Last week, I started to dip into the NSERC Discovery grant budget development process.

I have been getting quite a few comments, but my spam filters have been catching almost all of them. If you have posted comments and they have not been approved, please email me (via the website feedback page) to ensure that I process your comment appropriately. A little trick for skipping the filters: don’t include any links. Thanks!

Here is a recap of last week’s posts:

DG2010 – Evaluation Changes reviewed some of the changes to the evaluation process for the Discovery grant competition. I have had a few comments on this post via email regarding a misunderstanding of how the binning process will be applied. I am working on clarifying my understanding so that I can post a refined view of how this will work (or did work last year).

DG2008 & DG2009 Scatter Plots is a quick view of the scatter plot slide from the NSERC DG2010 information sessions. This data provides a bit more context to the Evaluation Changes post.

DG2010 – Building a (Normal!) Budget describes the importance of linking the budget request with the actual research work planned. Links to sites for calculating the budget ranges for GSCs from previous competitions and the NSERC Awards Search Engine are included.

Discovery Grants – Budget Breakdowns revists a post from The Accidental Mathematician on how research budgets are spent in math and stats.

DG2010 – Budget Rules of Thumb is an updated post from the last DG competition summarizing collected wisdom on budgetary rules of thumb. Be advised not to take these rules of thumb for face value — be sure to critically analyze whether these assumptions make sense for your research.

As mentioned in the notes for the Evaluation Changes posts, I am working on clarifying my understanding of the binning process and hope to provide updates soon. If you have any thoughts or knowledge of the process feel free to drop me a line!

I haven’t written all the posts for the rest of this week yet, so I don’t have a preview of what is coming up next. Stay tuned!

The following is a non-exhaustive list of rules of thumb for budgets (hopefully I don’t get skewered for putting this in print):

Equipment

• a computer purchase can be estimated at ~$2.5k

• Don’t forget to include the cost of federal and provincial taxes in your purchase – don’t let yourself be blindsided by these – they are real and justifiable parts of your cost (most academic institutions only pay a proportion of the GST, therefore use the unrebated portion of the tax in your calculations)
• If you have a large piece of equipment in your lab, you can ask for peripherals to expand/extend use (i.e. lenses for a microscope, etc.)

Materials & Supplies

• Life science disciplines, multiply the number of people supported by the grant by $10k (i.e. 2 grad students and a half time technician = $25k request) adjust downward if you don’t have enzyme or animal costs

• For grants involving cellular, molecular, developmental, biomedical, etc. research, assume an average real cost of ~ $1.5k per month ($18k per year) in supplies
• If you plan to hire undergraduate researchers (summer or otherwise) plan for additional materials and supplies expenses (for wastage)

Travel

• $4-5k for the PI, $1-2k per each supervised student/post-doc

• Aim for about 5% of total budget request

Dissemination

• Estimate ~$1k per paper, unless you use open source publications, then estimate ~$2.5k per paper

Other

• $200-1k for the cost of miscellaneous items such as photocopying, faxing, printing, toner cartridges, etc.

Do you have other rules of thumb to share? Please feel free to add by commenting on this post or sending me an email. I’ll post a more comprehensive list as material becomes available.

(Note: This post was originally posted in October 2008, but I’m not above recycling good information when I’m short on time. It is slightly updated. Hope you find it useful!)

Last year, Izabella Laba described how an average Discovery grant in mathematics is spent in her blog. This discussion is very interesting as it gives some perspective on how challenging it can be to fund research in mathematics.

I posted this last year, but I still think that it provides some relevant insight into some of the challenges that math and stats researchers face. If you have the time, Dr. Laba also discusses other aspects of her experience securing enough funding to run a research program – it’s worth a read.

If you don’t ask, you can’t get.

While the pressure to stay within the “norm” is increasing in this competition, it is important for applicants to remember that it is just as dangerous to lowball research expenses as it is to ask for too much. The key element to remember is that the budget and the research plan need to be linked. If the proposal includes projects that require 5 pairs of (graduate student) hands to meet the workload demands and the budget only asks for funds for one student (with no discussion of how the other four bodies will enter the project) – the applicant has effectively demonstrated that they do not know how to plan or manage research.

Many applicants devote all of their energy to writing the research plan without any thought towards the budget until the last few days before the deadline, then they ask their colleagues what the norm is for their field and plug that data into their budget forms. If you plan for a Porche and budget for a Smart Car, you are either going to be driving a Smart Car or not driving at all. The new scorecard system for binning applicants based on their budget request is going to make planning an appropriate budget an increasingly important element of Discovery Grant applications.

So how do you find out the norm? Ask colleagues, look at the statistical analysis of previous Discovery Grant competitions (links to: 2009 data, 2008 data), search through the NSERC award database to find out what competitive labs are receiving and then make a budget that is closely linked to the research plan.

While the GSGs are no more, looking up the min/average/max award amounts for the most relevant GSGs will help provide a ballpark of the normal funding levels for a particular field of study. This information is available from either the statistics links above or the NSERC Awards Search Engine. Some departments and/or research offices also keep records on the norm and might provide an opportunity to find out the budget breakdown in addition to the budget totals. It can’t hurt to ask – you never know what data might be shared.

While knowing the total award doesn’t tell the entire story and shouldn’t dictate the budget to apply for, it does give a guideline when writing a research plan to ensure that the plan (and linked budget) fall within a normal funding range for a particular field. This information is most useful for new applicants who are uncertain how to set their first budget, but is a good touchstone for returning applicants as well.

From the NSERC DG2010 Information Session slides & the DG2009 statistics:

To give a bit more context to the previous post.