We are pleased to announce that staff now have access to an online Research Grant Writing course, to be accessed at their own pace. The course consists of a range of short video lectures and learning materials, developed and delivered by Andrew Derrington*, who has delivered many successful, high-quality workshops for us over a number of years. The course draws on Andrew’s experience as a science journalist, and explains his design for a Case for Support, the main document of a grant application, that answers the important questions that every research funder considers when deciding whether or not to award a grant. Importantly, Andrew’s design ensures that the Case for Support answers the questions in a way that suits both the referees, who are experts on your research topic with plenty of time to analyse your Case for Support, and committee members, who know very little about your research topic and have almost no time to read your Case for Support, but who actually make the funding decision.

The workshops explain the approach, its rationale, and the specifications of a set of key sentences, which form the framework of the Case for Support for a project grant. The workshops also discuss how to create key sentences to support other types of grant, such as fellowships.  These workshops are even more useful for senior academics than they are for early career researchers because the design for the case for support makes it possible to write multiple applications very efficiently. 

We are pleased to be able to offer 100 places to the self-paced individual workshops, to all research staff enabling access for a week to video lectures and learning materials, to be covered at their own pace. 

To book your place on the course please go to eventbrite.

*Andrew was a successful academic who wrote grant applications that funded his research continuously from when he finished his PhD until when he became Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Kent, and was too busy to do research. He was also a member of grants committees for fifteen years and participated in the funding decisions on several thousand grant applications.