The “Mathematics Committee for Liaison with NSERC” has provided more insight into the 2009 Discovery grants competition from the perspective of applicants and committee members of GSCs 336 and 337. Read their letter to the Canadian mathematics community here.

The letter contains some interesting commentary on the binning process and describes some specific challenges for the mathematics research community.

I think they raise some very valid points regarding the weaknesses of the binning process, namely the potential for large cuts in funding. I think that this issue will create instability in research programs and promote conservatism in research and training initiatives in the years bracketing renewal.

Another interesting comment was on the challenges of instituting a minimum grant amount ($14,000 for the GSCs 336 and 337 in the 2009 competition).

The letter is worth a read even if you are not in the discipline of mathematics.

Yesterday, Genome Canada announced the results of the Applied Genomics Research in Bioproducts or Crops (ABC) Competition. A total of 12 projects were funded with $53 million of Genome Canada dollars levering a total of $112 million in total funding.

Rob Annan has some amusing commentary on the whole affair. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

All in all, I’m pretty thrilled that the western Genome Centres snagged 8 of the 12 awards.

Last week I was at a training session at NSERC and I learned something that I didn’t know before.

A few years ago, the online system would keep forms available for 7 years. That timeframe has now been compressed to 18 months!

This is great if you have many different test applications cluttering your eConsole as they will be removed in a much shorter timeframe. It is also a more effective use of NSERC’s resources – as the amount of net data storage is reduced.

Of course this does not apply to the Form 100 (the CV module or “personal data form”).

The take home message: Save a copy of your application (a pdf version) as soon as you click submit, because you never know when an archival copy of your grant applications will come in handy.

The results of the 2009 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s Discovery grant competition were announced on Friday. Generally the results are released in mid-March, so the delay was part and parcel of a series of odd events for this competition.

Rob Annan provided a very good summary of some of these issues in his blog. To summarize:

1) The results were announced by the Right Honourable Gary Goodyear himself (Canadian Minister of State, Science and Technology). Usually the DG program doesn’t rate ministerial announcement. See the press release here.

2) The second news release put a slightly different spin on the “good news” reported by Goodyear. For example:

• the success rate has declined
• the total amount of funding for the program was flat over the last two competitions ($349.3 million), however, the average award has increased by $4,000 per year. Technically speaking, the total number of applicants has been declining over the past three years, but the variance in total applicants in 2007 and 2008 was largely due to fewer new applicants. (Email me if you want the 2007 and 2008 detailed competition statistics.) In any event, the increase of funding per applicant is more related to the fact that fewer people applied and even less were successful.

Apparently, NSERC will be presenting more comprehensive stats on the competition soon. This is significant because detailed analysis of the Discovery competition doesn’t usually get released until September.

(I wonder if the delayed announcement is due to an attempt to provide competition analysis with competition results?)

Of course, it makes sense (to try) to be more transparent in this competition in anticipation of the heightened scrutiny related to the partial implementation of the new peer review process.

The new process attempts to disconnect the scientific merit of the applications and applicants from the award of funds through a scorecard system. Theoretically, this will reduce cronyism by funding applications based purely on relative score versus less qualitative factors.

I am looking forward to seeing the detailed statistics.

Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s President, Alain Beaudet, announced that CIHR will be providing a one-time supplement to all operating grants awarded in the Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 competitions. It appears that grant holders will receive (on average) a 3% retroactive increase in funding.

Interesting.