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Podcast – Why grants get funded and why they don’t

Postdoc Scientist at the UK Dementia Research Institute at The University of Edinburgh, Dr Mike Daniels [1] presents what he learned from attending the Alzheimer’s Research UK grant review board. Sharing tips on why grants get funded and why they don’t.

Hosted by Dr Fiona McLean [2] and recorded live in front of an audience at the ARUK Scotland Network Meeting on the 3rd December 2021.

This podcast also sits on YouTube with English Language Subtitles.


Click here to read a full transcript of this podcast

Voice Over:

Welcome to the NIHR Dementia Researcher podcast brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s society, supporting early-career dementia researchers across the world.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the Dementia Researcher podcast. My name is Dr. Fiona McLean, and I recently got to sit down in front of a wonderful crowd at the Scottish Alzheimer’s Research UK ECR Network meeting to hear the brilliant Dr. Mike Daniels share his reflections on why some research grant applications are funded and why some are not. This is based on his behind-the-scenes preview of an AR UK Grant review board. Here are the highlights from that lively presentation and the following Q&A.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Hello. Welcome to the next session of our AR UK Scotland Network meeting. This is ECR special meeting, and this is being recorded for the Dementia Research podcast, so I’m going to use my best announcer voice. And now we’re going to hear from one of the friendliest, most helpful postdocs I’ve ever met. He’s been working on a neuro information and he’s been in Edinburgh for a few years now and works at the UK Dementia Research Institute there. And it’s my absolute pleasure to introduce Dr. Mike Daniels.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Thank you very much, Fiona. You read my introduction very, very well, that I wrote for you. So, thank you very much for staying all the way to the end of this day, everyone. And what I’m going to close us off with is a bit of a talk of about grants. It’s going to be anchored around the Alzheimer’s Research UK Grant Review Board and the ability that they allow early-career researchers to observe that, and my experience observing that earlier this year. But I’m going to talk also about grants in general and some of my experience with things like small grants that ECRs can apply for.

Dr Mike Daniels:

So, as I said, I’m going to start off and just introduce the ARK Grant Review Board, how it works, and the kind of process that they go through. Because I actually think that was arguably one of the most informative things about being able to observe it. I’m then going to talk specifically about the good grants and the bad grants that maybe went through that, at least the ones I saw, what was good about them, what was bad about them, and therefore, what we can do, when we write grants, to keep an eye and make sure they’re on the good side.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And then I guess I’ll try and summarize all of that and give a list of top tips of things to think about when writing these grants, both from the aspect of what I saw at the Grant Review Board and also just throwing in my two cents as if I haven’t done that enough already today. And then finally, wrap up with some of useful resources that I found really handy in this sort of thing for you to all keep an eye on. Okay. So, this is a list of many of the grants Alzheimer’s Research UK will fund. This is pulled straight from their website. And as you can see, there are a plethora of different grants that you can apply for through Alzheimer’s Research UK.

Dr Mike Daniels:

They will assess these grants through a grant review board. And I’ll talk a little bit in more detail about that process later, but they allow some ECRs to come and observe that grant review board. And the set of grants that I observed were the Pilot project grants. So these are small grants, well, small in ARK project grant terms, because they’re limited around 50,000 pounds and they’re usually only for a year or so. And the idea is to generate or build on very small amounts of pilot data that will then go forward into major project grants or fellowships.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Okay. So, in a nutshell, what is the AR UK Grant Review Board? And they technically don’t allow this, but I was fortunate enough to get a sneak picture of what happens live in the AR UK Grant Review Board. And essentially, what happens is, the big professors around AR UK or the big professors, the academic professors are invited by AR UK, and they come and they judge the good grants from the bad grants. So, this is professor Selina Wray. And what she’s doing right here is judging the good Hugh Grants, for example, Hugh Grant from Love Actually, versus the bad Hugh Grant, for example, Hugh Grant’s arguably Oscar-winning performance in Paddington 2. And they need to find a way to assess these good grants from the bad grants.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And this is the process of applying for the AR UK Grant Review Board. And this depends a little bit on the type of grant that you apply for, but essentially, there’s a process on submitting application, triage process, things will go out for review, and eventually, you meet this panel meeting where there’s an in-depth discussion of the application, reviewers comments, and a rebuttal by the grant review board. And fortunately, they allow some early-career researchers like us just here to come and observe this part of the session, and it’s extremely informative. So, who’s in the AR UK Grant Review Board meeting? 40 people in a Zoom meeting, which I thought was quite a lot, to try and get opinions from so many people, but actually, there’s only a smaller amount of people that are really, really actively participating in this.

Dr Mike Daniels:

You have one chair. So, in the case of the one that I was observing, that chair was Professor Katie Lunnon, and she manages the whole meeting. There were 20 experts in dementia research from universities across the UK and the grant review board panel members. And I’ll talk a little bit more later about their role specifically in reviewing these grants. And as I said before, there are four ECR observers who are frantically scribbling notes to try and work out what’s going on. And for anyone that’s already been there, and I think some people already have, Fiona has seen one, I think Soraya was in the same one as me, and maybe a few other of you here, it’s all pretty fast-paced to keep a track of.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And the other thing to mention is there’s actually an enormous number of AR UK staff also in that meeting, having jobs, again, things I’ll talk about later, making sure the right people are reviewing the right things, who’s in, who’s out, and essentially, taking notes of the whole thing. So here, is the process of the Grant Review Board. Before the call, and this is from that diagram that I showed you earlier, the Grant Review Board members, they’ve been preassigned as what’s called Designated Panel Members or DPMs. And for me, at least, I missed that acronym at first and had no idea what a DPM was until about halfway through when I finally worked out what that meant. And the job of these people is to read the grants that have come in, in detail, and also read any rebuttals that have come through from the peer review or from the lay review, which also occurs in these grants. And there’s two of those per grant.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And so, in this review session though, we went through, I think, 18 applications. So it’s not necessarily that you only have to do one. There was overlap of designated panel members. So, the meeting, it’s full of extremely busy academics. And so we have to be very, very quick. So, there were very short introductions where everyone just quickly turned on camera and microphone, said their name and who they were, and turned off. And then once we got through that, we were straight in, and they just go through this, application by application, and you get a really, really strict seven minutes per application, which as you can imagine, it is not particularly long considering there’s a chair and 20 scientific experts from around the UK, basically throwing in their opinions on how the grant was written, whether they think it will succeed, what are the bad points, what are the good points. And it’s funny to think that this is essentially having the kind of defining moment in whether your grant gets funded. That’s your seven-minute slot, which is also a little bit scary, to be honest.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And before they actually start talking about any grants, you immediately kick out any conflict of interest. So people who come from the same institution as the one the grant came from, people who have declared a conflict of interest through things like collaborating with them, or any other reason. So once you’ve kicked out the COIs, your seven-minute starts and it starts with the designating panel members for that grant introducing the grant and basically giving their overall thoughts and opinions on it. And so, this is a lot of work for the chair who basically is reading all of these grants in quite a lot of detail and also all the rebuttals, and all of the lay summaries and the rebuttals to the lay summaries. And the chair generally will add their thoughts from the grant and will open it up to the rest of the panel.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And that’s when all the rest of the academics will chime in about what they thought, or “I don’t think they were so good at this, or I do think they were so good at this.” And it is really, really incredibly impressive, how many people will have read in quite detail, as I said, like 20 grants. And that’s just for that session that I went to. They will have read many, many more to then chime in and say, “I actually don’t think they should be using that time point,” or something like that, which really shows how much they’ve read into it.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Once they’ve done that, the designated panel members give their indicative scores. So, the way that this is scored is from one to five. And one is good. And they also say whether that grant should be invited for resubmission or not. And once they’ve given those scores, the rest of the panel then give their scores, and that’s all anonymous. And I don’t know exactly what the final average scores of those grants were, which actually would’ve been quite interesting. And I also don’t know which ones did and didn’t get funded it, but that’s the process. And then lather, rinse, repeat grant after grant, after grant, after grant, after grant. So, it’s really a quite impressive effort.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Okay. So, I don’t know the final scores, but I did… And I’m assuming I was allowed to do this, I guess we’ll find out. I did take notes of the indicative scores and so I would plot them. And so, something that’s quite interesting is that the mean score of this is just under two. So, all the grants are getting pretty good scores. That’s partially, obviously, because they’ve been triaged to get to this point, but generally speaking, these are pretty top-level grants. And from hearing about them and being fortunate enough to read the abstracts of the grants, which is what the ECRs do get given access to do, you get to learn a lot. And they are very, very well-written, very, very good grants, so the competition for things like this is extremely high. There were a couple here that I didn’t go to. I got kicked out of because they were either Edinburgh grants or grants submitted by people that I was co-authors with, so I was out for conflict of interest.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And so now I’ve summarized the Grant Review Board and how it all works. And it’s probably a good time now to start looking actually at those grants, what was good about them, what was bad about them. So we’re going to move that to the side and pick about things that were the good Hugh Grants, so, for example, Hugh Grant from Notting Hill, and the bad Hugh Grants, so this was a grant… And I say good and bad; this is grants with an average score of one and grants of the average score of three. So, they’re still very, very close, but that is generally the edges of this. And also a note is that look how close and how tight these are. I think there was only one where they were more than half a point apart, the two designated panel members. So that’s also good to know, that generally, the good grants are agreed to be as good by everybody and the bad grants are agreed to be bad by everybody.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Okay. So, the good Hugh grants, why do they get funded? So, examples now of things that I picked out as common features in these grants that were scored especially, well, low, but really good, basically. Generally speaking, they also did the remit. And I’ll probably add that when I talk about the bad grants, generally, this is two ends of a scale. And sometimes it makes more sense to talk about them as things done badly than things done well, but for example, here, all the grants that scored really well, really, really clearly suited the remit of AR UK pilot projects. So, they were genuine pilot work, reviewers would make comments, panel members would make comments like, “This is clearly a step away from the work that the lab is mainly doing,” and things like that.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And on the converse, there were grants that maybe didn’t get such good scores and I get such a good feeling from… that were saying things like, “I’m pretty sure this lab is doing this anyway.” So, that’s the first absolute key for that sort of thing and that’s an example of just suiting the remit because it tells you what pilot projects are for, and just doing work that you’re doing anyway isn’t allowed in there. The really good grants justified the tools that they were using or the experiments that they did really, really nicely. And this is one of those things that’s like you just have to be really good, I guess, at getting all that information in quite a small space, because, I’m sure we all wrote a grant and we had unlimited space.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Every time we said we were going to do anything, we would write massive paragraph saying why we’re going to use that specific mouse and why all these other mice are available but we’re not using those. And sometimes the issue is space, but it’s definitely a recurring theme. And so something I think that should be prioritized in writing these sorts of grants. It’s an easy way to fall down. It is just failing to justify why you use, especially something like a mouse line when there are many options.

Dr Mike Daniels:

The other thing that the good grants had and the things that reviewers were particularly happy to talk about was things like time evaluation. And again, that’s something that gets picked up a lot. So, for example, you would have the chair, Katie, who will be listening in on these and has read these in much detail, say, “Do you think that that’s feasible to do that in that amount of time?” And then one of the DPMs will say, “Yeah, I definitely think that because they’ve stated how they’re going to do it in that period of time, and that comes across really, really well.” And something that I’ll talk about again later in terms of top tips and things, if you have space for something in these sorts of grants, whacking a Gantt chart in is great.

Dr Mike Daniels:

The other thing that good grants had in the grants, that seemed to be overall really well taken on, was really, really clear, straightforward aims. So, as I said, there were 18 applications through, I got to watch 16, and I think in my notes, about four or five of the ones that were scored really highly, I have written down that the DPMs had set yet really clear aims; that was what I really liked about that grant. A strong recurring theme in well-scoring grants is having clear aims. And again, I’ll talk later, but a strong recurring theme in the lower, worse scoring grants, is people saying that it wasn’t really clear what they were going to do or why, which obviously is not good.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Another thing, and actually, something that I hadn’t really particularly thought about until I was there, is the authors of grants that had done really, really detailed and well-written response to queries, especially queries from lay reviewers. So, there was an example of one grant where they were planning on using… I think they were using some kind of device with people living with dementia. And there were some queries from the lay of viewers, which Alzheimer’s Research UK is brilliant at because they make sure that they do that. And one thing that came across really, really well from the whole panel was the response to the lay reviewer queries. So, don’t just whack down or response, “Their only lay reviewers.” Alzheimer’s Research UK take that really, really seriously, and rightly so.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And then one of the final things that was common with all the really, really good grants was not just good collaborators but relevant collaborators. And again, if I look through my list of my notes on those 16 grants that I was able to observe and look at the top four or five, one thing that came up over and over again, was people basically having their bacon saved by having really, really good collaborators. So, for example, somebody would come in and say, “I’m not really sure about using that IPS line for this model.” And then somebody else would come in and say, “Yeah, but if you look, they’ve got this person collaborating with them and that person really knows their stuff on IPSs. So you can guarantee that they’re going to use it exactly the right model in exactly the right way.” And that happened a couple of times. Genuinely, people being like, “Not so sure about this.” Another person from the panel being like, “No, look, I know that collaborator and they are awesome, so they will definitely make sure that the work is done really well.”

Dr Mike Daniels:

So really, I would recommend, in these sorts things, having collaborators, just having collaborators generally makes these grants really, really more likely to be successful. And make sure they’re very good collaborators. And finally, a bit of a note on good grants and particularly well-scoring grants, and something that, again, I think is quite comforting is that there was one occasion, especially where they were looking and talking about the CV of the main applicant on a grant, and one of the grant review panel members said, “They’ve been in science a long time. Something like 20 years post-PhD. Not sure they’ve got that many papers. I don’t know how strong an applicant this is.” And other members of the panel said, “No, actually, they clearly do loads of teaching. They’ve clearly got a really high teaching load if you look into a more detail. And that’s why they’re maybe not publishing so well. They’re just doing lots of teaching and they’re really promoting science and doing good things in science community.” And the panel were like, “Yeah. They’re absolutely right.” And that got really good indicative scores.

Dr Mike Daniels:

So, don’t worry about things like that. That is taken into account. The grant review board members are really, really good and they read into real detail. Okay. The bad Hugh grants, for example, why don’t grants get funded? As I said, this is going to be a bit of a crossover from the good side, but there’s some stuff that’s a bit different in here. Another common theme that came up in this is either not including talking about how you are going to do or not accounting for expertise or time in bioinformatics. A couple of times, people said they were going to do single-cell RNA-seq, and just said they were going to do it. And basically, there was no details on who was going to do the bioinformatics or how they were going to go about doing it, what kind of pipeline they were going to use. And a couple of those grants had quite poor indicative scores, I think as a result of that. So, can’t be lazy on things like that.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Again, it seems like one of those things that you’ve probably got a really small space limit, and so having to include those sorts of things could be quite hard, but it will definitely be picked up in grant review boards. Another thing that comes up in this and I guess was a bit of a surprise for me, is that people would sometimes almost have too much data. And basically, what the overall opinion from the panel was, is that this isn’t a pilot grant. And this comes back to suiting the remit on this. They said, “This actually is a major grant, but there’s too much in this.” And I think maybe they suspected that the applicants had tried to say, “Look, we’ve not got that much chance of a major grant, but we’ve got so much, we’ll definitely get a pilot grant.” And they’re wise to that because the whole remit of this pilot grants is, as pilot grants, it’s not the strip-down major grants where you’ve basically already generated all the data already and you just want 50K. So that again, coming back to suiting the remit.

Dr Mike Daniels:

I mean, I don’t know how many times people are going to come up in front and do these sorts of things and talk about power calculations, but for the love of God, include power calculations. It is genuinely amazing. I think that at this stage, there were still multiple grants that were either not including power calculations or were basically just fudging power calculations and saying, “We’re going to do an [inaudible 00:23:00] because that’s enough.” It will, every single time, get picked up. There’s absolutely no way you’ll get away with not including power calculations. And to be honest, I almost felt a little bit sorry for some because personally, I think that there are some cases where, in very, very super-pilot, early-stage stuff, I can see why you might not do a power calculation because you’re just trying to have a look and see whether there’s a phenomenon or not.

Dr Mike Daniels:

My personal recommendation would be, do one any way because it’s just like reviewers control-F; power calculation. And then if it isn’t there or if it’s rubbish, you get a lower score. So, just include power calculations in everything, make space for it because it will be looked at. Every single grant, there was either a comment about good power calculations or not-so-good power calculations. And it’s just something that clearly the reviewers and the panel members are just going to look for in every single grant. Additionally, to not quite the same extent as power calculations, statistics, how you’re going to do them and whether you’ve collected the suitable ethics for stuff that you’re doing. Really, really basic stuff. And as I said, in a way, I can imagine how it might slip the net when you’re trying to get all of this amazing idea of your great grant, the science you’re going to do, and you maybe don’t quite have the space to properly talk about the ethics that you probably have ethical approval for, but you don’t include it, but it will absolutely get picked up.

Dr Mike Daniels:

As I said previously, in the same way that good grants had really good, clear aims, good structure, one of the things I wrote from those grant, one of those grants that got quite poor score, I wrote notes and saying that generally, the panel members thought it was quite poorly structured. And again, similar to the good grants, they had a lack of justification of their models and their methods. It’s another thing that people are just going to look for. Say, you use a mouse, you have to say something about why that mouse or that model. Again, things like ethics, not taking into account patient welfare. One of those grants that scored particularly badly on the indicative scores, the reviewer panel members were worried because they hadn’t included details on how they were going to basically look after the patients that were in that study.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And another thing that got marked down was that they were worried that the authors didn’t have the right access to the tissues that said they were going to use. And then finally, inaccurate costing came up as well. Similar to the costing or the accounting for bioinformatics, it’s something else that will be looked at. Okay. Just going to sum up with overall impressions of what I learned and throwing in some of my two cents about all this sort of thing, with my own experience from writing quite a lot now of small grants. If anyone knows me, I have a lot of ideas, which means I write a lot of grants and also a lot that don’t get funded. And whether I actually do the experiments or not, to any great quality, is probably an issue that I have to work on. I wish I hadn’t recorded that, but I do now actually have quite a reasonable amount of experience with these sorts of small grants. And I think I’ve learned quite a lot.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Okay. Number one, check that you’re eligible. Absolutely, a hundred percent, check that you’re eligible. Very, very little effort goes into checking that you’re eligible. And something I’ll comment to later; email them. So easy. Write an email. It feels like there’s this wall between you and the funding body, and that absolutely isn’t. It is way easier than you might suspect to just drop them an email and be like, “Hi.” Even “Here’s my CV.” Or at the very least, “I’m a postdoc in this lab. I finished my PhD in this year. I’m interested in this grant that you are doing. Am I eligible?” They’ll just write yes or no. Get that done, otherwise, complete waste of time.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Strategy. Does not matter how good your research idea is, there are some things that you just have to nail when it comes to thinking about the strategy about at writing grants. And what you need to do is find the funding call or what the funding body are looking to give money to the sorts of people they’re looking to give money to, and then basically, just pluck from that and say how you’re going to do it. So, for example, there will be people… AR UK, I think, say that they look for people that are going to contribute to the dementia community. Copy and paste, “This will contribute to the dementia community.” Make it really, really easy to be like, “Yeah, you nailed that.”

Dr Mike Daniels:

Collaborations. Load and loads of grants, and this is becoming particularly common, really, really look for collaborations. Somebody in our lab quite recently submitted a grant that got really, really good scores, but didn’t get funded because they said, “We were really looking for a collaboration.” And all they needed to do, that person in our lab, was just email somebody, another university, and be like, “Can you even send me a bit of tissue that I’ll stain.” Very, very small things that will improve the grant massively. Would highly recommend, try and get some sorts of collaboration in there.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Match funding. I’ve done really, really well out of match funding things. And you can do it in ways that you might not suspect. So, for example, “We got some match funding on something because an MSE student I was going to co-supervise on a project. And MSE students come with some money.” That counts as match funding. Funding bodies absolutely love match funding because basically, they get more bang for their buck. They put two grants into something and they get three grants worth of research out of it. And they basically still get the same amount of credit they would’ve had before. If you can find any way to suggest that you’re match funding this, I would highly recommend adding that in. And something, again, I’ve added earlier, just map onto the criteria of the grant, look at the grant, copy and paste the keywords, and then make it really, really obvious how you’ve hit each thing on the nail.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Yeah. Already mentioned, just put power calculations in. Find a way to put them in. It doesn’t take that long. They will control-F for power calculations in almost any grant. Now you can only lose. Have some contingencies. Does anyone know who this is? Plan B?

Member of the Audience:

No. Not at all.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Come on.

Dr Mike Daniels:

This is English rapper Plan B. Okay. Maybe a slightly better version of that. More contemporary newspaper headline about the COVID plan B, which we may or may not be in. Another thing that, generally, grants just control-F, I think, for, like putting a sentence about “If this doesn’t work, I’m going to do this.” Some kind of contingency, something to show that you’ve thought about it really, really easy. Timelines. I mentioned Gantt chart earlier. I didn’t actually know if everybody and knew what I was talking about with the Gantt chart. Here is a Gantt chart. So, months along the top, each of your aims or sub aims. This is one of my Gantt chart from a grant. Got funded, so that’s good. And it’s so simple, laughably simple to put these sorts of things together. Definitely worth doing.

Dr Mike Daniels:

I emailed again, example. And I think I’ll talk about it a little bit later. I emailed the funding body for this grant and I said… Basically, this grant was for 12 months, but they were willing to extend if you were doing chronic models. Where dementia research, there were a lot of chronic models. I basically emailed to clarify that. Again, eligibility. I’m not going to spend a lot of time writing grant and then find that I’m going over the time limit, and it goes straight in the bin. I emailed to clarify, and they said, “Yeah, we love Gantt charts. Put a Gantt chart in.” Really, really easy. Makes it really, really clear that you thought about how this fits into your schedule.

Dr Mike Daniels:

But finally, and kind of unfortunately, there’s obviously a lot of chance in this. And I would say one of the things to go back to the AR UK grant review board is that they are fantastic and they spent a massive amount of time reading these grants in great detail, but there was an element to which I felt that some of them were more harsh than others, and I didn’t necessarily think that was because of the grant, which is inevitable, it’s definitely going to happen. I can imagine a time when somebody had resubmit exactly the same grant, they might have got two different DPMs and they might have got better feedback or better indicative scores. So, there’s obviously just an element to that. And I suppose something that comes down to that is not feeling too bad about when you don’t get something. And I guess a personal experience of that is I got to watch this grant review board this year. I didn’t get to watch it the year before because I applied and they rejected my application, and Fiona went instead.

Dr Fiona McLean:

And it was great. It was in person.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Mike points at Fiona aggressively. Okay. Finishing further reading useful resources. There are loads of these sorts of early career researcher frameworks. This is AR UK’s one. This is the sort of thing that they will say. If you are this career stage, you are eligible for this fellowship application. And then they have a whole table of things that you should be able to do in order to hit this. And just quote them. Like they will say things like, “Should be contributing to the dementia research community as a whole.” Write in your application, “This contributes to the dementia research community as a whole by X, Y, Z.”

Dr Mike Daniels:

There’s also a very similar version of this on the UK AR website, so will definitely recommend going to that. They also have a list where they summarize different funding body grants. So you don’t have to go to each one. AR UK and then welcome. You can have them all summarized. A better way of summarizing those is this website. Is anyone aware of Research Professional? Research Professional, you have to subscribe to or your university has to subscribe to, but both the previous universities I’ve been in have both subscribed to it. So, I suggest that you at least check out whether they do. This is just a massive summary of all the different global grants that are available. And it also includes things like prizes, which I would a hundred percent, just as a career-based talk, recommend trying to get onto things like prizes. Makes your CV look great, you get money, you lose very little from those sorts of things. All summarized in Research Professional.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Obviously, I have to mention Dementia Researcher; the fantastic podcast and platform which you’re tuning into right now. That is brilliant. And also, [inaudible 00:34:17] just shown, has a summary of grants available. And check your emails, which Susan will come on to later with what you should expect soon from Susan. A lot of grants just come in the emails, and if you’re anything like me, you can miss them. And things like Twitter can be really useful. And really quickly, just another example, I put a post on the Future PI Slack channel because I thought if anyone’s going to know about where good grants are, it’s the Future PI Slack channel, to say, “Did anyone have any useful resources?” And this came up, this is obviously American. It’s run by Johns Hopkins University. Still can’t say that.

Dr Mike Daniels:

And it is an enormous Excel spreadsheet of about 500 different types of grants offered by different funding bodies and societies. And you can do useful things like filter it for the different disciplines and the amount of money and their eligibility, and things like that. There’s an element, again, about luck, and so therefore, the more that you can find, the overall more that you’re going to increase your odds of getting something. And that is me done on for this talk. And we have a little bit of time, I guess, for a few questions, if anyone has any.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Thank you.

Dr Mike Daniels:

[Isa 00:35:36], is there something you wanted to ask?

Member of the Audience:

Thank you. How review committee see, for example, that you change a little bit the field, not like completely from neuroscience to cancer, but for example, to dementia, to another neurodegenerative disease, or from a cell type to another. Because I guess they may think that you are not an expert in these fields, so they are not going to fund you.

Dr Mike Daniels:

Generally, it comes across better to do that than the other way around. So, examples of people that they thought were just staying in the same field and doing the same thing that the lab were doing, that didn’t go down that well. And moving is good. The only thing that I would say to be really careful with, to come back to the collaboration thing, is, if it’s like a changing field thing that maybe you don’t have so much experience in, make sure that you have a collaboration as part of that application with someone that does have experience. Because as I said, that came up time and time again, then being like, “Don’t worry. They’re collaborating with this person, and they’re an expert.”

Dr Fiona McLean:

And I think as an ECR, I think what’s maybe more important is that you have the technical skills. So, for example, if you have the technical ability to carry out experiments, but maybe you’ve done it in a slightly different topic or a different neurodegenerative disease, if you have a collaborator that works in Alzheimer’s, and say, you’ve been working in Huntington’s, the switch is going to be really easy in some ways, because, if you’ve got that collaborator to cover the topic, you can walk into that project with all the technical abilities to interrogate your questions. So, I think Mike’s right. I think as long as you’ve got a collaborator and it’s working in the scope of what you have already done in terms of techniques, I think that actually would be a really strong application. Any other questions?

Speaker 6:

Sorry. I’ll try and keep this as short as possible.

Dr Fiona McLean:

No.

Member of the Audience:

So when you go and sit in on these grant review meetings, do you think there’s like hot topics that the grant review people go for, or is it just broad across the spectrum, like anything gets funded?

Dr Mike Daniels:

I wouldn’t say, in the one that I was in specifically, that felt like there were any… You mean hot research areas, you mean?

Member of the Audience:

Yeah. Like research areas that are-

Dr Mike Daniels:

In the one that I was in specifically, it wasn’t noticeable. I think that, that probably is the case though. I mean, for example, there was a single-cell study in there that went down very well, but it wasn’t like there were loads of them and they were all getting really, really good funding or anything. I think that’s just the case in research though, is that there are hot topics that you have to keep an eye on and try and crest the wave as such of, but it wasn’t noticeable that day.

Dr Fiona McLean:

I think it’s important to note that the AR UK Grant Review Board is purposely balanced. If someone retires from the board, they look to fill the area. It’s not like they have a bunch of people just working in humans or preclinical. It tends to be balanced so that you don’t just get people funding the same sort of things over and over, but I think Mike’s right. There is always cycles of hot topics in science, and things that maybe had good press coverage recently. And I think that can maybe influence a little bit, but I think it’s more in the writing of the grant and the person. So, what would be your sort of take-home message from your experience? What did you take away from it? Are you going to change any of the things that you’re doing your applications? Are you going to go for different types of applications? What do you think?

Dr Mike Daniels:

Interestingly, I’d kind of written off a lot of those grants because I didn’t think… This is quite niche to the AR UK pilot project grants. I didn’t think you would necessarily get away with having so much salary costing, but a number of those grants had often a hundred percent salary, so 50K all for salary. And they basically said they were going to fund the consumables elsewhere. And that wasn’t necessarily seen badly at all. It was quite well-reviewed. And I just hadn’t thought that that was something that was an option. So for anyone that’s maybe coming to an end of a PhD or a postdoc, the AR UK pilot project actually is an option for you to potentially write a grant that might get you a year and a half or something worth of postdoc, as long as you can justify that you can do the consumables and do the experiments externally to that grant. But I wouldn’t have thought that could be a thing. And that came up a lot. That’s probably the most surprising thing.

Dr Fiona McLean:

If there’s no more questions at the moment, I’ve just got a couple of closing segments. So, before we end, I wanted to just say that we know Alzheimer’s Research UK will be launching their new ECR strategy in January 2022, so keep an eye out for that. And, of course, the Dementia Researcher website does its best to try and create and share all grants and funding calls that might be of use. So definitely check it out at dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk. And thank you all so much for coming today. And please show your appreciation to Mike for sharing his experience today.

Dr Fiona McLean:

I hope that you enjoyed the presentation as much as I did. And if that was helpful, do remember that the Dementia Researcher has over 1,500 pages of articles, blogs, and supportive content, and includes much more on grant writing. A link is available in the program notes with this episode. And please do remember to rate, review, and recommend the show to anyone you think would find it helpful.

Voice Over:

Brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society. Supporting early-career dementia researchers across the world.

END


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