Know how: Getting that first grant

Struggling to win your first grant? It takes determination, says Thorsten Hauler, research development manager at King’s College London. Here he shares advice gained from years of experience in helping early-career researchers.

Getting started is always the hardest part, so let’s begin with a definition: most funders and institutions define an early-career researcher as someone who has been employed recently on a permanent contract and is, broadly speaking, a young academic. This is crucial when it comes to eligibility, as most funding schemes require you to be at this particular stage in your career and only allow you to be principal investigator on a grant if you have a permanent contract.

That notion can be confusing because, in reality, your career starts after the successful defence of your PhD. In the no-man’s land between your viva and your first permanent position, there are the fixed-term postdoctoral researcher posts and the postdoctoral fellowships, but not much else. Therefore, the focus of this piece is on people at the career stage according to the definition above: those recently employed on a permanent contract.