Work

The road to independence: how to get funding in neuroscience

Year: 2016

Type: article

Abstract: The Federation of European Neurosciences (FENS) and the Kavli foundation have recently founded the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence (http://www.fens.org/Outreach/FENS-Kavli-Network-of-Excellence/), a group of young, outstanding neuroscientists dedicated to providing peer support for early career neuroscientists and serving as the voice for people at this career stage in shaping the future of neuroscience. Part of this support is this series of opinion articles whose primary goal is to provide advice about different aspects of career progression in neuroscience. The series started in August 2015 with a piece about getting hired and negotiating a group leader position (CITE) and a second article about how to build and effectively lead a research team (CITE). This article focuses on the funding opportunities for young principal investigators (PI) working in Europe and ways to maximize the possibility of funding neuroscience research projects. Unfortunately, there is no magic recipe for receiving funding, but we hope that our experiences will at least help avoid some of the commonly made mistakes and provide some tips that have helped us along the way. Right after a successful post-doc, you managed to get a position as a junior PI and now it is time to build your team, equip your lab and this all costs money, lots of it. Most certainly raising the necessary funds is one of the most critical steps on the road to independence and it is likely to be one of the most critical factors that will impact the success of a young PI. How can one raise all that funding to pay for salaries, buy the essential equipment or even perhaps renovate his/her lab space up to reasonable standards. What are the ways to get the necessary funds to fuel up your innovative and exciting research program? There are different ways to raise funds from many different sources. However, typically the first and most critical opportunity arises when young PIs negotiate for their positions in their host institutions. This is usually the most challenging period where young PIs can have leverage for fundraising from their host institution. Start-up funds are essential support for a young PI to buy expensive equipment and renovate their lab space. Depending on the resources of the host institute, the start-up fund may be sufficient to get the lab going and may include salaries for a small team of core funded lab members. It is not that uncommon to ask for a PhD student and perhaps a technician as core start-up support along with some money that could be used for consumables. These are likely to be the only funds for the first 1–3 years of a new lab, until the first external grant money starts coming in. Thus, the effectiveness of this first negotiation is critical to ensure a decent start-up package that allows the recruitment of a small team of people who can generate key preliminary data, which will be crucial for subsequent grant applications. What is the best way of negotiating for a start-up package? Here are a few tips: As soon as you get your lab going, hopefully through a start-up grant, you need to commence thinking about how to secure funding for the years to come. Unless you are one of the few lucky young PIs working in places with large pots of core funding (e.g. Janelia Farms, the NIH, The Simons Foundation – all located in the U.S.), you will have to support your research via competitive grants. There are several types of such grants, awarded from the European Commission, National Funding Agencies or Private Foundations. A non-exhaustive list of such funding organizations can be found at the end of this article. In all cases, a young PI must submit a research proposal describing an innovative project, the proposed methodology for implementing this project, the associated budget and the expected benefits for the scientific community, the economy or the society as a whole. Different types of grant proposals require different writing styles, but all successful grants share some common features: The above mentioned features 1–6, usually serve as evaluation criteria according to which submitted proposals are judged. Feature 7 becomes critical if reviewers are asked to evaluate multiple proposals over a short period of time – which is frequently the case for EU proposals. Young PIs should therefore invest significant amount of time and effort to train themselves in proposal writing. This can be done by attending relevant courses (offered online, at many institutions, via large organizations like EMBO, specialist companies etc.) and, ultimately, by painful trial and error. Based on our experience, a few tips that may help when preparing a grant proposal include: In the following paragraphs we discuss the various funding opportunities for young PIs that are currently available, primarily at the European level. Getting a big, highly prestigious and competitive personal grant can be a major leap forward in the career of a young PI. Such an opportunity is provided by the European Research Council (ERC) through its Starting and Consolidator grants. Hence, it is very important for young PIs not to miss any opportunity to apply for ERC funding. The ERC funds frontier research across any discipline based on scientific excellence of both the applicant and the research proposal, taking into account the career stage. Given its highly competitive nature, your first ERC grant application may result in failure; but it is important to remember that every failed grant application is also an excellent consultancy for your research program by several top scientists in your research field. Thus, it is extremely important to make good use of the reviewer comments for improving your applications to either big or small funding opportunities at the next round. Some of the most important criteria for the big competitive grants are excellence, novelty, high-risk/high-gain factor and ambition. However, high-risk/high-gain factor and ambitious aspects can work against the applicant if they are not carefully presented in the proposal. Feasibility can easily be questioned against the high-risk/high-gain factor and sometimes what is obviously feasible for the young PIs can be way too ambitious for more experienced reviewers in the field. Therefore it is extremely critical to adjust the level of ambition and make sure that the feasibility of the proposed project falls within the proposed time frame of the project and it is clearly explained. For most of these big grants, young PIs will be competing against their peers and it is likely that the time of obtaining the PhD degree will be the moment that the clock starts ticking. Hence, the duration of a post-doctoral period can be critical for the eligibility for the starting level grants. While a productive post-doctoral period with many high quality papers is important for a good CV, it is also important to realize that too long a post-doctoral period (e.g. over 7 years) can be detrimental for the eligibility of the young PIs to these starting level grants. As a result, a young PI may have to compete at a different category against the established labs in the field (e.g. for a Consolidator instead of a Starting grant). Therefore it is important to keep this ticking clock in mind even during the PhD years and adjust your career early on, to make sure that neither your PhD is prematurely obtained without papers nor your post-doctoral period is exhaustively long. A combination of a great CV at the right/young career level can be a key ingredient for getting a personal ERC grant. Most European countries have several national funding bodies which support basic or applied research. It is certain that excellence is the key factor for obtaining support from national funding bodies. The opportunities for getting generous support for building and running one's lab over the first 5 years, such as the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG), Wellcome Trust Grants in the UK or the specific programs of the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), are optimal forms of support for young researchers. However, these are highly competitive and such granting schemes do not exist in all EU countries. Alternatively, smaller grants that provide salaries and/or basic consumables for 3–4 years for young PIs may represent a good start. However, it is likely that these national funding bodies are built around the strength of the general research program of several established laboratories and the preferred research fields for the national funding bodies can vary from country to country. While some countries might have a strong focus on neuro-degenerative diseases, other countries might favor cancer research. It is natural for most of these national funding bodies to focus the limited available funds on the strengths of the national research programs, especially in smaller European countries. These focused research programs can be an advantage or a disadvantage for the young PIs to obtain their first national grants. Most national funding bodies will make their decisions at a panel of local researchers that are helped by the comments from external reviewers. Thus, it is likely that a research program that is well aligned with the interest of the national funding bodies will also receive well deserved attention, whereas relatively exotic research programs might suffer from lack of interest and local support. One way to deal with such situation can be to lobby for the importance of the young PIs research program at every level, by attending networking events, by giving talks at surrounding national institutions, highlighting the importance of the young PIs research program etc. It is very likely that such visits will generate some local supporters for your research program, which could influence the preferences and decisions at the panels of national funding bodies. It is also important to keep in mind that success rate is slightly higher in most of the national funding bodies, when compared to European or international funding schemes, where the competition is much larger. Hence, competing for national grants – and especially the small ones – can be a good way to write grant proposals with better-adjusted ambitions. This exercise provides good training for establishing a more focused research program. Moreover, it is possible that such focused research proposals might require very well established hypotheses, when compared to high-risk/high-gain big grants. Furthermore, most of the time well established hypotheses need a substantial amount of preliminary data. Hence, it is important to generate sufficient preliminary when preparing your application for a national grant. Unless you are very well prepared and lucky, there is a good chance your first few grant applications will fail (the success rate for ERC grants is currently 10–15% and increases significantly only for some national programs). However ERC starting/consolidator grants or national grants are not the only ways to get funding for a starting lab. There are several fellowship opportunities at the international, European, and national levels, that young PIs, talented post-docs or PhD students can apply for. These include for example the MARIE SKŁODOWSKA-CURIE fellowships of the EU, the EMBO short and long term fellowships, the HFSP fellowships among others (see list at the end of the document). At the national level, most countries in Europe have built-in structures in their national funding system for PhD students or post-docs to apply for their own funding. These structures usually evaluate students or post-docs mostly on their CV, quality of the project and the host lab. Hence, recruiting students or post-docs with stunning CVs is certainly the best thing that could happen to a starting lab, not only due to good potential for productivity, but also for raising additional funds. Moreover, several companies (from banking to pharmaceuticals) or NGOs and governmental agencies would provide PhD or post-doc fellowships for those successful candidates. Hence, it is most important to identify the good candidates and not to miss any of the deadlines for these small and perhaps less well-known funding bodies. Similarly, several of these NGOs or companies support young PIs through research grants. Therefore, working with the local administrative support staff of your institution and/or the NGOs can be very effective in identifying and exploiting these less known opportunities. Depending on your host country collaborative national, European and international grants can be a good source of funding for many starting labs. These collaborative grants usually have large budgets, which can support groups of PIs at several different career levels. While the numbers of collaborating labs could vary between 2 (e.g. in HFSP grants) to very large consortia (e.g. in MARIE SKLODOWSKA-CURIE ITN grants), small numbers might suffer from lack of breadth and too large numbers can be hard to manage and suffer from low levels of funding for each partner group. Therefore it is important to keep in mind that the number and scope of partners in a collaborative grant, both for effectiveness and for budgeting purposes. By their nature, collaborative grants rely on strong interactions and collaborations between several labs and can lead to very exciting new avenues for all partners involved. However they can also be very distracting for a starting PI, since poorly planned and/or multiple collaborations might reduce the focus of the lab. Even a high quality publication on a topic that is not the core field of the starting PI might sometimes not be appreciated as much as a publication in her/his core field, especially if the starting PI is not planning to further her/his research in that new field. Moreover, the workload associated with being a coordinator of a large collaborative grant is overwhelming for a young PI: both in terms of proposal writing, but more so in terms of managing a large group of people and ensuring a smooth execution of the project. It would thus be more beneficial to join such grants as a partner rather than assuming all responsibilities of a coordinator at the very early steps of establishing a lab. On the other hand, coordination of large awards is highly prestigious for a young PI and likely to have a greater impact on his/her CV. Hence, a careful balancing of pros and cons should precede the decision to apply for a collaborative project. It should be clear whether these sources of funding will be beneficial to the future perspective of the starting laboratory or whether they will be just a short lived passion that will take-up much of your time and effort but bring little in return. All in all, science is one of the most exciting endeavors for young PIs. However doing science is an expensive business and it is important for young PIs to plan their future careers accordingly. It's good to ask oneself ‘what do I want to do’, ‘how much will it cost’ and ‘what would be the best way to raise that kind of money’. Answers to these questions depend significantly on the place (institution/country) that hosts the starting lab. Identifying these targets early on will not only help a starting PI to negotiate better as part of a job application but also to direct the right kind of question to the right kind of hosting environment. It might be important for the senior post – docs/young PIs to adjust their research plan and target their job applications, negotiations, host institutions and host countries accordingly, so that their ambitions are not capped by any type of place-specific limitations. We would like to thank our mentors, colleagues and friends who have taught us all the invaluable lessons which we incorporated in this piece. I.L.H.-O. acknowledges funding from the German Research Council (SFB936, SPP1665, Ha4466/10-1). P.P acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (StG 311435 dEMORY). E.Y acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (StG 335561 ChemosensoryCircuits). The authors are scholars of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, a network of young neuroscientists, with the goal of fostering exchange scientific or about science policy between excellent junior/mid-career neuroscientists who are either currently working in Europe or received their academic training in Europe. Emre Yaksi is an Associate Professor at Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience – Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He studies how sensory information is represented in the brain and how these representations are modulated by stress, hunger and learning. Ileana Hanganu-Opatz is Professor of Neurophysiology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. She studies the mechanisms underlying the maturation of neuronal networks in health and disease. Panayiota Poirazi is a Research Director at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB), Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH). She used computational modeling techniques to study neuronal and dendritic computations and their role in learning and memory functions.

Source: European Journal of Neuroscience

DOI: 10.1111/ejn.13169

Authors: Emre Yaksi, Panayiota Poirazi, Ileana Hanganu‐Opatz