• Question: How easy is it to get funding for the type of work you do? How much time do you spend filling in forms rather than getting to do the interesting stuff?

    Asked by dralnuamaani to Austin, Kirsty, Nicola, Nike, Sarah on 18 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Austin Elliott

      Austin Elliott answered on 18 Jun 2012:


      It’s pretty tough to get funding for any kind of research work at the moment, mainly because money is in short supply (the economy!) and most scientific research is expensive to do. Everyone I know who runs a lab has got very good at making a little money go a long way – we have Master’s degree students (a one year degree some people do after their first degree), and postgraduate students from other countries who have come to the UK to get a doctorate, and undergraduate project students, running experiments, and we find ways to buy stuff in bulk to make it cheaper, and to make things that we can’t afford to buy. It reminds me a bit of the 1980s when I started, when money was also pretty short.

      Of course, there are always some really well-funded labs, if they are really famous, or are the very best in the world at what they do, or work on really ‘hot’ things (or all three of those!), so if you work there things aren’t so tight. I guess some of the really big-name labs working on stem cells probably still have a lot of research money.

      There is more form-filling then when I started, too – a lot of it is because there are a lot more checks now on how public money is spent. Tax money still funds Universities, and a lot of ‘research grants’ come from tax money or from research charities, and we definitely have to explain in far more detail what we’re going to spend the money on, or what we did spend it on. Probably the biggest problem of all at the moment is that you have to write lots of applications for research money to get some – everyone is competing for it, so the success rate is quite low. But people keep trying because they believe in what they do.

      I wouldn’t say that all of this stuff means that form filling is all you do. It also depends what your job is. As a doctoral (PhD) student you mainly only do the interesting stuff, and even as a ‘postdoctoral research scientist’, like Kirsty is, you probably don’t really do form filling much. It’s when you run the lab, like Sarah does or I do, that the paperwork gets annoying. But you usually only get to that sort of job after you’ve been a scientist for ten years or more, so you tend to spend a lot of time first doing the interesting stuff. I think I only began to find the amount of form-filling I had to do really tiresome when I was getting close to 40 and had been running a lab for quite a few years.

      If you do get to the “Arrgh! Forms!” stage, the only real solution is to be good at organising your time, so you get the dull stuff out of the way efficiently and save time for the good stuff. From reading what she’s written I have the impression Sarah is much better at this than me!!

    • Photo: Kirsty Ross

      Kirsty Ross answered on 18 Jun 2012:


      The funny thing is, if you can prove that you are competitive enough to get the smaller amounts of money early in your career (for trips to conferences, other labs etc) it does become easier to get the larger amounts. As Austin says, it isn’t really part of my job. You often have to submit to lots of different places, like research councils and charities, but can’t always submit the same ideas, so you have to get creative to make your applications distinct.

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