Image: Keace Ruziel [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr
Three winners of BBSRC fellowships on their paths to victory
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s three-year discovery fellowships are for postdoctoral researchers keen to develop leadership skills and independence.
To stand out from the crowd, applicants need to impress upon a panel their potential as leaders in their chosen fields. But demonstrating this requires much more than a healthy incipient publication record. In fact, of three recent grantees who spoke to Research Fortnight, none thought their publication record was particularly strong, or likely to have given them an edge.
Sam Amsbury, who is just starting a project on plant cell walls at the University of Sheffield, used a £5,000 proof-of-concept grant, his teaching experiences and invited talks at other institutions to show how his track record was building to greater things. He also contacted previous winners and asked to see their applications; he found that the winning bids projected leadership potential, seeming to express more big-picture thinking and “confidence in how the applicants presented themselves and their work”.
Magdalena Czubala’s fellowship on cell signalling and survival is at Cardiff University, the same institution where she did her PhD and postdoctorate. As well as leading her own work and supervising students, she used an undergraduate research placement in Australia to show her leadership potential.
Staying at her alma mater meant Czubala also had to be clear on how her proposal was distinct from the work she had done under previous supervisors. In doing so she emphasised that she would be working in a different area of biology from the one she had focused on previously, and stressed the new collaborations she had initiated, both inside and outside Cardiff.
Money talks
The discovery fellowship covers salaries, training and consumables, but not equipment. As with all Research Council schemes, there is a necessity to demonstrate value-for-money, but the £100,000 a year on offer means that getting the most out of every pound will also be a practical consideration for applicants themselves. As a result, part of putting together the application is negotiating resources from the host institution to top up the grant.
“I discussed what the fellowship can bring to the university,” says Czubala, who used her external collaborations, contributions to overhead costs and the new techniques she would bring as incentives. In return, Cardiff agreed to put an extra £20,000 towards her work.
Negotiations should go well beyond a cash figure, as the department and wider institution will also be responsible for nurturing the prospective fellow. Reviewers are “not just interested in how much money you’ve got; they’re interested in how you’re going to be supported to develop as an academic,” says Amsbury.
Lewis MacKenzie, who is due to start his project on oxygen sensing using nanoparticles at the Durham University in July, won a discovery fellowship on his second attempt. He says his career development plan shot up the priority list on his second go. “The first time around it was just, ‘here are some training courses I thought looked good’,” he says. On his second bid, he thought more strategically about the long-term impact of his choices.
Both MacKenzie and Czubala say they were careful to match the training element of their applications to the work they were proposing, and both gave their career development activities a distinct focus. MacKenzie will concentrate on learning about intellectual property, while Czubala will develop skills in bioinformatics.
Best foot forward
Like all BBSRC schemes, applicants to the discovery fellowship must use the Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system, where there are a series of text boxes to fill in. “One of the things I hadn’t appreciated the first time around is that these boxes shouldn’t be seen as something to fill in at the last minute; they should be seen as an opportunity to expand on what you say in your core grant documents,” says MacKenzie.
“A lot of grant reviewers might print off applications,” he says. “I thought about what comes immediately below the name and the title—which summary box is it? You are trying to get your message across and frame it from the offset.”
A focus on the candidate
Interviews for discovery fellowships tend to focus more on the candidate than their science. “It was, ‘How are you going to do it?’ A lot of questions about me and my career development, but also risk mitigation,” explains Amsbury. ‘What are you going to do if one strand of your fellowship doesn’t work?’”
Indeed, attention to detail regarding seemingly peripheral elements, such as contingency planning, may well be what sets successful applicants apart. “Everyone applying for these schemes is going to have a great research idea, so I focused on trying to distinguish myself from other candidates in the bits around the edges,” says Amsbury.
The fellowship is currently open for applications as the deadline for the 2020 round was extended from 12 May to 11 June.
This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com