Some self-promotion is necessary to win a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship
As the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s specialised scheme for helping researchers move on from their postdoctoral careers towards research independence, the Discovery Fellowships are always highly competitive.
This year is likely to be no different, especially as, unlike in previous years, only one competition is running. The deadline is 5 May and up to 15 fellowships are available. Each can be worth up to £500,000 (funded at 80 per cent of the full economic cost by the BBSRC) and projects can last for up to three years.
To win, you should ensure your project is of an excellent standard, but also not forget that these are individual fellowships—so a little self-promotion is necessary, say Cynthia Okoro-Shekwaga and Amanda Warr, two of last year’s winners.
Okoro-Shekwaga, who is based at the University of Leeds and is researching ways to improve biomethane production from food waste and use it as an energy source in transport, knows that applicants might not feel comfortable with self-promotion initially. “You’re coming into this project with just a few years’ post-PhD experience,” she says. “You will always feel a bit inadequate when putting in for this.”
Warr, who works at the University of Edinburgh, advises applicants to “remember that the people you work with know what you can do, but the people who read the application know nothing about you”. As a result, she adds, her case for support “started with a big chunk of who I am and how I’ve demonstrated leadership”.
Step change
When it comes to the project itself, both Okoro-Shekwaga and Warr stress that the work proposed must display two things: a step away from any previous supervisor’s or principal investigator’s work, and a transformative rather than incremental advance on previous research.
Warr’s project focuses on manipulating the microbiome in pigs to try to make them more resistant to enteric coronaviruses. Her fellowship is hosted by a lab she previously worked in. She stresses that applicants in a similar situation “really need to demonstrate why that’s the best place to do the work”. For her, she says, that was “relatively straightforward” as hers is one of only two labs where the work is possible.
Warr also needed to ensure that her project was indeed transformative. “One part involved using cannulation to access the internal microbiome through the whole course of the experiment. That hasn’t been done in the way we’re doing it before.”
The alternative to the technique Warr is using “would have involved using a lot more pigs and culling a subset of them at timepoints to see what’s going on internally”. Warr’s technique therefore not only represents a step change but also plays into one of the council’s priorities, she says: “The BBSRC is keen on reducing animal use, as we should all be. This method will be a great demonstration to the community that we can do this. It was quite a big selling point for the project, I think.”
Practice and preparation
Discussing writing the bid itself, Okoro-Shekwaga stresses the importance of “working in blocks”. A Discovery Fellowship bid will be a major undertaking, she says, and it can quickly become overwhelming. “The scheme has eight or so different sections to fill in. It’s easy to lose focus when you want to touch on everything. I started off with the case for support—the science I knew best—and developed it to a decent level. Then I shifted focus to a new section, maybe the justification of resources, and focused on that for a while.”
Working like this also helps to get you in the right mindset for each section of the application, she adds: “There are different strategies, I’d say, for each section. You need to understand that it’s a different kind of writing for those different contexts.”
Neither Okoro-Shekwaga nor Warr included much detail of contingency plans in their bids, a move that was largely strategic as both wanted to make the best use of the limited space available. However, both expected contingency to come up in reviewers’ comments or at interview, and both were correct. Warr says it was fortunate that a reviewer brought up the topic because it gave her space to create a table containing the contingencies—and “there wasn’t much room to put them elsewhere”.
Both fellows stand by the old cliché that practice and preparation are key when it comes to interviews. Mock interviews were “particularly useful for the leadership and career questions”, Warr says. “I’m not very good at articulating what leadership means to me. If someone asks a question along those lines, and you don’t quite know what they’re asking, you can feel like a deer in headlights. Having the practice of being able to deal with those moments is important.”
Okoro-Shekwaga also stresses the importance of preparation in helping interviewees be ready for questions that come from unusual angles: “Not all of the panellists are in your research area, so I had questions that I didn’t expect, that came from outside my area. I would say that you should not assume anything in your answers.”
This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com