Advice on applying for an ERC Start Grant (part 1)

I was asked to give some advice on ERC Start Grant applicants, as a current grant holder. As this has come up several times I thought I would write a series of blog posts covering my hints and tips. Partly, this advice is specific to the ERC grant system, although most points are valid across any grant. In this first post I will deal the written application Part B1.

ERC Start Grant - Part B1

• Write every part of B1 in the context of the project that you are going to propose - fully utilise every section to sell your application
  
• In your CV you are selling yourself, not describing yourself. Identify your relative strengths and make them stand out. Perhaps you have lots of middle authorships in great journals – then put the journal impact factors in bold, so a quick scan of the page will highlight the great journals rather than your position on them. Perhaps you haven’t published in the top journals, but your work has gathered a disproportionate number of citations – then don’t put the journal impact factor in bold, instead put your individual number of citations in bold.
• Most importantly, when you are presenting your “scientific or scholarly contributions to the field” this is not a generic description. Use this to show how you are uniquely suited to run the project that you have proposed. For example, if you are proposing a project that melds skills you learned from your PhD and your post-doc, place special emphasis on these skills. Your career descriptions should be interwoven with the perspective of where you are going.
• Do not use the extended synopsis in Part B1 to simply summarise the project of Part B2. Use it to discuss the novelty of the approach or the concept. You do not know which part a reviewer will read first, so each document needs to be able to stand alone. Part B2 has a key function in showing that the outcome of your work will be important

Key tip: write about your career projection in the same way you write a scientific paper. You wouldn’t write “we investigated gene X, because of the twelve candidate genes the lab next door had a knockout of this one available”. Instead you would write up results that placed intent and direction in your activity, justifying gene X as your primary focus for a reason. Likewise, don’t describe your career trajectory as it actually occurred, “I did a PhD in metabolism, then my partner moved to Leuven so I looked for a post-doc and got offered one in dendritic cell biology”, rewrite it with intent and direction – “I have had a long-term interest on the impact of metabolism on the innate immune response, so in order to gain skills in both disciplines I first pursued a PhD in biochemistry and afterwards moved to a dendritic cell laboratory. Now I am able to utilise my training in both disciplines, with my independent laboratory focused on the effect of metabolic processes on monocyte activity.”

More hints and tips - Part B2 and the interview.

Academic independence

What is academic independence?

In the mind of many a post-doc it is quite simple, it is the freedom that you gain when you step up from being a post-doc to becoming a faculty member. As a post-doc, your principle investigator has the final say over your research program, while as a faculty member you are the principle investigator.

It seems straight-forward, but in practice the distinction can be quite blurred. As a senior PhD student in the Goodnow laboratory I effectively had academic independence. My principle investigator had funding and placed trust in me so that I could run my research more or less independently. Hopefully the PhD students in our laboratory feel the same way. Could I have done any hair-brained project I wanted to? Certainly not, it had to be within reason, but the research interests I had were aligned with that of my mentor, so in effect I had the independence to pursue the research that I wanted to pursue.

This is not qualitatively different from the academic independence I have now as a faculty member. Yes, I can chose the research program that I want to pursue, but again the within reason proviso applies. I no longer have a faculty member above me, acting as the final arbiter, but there are still limitations. The most obvious limitation is the grant review process. If I want to do an experiment I require funding, which necessitates my research aims being in line with the granting body and being approved by a panel of experts. Then of course, as junior faculty, I will have a jury over-looking my renewal. These juries invariably have something to say about the direction of your science - your research interests are too broad/too narrow, you are spending too much/ too little time on collaborative ventures, etc. In the modern "big science" era, your colleagues and collaborators form another restraint - you may need to negotiate for time on certain equipment or access to particular samples.

Some of these restraints may be reduced over time, but unless you are a Nobel Prize winner with guaranteed block funding for life there will always be some limitations to academic independence. Perhaps the biggest difference in the academic freedom between a post-doc and faculty member is the diffusion and immediacy of responsibility. As a post-doctoral fellow, the limitations on your research are concentrated in a single person who can have immediate impact - a particular line of research can be shut down today with a single decision. As a faculty member, by contrast, the limitations on your research are delayed and the decision-making capacity is diluted out into a plethora of juries. If one grant foundation chooses not to support your work, another (with a distinct jury) may, and often there are avenues for pursuing research for some months or even years without direct funding.

So rather than the qualitative leap in academic independence that a faculty position represents to some, perhaps it is more accurate to think of a gradual shift in responsibility. Someone moving from a post-doctoral position in a restrictive laboratory to a well-funded start-up faculty position will feel an enormous leap in academic freedom. But for others, being a senior post-doc in a rich laboratory supervised by a figure of benign neglect, the entry into a world of constant grant review may even result in a loss of freedom to pursue your research interest.

One year as a junior faculty member

One year in numbers:

62: the number of grants I have reviewed for various foundations
19: the number of articles I have reviewed for different journals

25: the number of grants I have submitted
7: grants accepted
4: grants declined
14: grants pending
1,029,685: euros given in grants
830,493: euros spent in research

10: invited talks
3: conferences
3: lectures

13: article submissions
9: articles published or in press

5: PhD projects started
11: number of permanent staff in the lab
8: number of full-time permanent researchers in the lab

0: number of days I've spent doing experiments

Negotiating a start-up package

After my previous posts on science careers I was asked about negotiating a start-up package. Unfortunately here I have little input - for a new faculty member there is very little negotiation that can take place. The faculty will have a budget set aside for recruitment and this is not going to change in any substantial way. There are a few minor points to consider:

1. The edges can be flexible. The net value of the start-up package is unlikely to change, but a one-size-fits-all package may be adopted to your circumstance. Will it be possible to have no teaching commitments in the first year? A discount on departmental services? Perhaps make your start-up fund open-ended rather than time-limited. Look carefully at the package being offered and find any conditions that could be an issue to you - and only ask about changes that will make a real difference to your research. Often the hardest part is working out what would be important to you, since you will not be familiar with the inner workings of the department in advance.

2. Negotiate for the research, not for yourself. If you talk about changes in terms of things you would like, the faculty will weigh this up against how much they want you. Instead phrase the changes in terms of how they can add to your research. Why will this change make your research output substantially better? The faculty will be much more willing to make changes if they can see the value to your research output - after all they want you to succeed.

3. Don't grandstand. These are your colleagues and your requests will typically come at a cost to them, either in terms of faculty subsidies or extra workload. Do not make a little issue into a big issue. Also, don't bluff. In my negotiations with one faculty I did have one "make or break" issue. There were a few things that would have been nice but I could live without - these I let go when they were turned down. But when I discussed one particular clause I explained exactly why this would make my particular research program untenable, and when they couldn't change that one clause I walked away. Don't make an issue "make or break" unless it is literally a deal-breaker.

4. Get it in writing. Okay, this is not exactly in line with #3 about being considerate in negotiations, but a contract should be in writing. If a faculty is happy to agree to a condition there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be written down in your contract. Things change over five years. Departmental heads leave and get replaced by new heads. Memories on exactly what was agreed become hazy over time.

Applying for faculty positions

I've had some occasion recently to contemplate the strategies for applying for faculty positions. In 2008 I interviewed at eight different universities for a faculty position, and two of those experiences in particular were very illuminating - the IRIC (Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer) and VIB (Flemish Institute of Biotechnology) held open applications where all the applicants were interviewed together. This gave me a fascinating insight into the faux pas made and the important criteria for being offered a faculty position.

These are the three criteria I recommend post-docs to consider:

3. Publications. Yes, telling people they need Nature papers is useless advice - everyone knows the importance of publications. Actually, I have put publications at #3 because I think it is much less important than the other two criteria. I interviewed back-to-back against post-docs with outstanding publication records that I couldn't match, multiple major Cell papers that redefined a field and opened up new technologies. Yet I've seen these same people fail at criteria #1 and #2 and miss out to people with less outstanding publication lists. I see publications almost as a threshold effect. For a post-doc to be competitive at a high-level institute they will need to have multiple papers at JEM or higher journals. But in a way it is more important to have a diverse portfolio of publications. Primary papers in multiple laboratories demonstrate an ability to research in different environments. Middle author publications demonstrate willingness to collaborate. Review papers show a grasp over the field. The risk for an applicant with a few good first author Nature papers is that the credit will go to the last author. Having a broader repertoire with senior authorships and multiple laboratories tells the selection panel that you have carved out your own research niche and that you were more than a PhD student put on a lucky project.

2. Experience outside benchwork. The enormous importance that is placed on publications tends to drive post-docs to make a fundamental mistake - you cannot learn to be a PI from the bench. Once you have a faculty position the amount of research time you have available will drop precipitously. Skills are needed in setting up a lab, writing grants, working on a budget, mentoring students, teaching undergrads, faculty business, etc etc. The selection panel is well aware of this, they are not looking for a post-doc to work in their lab, but someone who can run a successful operation, someone who can translate their previous first-author success into future last-author success. One applicant I interviewed with had an outstanding publication record but didn't get a job offer because it was clear that they were an outstanding post-doc but would be a terrible PI. When asked about supervision experience this candidate said "Oh, my PI gave me a technician, and I've trained her to sit behind me and pass me solutions and pipettes reset to the right volumes. It is great, I can now do research twice as fast as before". Perhaps - but how would he fair when he was tied to a computer writing grants and relying on his technician to produce data? It is important for post-docs to show that they have the skill set to run a lab - a different skill set to being a post-doc. Mentor students, write fellowships or grants, train technicians, teach classes - show the selection panel that you have already been running a sub-lab within a larger lab, and you are now ready to expand your operation.

1. Emotional intelligence. We work in science, the bar is pretty low - but still I have seen the stunned look on faces as applicants show zero emotional intelligence. I'm going to put this one at number 1, because an applicant who is above average but not genius on publications and management experience can shoot to the top of a list if they have emotional intelligence. This stuff should be simple but it obviously isn't. I remember standing around at a coffee break during the interview day and listening to a selection panel member ask an applicant how they were finding the experience. The reply? "Actually, to be honest it is terrifying, there are so many good people here that I feel like a fraud". Okay, this is not uncommon, a study by the American Astronomical Association found that more than 50% of graduate students admit to being afraid their peers will find out how little they know. Only 5% strongly disagreed. But don't confide in the selection panel. Every interaction with the selection panel or any faculty member, regardless of how informal, is part of your assessment. An applicant needs to work out what each person is after, and show them that you can deliver - both in body language and your response. Be calm, authoritative and deliberative without being aggressive, flighty or nervous. Consider that every panel member is looking for something different. A good selection panel wants the best person for the department and also the best person for their laboratory in particular. They are picking a long-term colleague, show them that you have skills they can use, knowledge they can draw on, that you are willing to collaborate, that you have an ability to "value-add" to the department. The right applicant in the right place will not only bring in their own research value, but will also increase the research value of other laboratories in the faculty. An applicant should research the faculty and the faculty members, think about collaborative potential and engage each individual they interview with on their own terms.

Now the corollary to this advice - don't fake it too much. If writing grants and mentoring students feels like an annoying distraction from benchwork, think again about whether you want to be a PI. If you are not genuinely excited about the collaborative prospects in a department, don't send in an application there. The interview is not just about the selection panel interviewing you, it is about you subtly working out whether the department will be good for you, so if you have to make promises you don't want to keep you are looking in the wrong place.

The things they don't teach you about being a scientist

One of the frustrating issues in a science career is the limited extent to which each career stage prepares you for the next. An undergraduate degree in science will typically focus on teaching established science theories and testing them via examination. The research proportion is limited and shrinking due to budget constraints.

Then you finish undergraduate studies and start a PhD, and the ability to learn established theories and sit an exam is completely useless. Instead you need to completely reorientate yourself to research skills, both practical (in terms of benchwork) and theoretical (in terms of experimental design and analysis). Exactly where your PhD mentor expects you to pick up these new skills is a mystery, as there are no lectures or classes to teach it. Throughout your PhD and postdoc you know that you are going to be judged solely on your research output. Do experiments and publish, do experiments and publish, anything else is irrelevant.

So you finish your postdoc with a lot of research experience and a handful of publications and manage to land a faculty position. You are now an independent principle investigator and all the skills you have learned to date are redundant. No time for benchwork anymore, you need to master a new set of skills within a year or fail miserably and end with a whimper. Having only written one or two short fellowship applications at the end of your PhD, you now need to master the major project grant. A detailed and elaborate research proposal which needs to be tailored towards the language and politics of the particular granting body (information which is never given on the website of course), your grant has to compete with successful investigators who have been operating in the field for decades.

While you wait for a year for the grant results to come back, your startup grant seems to disappear - quick, learn the skills of an accountant! So far you've only spent money in the lab, now you need to know the complete salary costs (including taxation status, social security contributions and yearly increments), equipment depreciation costs, which items should go on which budget (international staff on the VIB budget can gain expat taxation status, but international students on the KUL budget are exempt from social security), the cost threshold for requiring multiple quotes, how to negotiate with reps for good prices, and so much more. When you have mastered this you realise that you wasted far too much money on furniture when the university has a hidden basement full of free cast-offs and that expensive piece of equipment you bought already exists unused in a laboratory two floors down.

Of course, while you are becoming a grant writer / accountant, research needs to occur, so you'll need staff. You are a complete unknown, so no high power post-docs coming with their own fellowship. You didn't teach undergraduate classes last year, so good luck in snapping up a student able to attract a scholarship. You place a few adds in Nature and for the next six months you get ten applications a day from India and China. How to judge them? Hiring decisions are a science in themselves, then labour contract law is a mine-field. Nevertheless, with a few bumps along the road you somehow manage to put together a surprisingly talented and hardworking team. You already knew from personal experience that a lab can be an emotional boiler-room, now you need to manage that or manage the consequences. You need to understand every staff member as an individual, what makes them tick, how to keep them happy and productive, the best way to redirect them when they go off-course. Skills that can take a lifelime to learn about your partner you need to pickup within a few months about six strangers from six different cultures. Plus you'll need to leave your computer enough to spot trouble brewing in the early stages. The small things matter, the person irritated about someone else casually borrowing pipettes and not returning them happens to have a habit of writing directly on glass bottles. And let's face it, scientists are not exactly trained in emotional intelligence.

Think that you can do research now? Equipment, check. Reagents, check. Grant money, check. Staff, check. Stir the pot and research comes out? Hah! You would be breaking a surprising number of regional, national and international laws. You'll need a liquor license for that ethanol to clean benches, a permit to use sedatives on mice, ethics clearance of course but also an animal use license. Biosafety permits, equipment certification, occupational health and safety monitoring, a fire-warden. The most frustrating part is that there is no check-list to work down, you only find out about a requirement when you think you are there and you hit a brick-wall.

Then there are the unpredictables, that sap away your time until you are ready to scream. Your immunology department is the only one in the world without a flow cytometry core unit. The research assistant you hired to look after the mouse colony turns out to be afraid of mice. Your contract unexpectedly stipulates that you become fluent in Flemish within three years. That assay you used to do in your sleep simply doesn't work in Belgium. Your post-doc falls in a legal loophole that makes them ineligible for fellowships designed for both locals and foreigners. The SPF mouse house didn't tell staff to set up breeders inside a hood and all your imported mouse strains are contaminated. Your weeks of slaving over an FWO grant are wasted because you didn't know that the FWO does not have anonymous peer review and requires you to submit your own reviewers. You find out that your start-up grant also has to cover your own salary and you over-hired in the first year. You have a hundred meetings, departmental politics, collaborations to foster and suddenly a year has gone by and you didn't even manage to finish off that project that was nearly ready for publication at the end of your post-doc.

Of course, I could be externalising. Perhaps I just missed the training session.

Science is not a family-friendly career

There is a brief article in this week's Nature entitled "Tenure or family?"

Marriage and childbirth are what stop most female US graduate students from becoming tenured researchers, according to a report by Washington DC think tank the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences found that married mothers with a PhD are 35% less likely to enter a tenure-track position in the sciences than married fathers with PhDs, according to a National Science Foundation survey. And they are 27% less likely than their male counterparts to get tenure after securing a tenure-track post. The report advises universities and funding agencies to create family-friendly policies, including six weeks of paid maternity leave and a week of paid parental leave.

Obviously there is an enormous problem in career progression for women in science. A 35% reduction at the tenure-track stage and a 27% further reduction at the tenure stage - women get whittled out of the academic career pathway. This article kind of misses the point though. Marriage and children are not what stops women progressing in science. Extra maternity leave is not going to help if it puts women further behind the publication scramble. To put it bluntly, in my opinion this is the real problem:

1. A career in science is horribly unfriendly to a balanced life. There is no security or safety, every step of the way 90% of people are going to jump or be pushed. Everyone is smart at the top, that isn't enough, you also have to be lucky and obsessively determined. Most tenure-track professors don't even take weekends or holidays - they can't afford to be left behind.

2. Society still has structural sexism built in. Yes, women are now free to pursue any career they want, in addition to their previous workload. If it was purely child-rearing that was a problem the blockade would be in all scientists who have children. Instead the burden falls disproportionally on women scientists who have children, because on average they still end up doing more of the work than men. Consider the recommendations of the report: six weeks of paid maternity leave and a week of paid parental leave. Even if the recommendation is passed, women will be expected to do six times more child-rearing work than men.

These problems are much harder than simply paid parental leave, although obviously that would be a positive contribution. Instead we need to tackle the two fundamental issues. The science career needs to be made more family friendly, or at least not a horrific all-consuming ordeal. We can't continue with the same massive bottle-necks in careers or with a system where every person works themselves to death to stay in the game one more round. Competitive peer review has grown into a destructive monster that chews people up and spits them out. Secondly men need to pull their own weight rather than expecting women to sacrifice their time to make up for a thoughtless spouse.