensive, so you can find all sorts of calls, specific project calls, as well as other ways to submit your proposed idea. Maybe it's not a call, it's just that you can make submissions any time throughout the year. Here in the UK, we call them standard mode. There are also funding agencies that they support multi-country research programs. Perhaps the largest of these is the European Commission, the European Union's program and the European Commission, where all countries in Europe, as well as some other countries outside Europe, are welcome to put up collaborative applications. But the question you need to ask yourself again is that do you really need that much money to do your research? In the early stages of the career, perhaps you need a smaller budget, maybe something which is internal within your institutions and that will enable the collaboration internally as well as externally. Generally, they will support some sort of like workshops and seminars, maybe a few presentations or you're traveling around, going meeting people and nurturing relationships as well as develop those ideas. So smaller funding can do the job and you can do brilliant with that. As you get along, you will need to get into the more prestigious funding, which again, not always is very big, but it is significant in order to be able to initiate your work. So you have a postdoc or you have a PhD student and you can spend a year or more and you can work with them into really shaping the ideas and developing your research program. Starting from a small scale, doing good research, excellent quality of research and seeing that as a stepping stone to something much bigger. The good thing about small grants is that you're not overburdened into the bureaucracy of the grant. So you don't really have to submit a hundred reports back. You don't have to spend so much time in managing the grant, the financial side of the things as well as the managerial side of the things. You can focus more on the research you have one or two people working with and you can do research yourself as well. So a lot of times we as academics, we go through that question ourselves. We need to make sure that we're asking the money, not for the sake of getting a grant, but actually doing something with that grant. So a lot of times we're just focusing on building large consortia or trying to get the funding just for the sake of it. What is important is to look at what you really need in order to do that research. At the end of the day, that is something that will be questioned by the reviewers anyway. So if they feel that your research doesn't need that much money to be conducted, then they will not really fund the program. So in that case, you either go for something smaller or perhaps you can actually expand on the research idea and bring more collaborators. Now, independent if it's a small application or a much bigger application, there is a procedure that you need to do in order to ensure that your application is of good quality and it's done some success. In other words, it's as competitive as possible. So having decided that you are going to go for an application, what I advise you is first to just write a hundred words of a summary for the idea. Just write that summary. You will find it quite difficult at the beginning, but only a hundred words. So only the interesting stuff. Write it, polish it again and again and again, and then give it to a few of your colleagues, a few of your friends, just to read it and ask for feedback. If you're a PhD student, of course, you can send it out to your supervisor or your mentor and again seek for feedback. The most important questions here is what is the aim of the project for that given time and what will be the deliverables at the end of the project. Of course, these need to be highlighted clearly in those 100 words summary. You should be as realistic as possible here. You don't really want to overstate your research. You don't want to undermine it. You definitely want to write the good things and that it will have a clear impact to the industry or to the academia, to the research world. But you don't really want to overpromise things. Things that most probably your reviewer will soon realize that they are not possible to be done, so you will be rejected. So make sure that the tone you're using, the way that you elaborate and you're explaining things is the appropriate, is really clear and you are not really overpromising, but it is an ambitious project. Also, another very important thing that you have to think about at that very early on stage is whether you will be doing the research alone or you will be having a co-investigator within your department or in another university. You have to subcontract some work. So think about who is actually going to do the research. Of course, it's very different if you're going to be the fellow of doing the research or you're going to get the money to employ someone else to do the research or is a collaborating project. Of course, this video is mostly focusing on you guys, the PhD students who are about to write the first grant. So you will be the fellow who's actually going to do the research. You will be the postdoc who is going to do the research after if this is successful. Another thing that you should look very carefully is whether those fellowship applications, they clearly say that they're evaluating the fellowship based on the CV, on the track record of the applicant. It's not happening in all cases, but in most cases when you're applying for a personal fellowship and it's not just a collaborative project that we can discuss in another video, then you will have to have a very strong track record. So at that point, if you believe that the idea that you're about to apply doesn't really correlate much with your existing research and your existing research is not there yet, then you better avoid it. You better first build your research, write a few good papers, publish them, and then thinking about applying for that fellowship. Or you will have to tune your research, make it more appropriate and applicable for your expertise. So it is important to make sure that what you will be doing, it is extending your research. Maybe it's a step change into your research, but at the same time, it's kind of complimentary. There is a continuity there. It's not that you're leaving back whatever you've done so far and you're starting something new. It doesn't work like that. It has to be some sort of incremental, sequential sort of move from where you are at the moment and where you want to go. That's fine if it's an ambitious project. That's absolutely fine. But you need to actually show that the skills that you have developed already can be used for that project later on. So that will reduce the risk of you failing completing the tasks of the project. I'm sure that your supervisor and mentors can actually help you a lot with that because they can see whether your expertise, your knowledge is really related to the idea that you're applying. What we're trying to do is to shape the idea based on the fellow's expertise. So if you decide to go for that application, I would advise you to work very closely with your supervisor or the potential supervisor who is going to be the host of your fellowship at that institution. So work together as much as possible and get lifted by their experience, their expertise and their good track in grant applications. If there is a possibility that you can publish before the application with those potential supervisors, in most cases it works well. Let me clarify that. There are grants that you should not have any relationship with the supervisor before you apply for that fellowship at that institution. But these are very few. In most cases, what they want to see, the panel, the reviewers I mean, is that you are bringing a different expertise. The supervisors got a different expertise. But these two together, they are very complementary and it is what is needed in order to succeed with the project. So if you have shown that you have already collaborated with that supervisor and you've published together a few papers, then that really strengthens your position as an applicant. At the end of the day, if you have worked with that supervisor before, even for another application that the supervisor has made in another grant, maybe a collaborative grant, that is going to be extremely good for you because you're learning at the same time, not only the way to write grants, but also how the potential supervisor is working. You get that experience of collaborating and that will help you a lot for writing your own grant. So after you have considered all these and you've checked the list with all the available calls out there, as well as the next available submission deadlines for calls and other grant applications, now is the best time to think about which one that you will tackle. Some of them are pretty similar. So you may be thinking of putting an application in the most appropriate one. And then if it's not successful, you will take back the application, you will take the feedback if there is any, if you're lucky and there is any, and you will make another application, you will prepare, polish it, improve it and submit it somewhere else. So let's say now that you've picked your agent, the most important thing now is to see what is this agent, this funding body's directives, what is the aim, what are the themes that they're supporting and where they are strategically funding. So that will help you a lot to go back to your idea and shape it correctly, as well as use some keywords throughout your application. There is very little point of applying for a grant in a particular funding body that is not really supporting that type of research. So say you are doing research on mechanical engineering and additive manufacturing and you're applying in a funding body that supports more kind of interdisciplinary research where there is a combination of social sciences and applied sciences. So that is most probably a bad idea. So you should be very specific with what are the themes that this funder is strategically supporting. This information is usually laid out at the very beginning of their websites, but in some cases you will need to scrutinise a little bit more to find exactly what they're supporting, what they're heading to. SEI Valve funding created to support researchers in the pre-award stage. It can help you analyse the funding environment. You can access award data for funding performance measurement, evaluation and strategic planning. Learn what publications are linked to certain funding programmes. Gain insight into funding history to see what researchers and what research they have done in the past and they received funding and find collaborators and learn about potential competitors. But don't miss the opportunity to visit their website and seek about information for different kinds of grants. So there's plenty of applications that are submitted all the time and they must follow their criteria. So there are mechanisms within the funding bodies that they will quickly select those applications that meet the requirements and unfortunately the rest will be just overlooked. So when you start writing your application, make sure that you have the assessment criteria also inside at all times and you're looking at these assessment criteria while you're writing your application. That will help you a lot to stay focused and actually see what the evaluators will be judging your application against. Lastly, make sure that the proposal is formatted as best as possible, does not have spelling and grammatical mistakes. If you have any previous grants, even if you are not the PI, the Principal Investigator or the Co-I but you're working for that grant, you can show that the grant was moving smoothly and nicely. So if there is any success, you can demonstrate that success and that guarantees your success in this project as well. If you manage to strategically use those guidelines and answer the correct questions as I've laid out earlier, you will manage to have a very competitive application. Nobody can guarantee you that the application will go through and you will be successful, but with a great research question that can be answered and in specific can be answered by you, with a very well written report, all inclusive and with a project that fits very nicely the criteria of that funding body, you stand a lot of chances to have a very successful grant application. We will have another video later on where we will describe all the different steps that you need to undertake when you're writing a collaborative project with other partners within or outside your institution or even a multi-country grant where you need to bring a lot of partners from different countries, including both academia and research. These are far more complicated and they don't only have to do with the type of the research, but also how the consortium will move all together. If you find this information useful, please hit the like button and if you have any questions or comments, please write them down below. I will be very happy to respond to those. I know that grant writing is a big story, it's difficult, it's taking time and it's really hard to say at any time that you're mastering that because you never know what's going to happen with a research grant application. So please consider those guidelines and keep on watching these videos for more information. Until next time, bye bye.