What makes a good ERC proposal? The answer lies not only in academic strength, but also in an understanding of how to present and explain your idea to the critical evaluators in the best possible way.
The Research Council’s ERC Proposal Reading Days provide precisely this insight. Through access to previously funded proposals, researchers gain a concrete understanding of what is required – and how they themselves can structure and refine their own project proposals.
“I gained a broad understanding of different ways to formulate and structure the proposal, whilst also seeing what the common features of a good and successful proposal are“, says Iselin Åsedotter Strønen.
From inspiration to concrete improvement
For many, the proposal reading days serve as an important turning point in the application process. By participating both early and late in the process, researchers can gain both inspiration and concrete tools.
“The first time gave me an overview and an understanding of the scope. The second time I went into more depth and actively used the successful proposals in my own work”, says Strønen.
By studying how others have structured their proposals, it becomes easier to make informed choices in your own text. Everything, from how the introduction captures the reader’s attention to how the research question, objectives, and progress plan are presented, can be crucial.
“I took plenty of notes along the way: How they phrased the introduction, how they structured the project, how they described the state of the art, and what took the project forward. That gave me a concrete starting point for developing my own proposal”.
Confidence in structure and standard
Ida-Marie Høyvik also highlights the insight into what characterises a good proposal as particularly valuable.
“It was useful to see that there were significant variations in how a good proposal was structured, and to get a sense of the level of detail the applicants had gone into. At the same time, I saw how concrete the applications were”, she says.
She participated in the reading days before beginning work on her own proposal.
“That made me feel more confident about choosing a structure that suited my topic.”
Her advice to other researchers is clear:
“I would recommend that everyone planning to apply takes part. It’s good to gain an insight into how specific you should be about what you want to do and why”.
Research with global significance
Strønen’s project focuses on gender inequalities in the global fisheries and seafood sector. Despite women making up a large proportion of the workforce, their contributions are often under-recognised, and they have less access to rights and influence than men.
The project aims to investigate why these inequalities are so difficult to change, through fieldwork across several continents and analyses of the interplay between local conditions and international politics and governance. For this work, she has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of around 23 million NOK over five years.
Strønen is an associate professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen and conducts research on gender, inequality and natural resources, with extensive international fieldwork experience.
Developing new models for molecular systems
Høyvik is a professor of theoretical chemistry at NTNU and does research on the development of electronic structure theory for molecules and molecular systems. She has previously worked on cost-effective algorithms and models to describe the behaviour of electrons, including through so-called coupled-cluster methods and multi-level models.
Today, she focuses particularly on systems where the number of electrons is not constant, for example, when interacting with the surroundings or in non-equilibrium situations. In a project funded by the Research Council of Norway, she is developing new wavefunction models for such systems and has also explored how this can be used to describe redox processes.
She has received a Consolidator Grant of 2 million euros from the ERC.