Last week I had the wonderful experience of participating in an international grant panel – this time for NSERC in Canada. Being on an international panel showed me new aspects of grant writing, reviewing and decision making. Specifically:
1. Being on an international panel means that we experience people with different grant panel cultures. These throw up quite varied views: how much do you value the publication track record of the applicants vs the actual proposed research in the grant? How crucial is preliminary data? How important is the training and experience of people working on the grant (the Canadian system uses the term ‘HQP’: highly qualified people)? These seem to have different emphases for people used to the UK system, or EU, or USA, or Canadian.
2. How to disagree with dignity. One of our European panelists was exemplary in the way in which he surfaced differing views, while remaining calm and rational at all times, asking tough questions of other panelists where he took a different view, but also backing down graciously when it was clear that was needed for consensus building.
3. The importance of response to reviewers. I know this is important with UKRI grants – but it really came across profoundly in this process for two reasons. (i) As a demonstration of the depth of thought and knowledge that sits underneath the material in the proposal itself, which by necessity is always edited down. (ii) As a test of the strength of the team. This is especially evident in interdisciplinary research, where the PI relies on expert answers from the whole team: can the PI pull together answers to all questions on a short time frame? Sometimes that requires high levels of commitment from team members – which may or may not be manifest.
Dov Stekel's Laboratory 