Semester 1, Week 7: Dr Tom Elsden, University of St Andrews

Title: My Experience on a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Grants Panel  

Abstract: The UK government disseminates money for research primarily through the body UKRI. Sitting inside this are many different research councils responsible for different research areas. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is the research council covering nuclear physics, particle physics and astronomy – where astronomy is deemed to mean any research pertaining to a few 100 km or so above the Earth and beyond. 

This year I was on the panel for the STFC Small Awards Scheme in Solar and Planetary Studies: https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/astronomy-solar-and-planetary-small-awards-2026/. This is run in tandem with the separate panel for astronomy (observation and theory) small awards. Based on last year’s funding, these panels combined hand out around 50-60 awards of roughly £500-750k each, where each award is used primarily for funding a single post-doctoral researcher to work on a specific project for 3 years. Our job as panel members is to provide a ranked list of all the applications, based on expert reviewer reports and how well the applications meet the given criteria.  

In this talk I’d like to discuss how the panel operates, how applications are assessed and how we (St Andrews) can improve our applications going forward (4 of us from maths were leading applications in this round). From reading around 45 proposals this year, many of them had simple things which could have been improved to better meet the guidelines. Many of the elements of this assessment process will be common across other funding councils, so I hope that this is also useful for those not funded by STFC. I would also like this to be as much of a discussion as possible, so please do come along with questions about this funding scheme.