In the new episode of the NCN podcast, professors Artur Obłuski and Piotr Sankowski, who have won grants from the European Research Council (ERC) and the National Science Centre, talk about their experiences in preparing research proposals and discuss the importance of perseverance in their quest for funding.
Artur Obłuski is an archaeologist at the helm of the Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw; he has led excavations, e.g. in Old Dongola in what is now Sudan. Piotr Sankowski is the mastermind and the first president of an AI research centre known as IDEAS NCBR. He received the NCN Award in recognition of his foundational research in the field of graph algorithms. He is also the only Polish researcher to have won four ERC grants.
“Behind any proposal, there needs to be an idea, a question that you want to answer. This is what science is all about: it’s about asking questions”, says Artur Obłuski. Piotr Sankowski explains that preparing a successful research proposal is a process. “Before we applied to the ERC, we had submitted many proposals to the NCN, to the EU; some made the cut, some did not, and this is how we learned to write them really well”, he says. “It is part of the job description for a researcher to know how to write grant proposals; we just have to learn it, it’s part of our job”, he adds.
A competitive procedure
Between 2011 and 2023, nearly 56 thousand researchers submitted grant proposals to the NCN. We funded nearly 30 thousand projects, with more than 21 thousand winners, i.e. more than 21 thousand people who were able to pursue their research plans as PIs thanks to NCN funding (and that’s not counting all the research team members in their grants!).
The selection procedure at the NCN is very competitive. Most of those who ultimately win a grant have previously walked away empty-handed. People who have worked on more than one project and never failed to win a grant represent just two percent of all applicants. After an initial failure, some researchers never try again.
A consistent research record
In the NCN podcast, Artur Obłuski and Piotr Sankowski share their personal experience in applying for funding and encourage others to never give up. “I started writing proposals and applying for jobs when I was at the University of Chicago and wanted to stay there or someplace else in the US a little longer. I sent out around 20 job applications, maybe more, and failed to get any of those jobs. But I think the idea is to never give up...If you’re confident you have a good research programme, just keep going”, says Artur Obłuski.
Both our guests admit that, today, they make short work of writing proposals but before they do, they take several months to get prepared. “Building a consistent research record, asking questions that fall within the wide spectrum of interest of other researchers or research programmes around the world: this is something I think a lot about before I begin writing a proposal”, stresses Piotr Sankowski. Artur Obłuski adds that consultations with colleagues in the field are equally important. “Today, archaeology is such a complex discipline that you cannot keep track of everything that goes on in every nook and cranny of this atomised field. We use the methods of physics (archaeometry) but also history. We need to be able to read ancient and medieval texts. And then there’s archaeobotany, which means we need to know about plants that once grew in this or that region. It is simply impossible for one person to hold it all in their head, so we have to ask our colleagues”, he says.
The same tone continues throughout our interview. Our guests point out that consulting proposals submitted to, e.g. the ERC with other experienced researchers is now the standard at many Western universities. “In Poland, a colleague will often hesitate to show their proposal for fear I might steal their research idea. I’ve never seen that happen in the West; on the contrary, researchers want to share their work, because a colleague who comes in with a slightly different perspective can really help them a lot with their proposal”, says Piotr Sankowski.
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast or YouTube.