Seminar Today

Well I sat through the how to write a grant seminar today. It covered all of the stages of the EU funding under the Framework 7 Program. We were told how politicians make policy and then how the policy is handed to the bureaucracy who design the committee that organised the grants and eventually gives money to the scientists, The interplay between these three bodies covers a forward looking time scale of 10-15 years.

A lot of the seminar was about how to write bog grants. So centre wide grants for 5-10 institutes and up to 6 million euro funding. what I was more interested in was the fellowship funding. the so-called Marie Curie fellowships which give you your own money to hire a postdoc and do your own research project ovber the course of 3 years or so. The idea of these grants is to encourage skills and mobility in young scientists. So maybe in about 6 months I will position myself for one of these grants to do some single monolayer organic small molecule spectroscopy with the LT-STM here. Who knows...
But all in all there is a shit-load of red tape to go through to apply for any type of funding. You have to compete with the best scientists in all of europe which makes me a small fish in a big pond. There are institutes like the Max Planck Institute with entire departments working full time on grant applications for it's scientists. Also inductry can apply for this type of money. Phillips is a big investor in fundamental research in europe. The next stage of science for me is yet another one of those watersheds where many of us fall by the way.

Lets hope I can jump that hurdle when i get to it.