As I recently announced, I have recently secured an ERC Starting Grant for my project on the genomics of miniaturisation in vertebrates. One of the things that was really valuable in the application process was reading others’ experiences on their websites and blogs, so I think it appropriate that I also recount my own experience. It was a mammoth effort, so it is extremely gratifying that it paid off in the end.
Taking a shot early for a chance at a second
Ever since I heard about the ERC StG sometime during my PhD, it has been an aspiration of mine to apply for one. I didn’t necessary expect to be able to get it, but I felt that the ability to apply would already be a huge achievement—it would prove (mostly to myself) that I was at an advanced and competitive point in terms of my scientific development. In the Tenure-Track Plan that I had to put together when I started my position at the Natural History Museum Denmark, I worded this aspiration carefully:
External Funding
Until substantial funding is acquired, regular yearly PI and co-PI applications to major external research grant competitions. Target programs include “starting grants” DFF Sapere Aude and Villum Young Investigator; as well as more general opportunities such as DFF Project 1 and various Carlsberg Fonden grants. Building towards applying for an ERC starting grant.
Simply put, I knew that I had six years to achieve tenure, and that the ERC StG was one of the most competitive and challenging grants out there, so I didn’t want to over-promise. But I wanted to make it clear that this was an aspiration. I expected that, if it happened, it would be rather in the last year of my tenure process. I was not, originally, planning to apply in October 2023, two years after starting at the museum.
But then, early in 2023, I started to do some calculations. One of the important limitations of an ERC StG is the time limit. You have to be within seven years of your PhD at the time of granting (so six years at the time of application) in order to be able to apply. If you get a bad grade on an initial application, you cannot apply in the subsequent year (if you get a good grade but are not successful, you can apply again the next year). In my case, by October 2023 I was four years out of my PhD. That meant that, even if I got a bad evaluation, I would definitely get two shots at the grant. If I waited one or two more years, I would probably only have one shot at it. So, on the balance, it seemed the right move to do my best in the 2023 round, learn from the experience, and have a chance to try again.
Finding the gaps—and how to fill them
So, early in 2023, I started doing some serious brainstorming about the project I wanted to put together. I knew that I wanted to focus in on miniaturisation; this is a space I have been exploring since my PhD; where I have a good publication record, have a deep and broad grasp of the literature, and one of the main directions I want to take my lab (the other being the field of museomics, where part of my lab is already working). I knew that some palaeontologists had invoked miniaturisation as an important diver of novelty—though I was not aware just how widespread this was until I started getting into it! I also knew that I wanted to use this rare opportunity for a massive amount of funding, to build resources from which my lab would be able to profit indefinitely. A 2018 paper on the genome of the world’s smallest fish had blown my socks off, but that was essentially the only foray to date into the genome of a miniaturised vertebrate. So I started to wonder what we knew about genomics of miniaturisation in other organisms? Here, too, I found only sparse information, but a series of patterns to do with genome size reduction, and semi-consistent patterns of selection and conservation. So here was a huge knowledge gap—one that we now have the technology and tools to fill—which I was coming to realise was of major evolutionary significance.
So, after much consideration, and a lot of reading, I came up with the general outline of what would become GEMINI: the foundation being an enormous comparative genomic paradigm, upon which a host of hypotheses, both established and novel, could be tested.
One of the big challenges I faced was deciding how big was too big, how small was too small, for a grant like this. I didn’t want to make a project that too straightforward, because being high risk is a big part of the evaluation of ERC grants—they should take big conceptual risks, whilst keeping operational risks manageable. So, I wanted to integrate elements in the grant that would go beyond just comparative genomics, to actually test the significance of results from the genomic tests. On the other hand, I also did not want to over-promise; methods and fields that I had never touched, like CRISPR, felt like they would be seen as unrealistic based on my publication record. Because the PI is at the centre of the ERC StG, it was important that I didn’t have elements in there that it seemed like I would be completely reliant on collaborators for. So, in discussion with Joost Woltering, who is well known for his work on limb development, I decided to integrate a work package involving developmental biology, which will look into the underpinnings of digit loss in frogs. I hoped, but was not confident, that this would take the grant a step forward in the direction of demonstration of function, without looking unrealistic in light of my qualifications.
I also profited in this a great deal from discussions with Tom Gilbert, who has been on the ERC StG panel, and who was able to give some very useful insights. For example, Tom emphasised the importance of highlighting that methods and tools used for a project like this should always be given as ‘one possibility would be…’ or ‘for instance using…’, because the best option at the time of execution of such a grant may have changed substantially from the best option at the time of applying.
Another aspect I found challenging was the time and personnel budgeting for the proposal. How many team members did I need, which tasks would they focus on, and how long would the respective pieces of the grant take? In the end, I have gone for a moderately small team—a three-year PhD student, three-year postdoc, and a two-year research assistant, staggered across the timeline. My own salary is fortunately covered by the Natural History Museum Denmark, so I was able to afford more personnel than I might otherwise have been able to afford. This, by the way, was one of the starkest realisations I had whilst perusing the proposals of others: the cost of personnel across member states of the EU differs so vastly, that a project in Denmark might only afford three staff members, whilst one in France or Spain might be able to afford a team twice as large. In the end, I had to settle for a reasonable compromise, based on a variety of factors, from institutional pressure to my own preference, and the limitations of the project.
Writing the grant—a new kind of immersion
What followed was an enormous investment in writing. Everyone I have spoken with has recommended at least six months to write an ERC StG. What is not clear, is what percentage of time is involved; six months full time is quite different from a few hours a week for six months. Unfortunately it is difficult for me to calculate exactly how much time I invested only in the ERC, because there is a confounding factor in the mix: the Sapere Aude Danske Forskningsfond Starting Grant was also due in October, and because I wanted to hedge my bets as well as I could (and because the Sapere Aude is listed in my Tenure-Track Plan as one of the grants I definitely wanted to apply for), I decided I would apply for both. However, as the two grants were in essence similar, except that the ERC StG is a larger and longer grant (both in terms of writing and in terms of duration, five years vs four), most of the work was shared among them. (My Sapere Aude was rejected without an interview).
I am very anal in tracking the time that I spend on my various tasks, in part because it helps me to balance responsibilities in a highly varied job with many demands on my time. So I use Tyme to track my work. Sometimes this is tedious, but what it does allow me to do is a pretty accurate breakdown of the amount of work I put into projects. Here I will be perhaps a little over-honest in the interest of transparency; this was perhaps the hardest thing I have ever written.
In total, I spent more hours in 2023 working on grants than on any other task; it made up 22% of my work time—almost twice as much as email! Between April 2023 and submitting the ERC at the end of October 2023, I spent 328 hours on grant writing, researching, brainstorming, meetings, or dealing with submission forms—roughly equivalent to nine full work weeks. Spread equally over these six months, that might seem perfectly reasonable, until I confess that over half of this time, 183 hours, was in October alone, and 84 hours was in September. You may realise that, at a work week of 37 hours, 183 work hours cannot be fit into the month of October. This is true. In fact, I worked a total of 260 hours in October—the true 80-hour work week. This was horrible, and I was not a fun person to be around for a good part of October. It was only possible thanks to the support of my wife, Ella, and her mother, Inge, who came to stay with us for this time.
The complete immersion that I achieved during this grant writing, especially in September and October, was unlike anything I have experienced before. Because I was spending the vast majority of my waking hours (and not an insignificant number of sleeping hours) thinking about the project, I reached a kind of flow state, where I was able to integrate pieces from literature across disciplines, to put together the grant. I was also keenly aware of the amount of time that was remaining before the deadline, and, fortunately, could maintain calm based on the rate that the writing was proceeding. There were some moments of panic in there, but ultimately I was single-mindedly focused on getting the grant finished and submitted.
So, just before the deadline on the 25th of October, I managed to submit the grant.
But then, unexpectedly, the deadline was extended due to the situation in the Middle East, and I had an unexpected opportunity to send it out to colleagues for some feedback. This wound up being essential, because quite aside from nice, positive feedback that the grant looked good, I received some input that it did not contain enough explicit reference to hypotheses being tested. As much as the project was set out to be exploratory from the start, it does incorporate a good deal of hypothesis testing, and this is also something that the reviewers look for. So, I had time to work over the grant, put these in greater focus, and draw the reader’s attention to them. I think that this last-minute change was probably essential to the proposal’s success.
So, finally, just before the new deadline, I resubmitted the grant, and breathed a long sigh of relief.
An unexpected interview
Just as I was waking up from hibernation in mid-March of 2024, I opened my email inbox to a new surprise:
Dear Dr SCHERZ,
The ERC evaluation panels, composed of independent experts, have carried out their review of the proposals submitted to the ERC StG 2024 call.
I am pleased to inform you that your proposal was retained following the first step of the evaluation and will now proceed to the second step.
…
About 20% of proposals move on to the second step, which is an interview. Information about the time and format of the interview filtered through slowly, with the most important pieces—length, format, date—coming only in April or May. The interview date was set for the 11th of June, and would be fifteen minutes, followed by ten minutes of questions.
ERC interviews are notoriously gruelling, so I tried my best to prepare as well as I could. First, I prioritised getting my slideshow together. This was extremely valuable in the end, because it really pushed me to develop some more imagery/visualisations, which I had not had time or presence of mind to prepare for in the lead-up to the application. It also made me re-analyse some of what I had proposed critically, and thus influenced the way I framed it. By the end of May, I had a really nicely polished presentation that I had practiced already many times, and that was both visually attractive and detailed.
For the interview, too, I received a great deal of help. The Science Finance office at the University of Copenhagen takes on applicants who have been invited for an interview for a practice round, and this was very valuable. I also held numerous practice interviews with several colleagues, where I encouraged them to ask tough questions. I received a few slide decks from friends and colleagues who had been through interviews, and these were particularly enlightening to the difficult balance of detail—not so much that I ran out of time, not so little that it was superficial.
I could write more about the preparation for the interview, but I think the most instructive is to tell the story about how it went. There are some lessons there.
Interviews for the ERC are no longer held in person, but instead are done remotely through a software called Webex. I had never used it before, but they provided guidance documents to explain its use, and I had plenty of time to practice. Although it is in principle not a terrible software for online meetings, it does have some serious flaws. One of those flaws is that it requires different permissions to access microphone, camera, and screen recording on a Mac when you are practicing for yourself, versus when you are actually in the call. I found this out the hard way: on the morning of my actual interview, I was invited into the waiting room, and then into the technician’s pre-interview room, where there was a software check to make sure everything worked. Even though everything had worked fine in practice, suddenly the software needed to be restarted in order to get permissions to work. Fortunately, there was time for this (that is what this time with the technician is for), and everything worked well after a brief software restart. But by this time, nerves were through the roof. For others, I would strongly recommend practicing in Webex in a ‘real’ room, where these permissions might already get set correctly before the real thing.
Finally, I was brought into the interview, and everything started running like quicksilver. There was a very rapid introduction of the chair of the council (my grant is on LS8: Evolutionary, population and environmental biology), and then the floor was given to me to kick off my presentation. I was standing at my standing desk in my office, the wall blank behind me (hoping beyond hope that nobody would start drilling or vacuuming and no sirens would blare at 8:30 in the morning), with two active screens in front of me. Because of the way screensharing works in WebEx, the panel were tiny on my screen, and I could barely register anyone I was speaking to. I could not guess how many people were in the room.
I rattled off my presentation—of the five dozen times I practiced it, none was as good as the interview presentation itself. I was proud and elated by the success of the delivery. And then, two heartbeats later, the council chair handed the floor over to the lead reviewer on the grant, and the first question came: a clearly articulated, excellent question; one I had myself thought of and discussed whilst writing the grant, about the design of the very paradigm the grant is centred around, and how it is set up.
But my mind went blank.
I took a beat, and then spluttered out something about this being a totally normal thing to do; something that others had done before; that it was sufficient and would work. A shit answer to a question I should have anticipated.
Then the next question was like a second blow to the stomach; one I had not anticipated at all, but that was totally astute. Given time and peace, I could easily come up with a cogent and well-argued answer that I think would have convinced the interviewer and the panel. But in the moment, my answer was halting and flustered. I had been repeatedly reminded of the importance of keeping answers short, so this was always at the front of my mind, and consequently I didn’t have the time I needed to ramble my way to a cogent answer.
In any case, I was already faced with the next question, now from another member of the council who had reviewed the application: why did I not go ahead and do CRISPR? How would the patterns I found in the genomes actually be integrated into the developmental work?
This one was I had been anticipating and was ready for, but by this time I was so flustered from the last two awful answers, I think my response was poorly phrased, and I had the impression that the council member thought so too. There was one or two more questions that went back and forth I think (none of which I felt good about), and then came the final questions, this time I believe from the council chair. He asked something about tardigrades, which I vaguely remember being very excited about, because firstly it was an easy one to answer, and secondly tardigrades are super interesting, because they seem to be an ancient lineage of miniaturised worms, where miniaturisation led to them losing basically all of the middle segments of what otherwise would have been a long animal. Also their genomes have essentially fallen apart. It’s pretty interesting.
And then suddenly there was a ‘thank you, you will hear from us’ or something, and the room was closed and I was standing in my office and all the tension of two months was passed, but I did not feel good about it. I was sure I had absolutely bombed the questions part of the interview, and consequently I stood no chance of being funded. But, on the other hand, it was over. I could breathe. And I wouldn’t hear for months. In my preparation, I had put in my calendar the expected announcement date of the ERC, some time around August 2024. So, I could forget about it for a long time. I went home to find the Lego Rivendell set had arrived just in time! My reward to myself for getting to this point.
The shortest waitlist
Out of the blue, at 11:00 on 15 July, I received an email with ‘Evaluation results’ in the header. This was a full month before I had expected to hear anything. After taking a second to brace myself, I opened the EU Funding and Tenders portal, and navigated my way to a document entitled. ‘Information Letter for reserve list’
Dear Applicant,
I am writing in connection with your proposal for the above-mentioned call.
Having completed the evaluation, we would like to inform you that — although it has in principle received a favourable evaluation — your proposal is unfortunately currently not high enough in the ranking to be funded (given the budget limit of the call).
Your proposal has however been put on the reserve list (proposals that might be invited to grant preparation if higher ranked proposals drop out or additional funding becomes available). In this case, we would contact you and invite you for grant preparation.
Please find enclosed the evaluation report (ER) for your proposal.
Of the two answers I had expected—brutal rejection, huge gratification—this was neither. Apparently the proposal was good enough to be funded, but I would have to wait until someone rejected their grant to have a chance of getting through. Or, so I thought. I was a bit too shaky to spend any time looking at the evaluation report for the proposal just yet, so I went home at the end of the day and was a bit unsure what to do with myself. There was much discussion of it over dinner. But then, after dinner as we were starting to get our son ready for bed, I glanced at my phone and there was a new email. This time, the email said ‘Start of grant preparation’. The body of the email said ‘Your proposal has reached the stage of Grant Agreement preparation’. I was very confused. Why would I have an email like that if I was on the reserve list? I immediately rushed to the computer and checked the portal and, after some rummaging through cryptic messages, managed to find a new letter:
Dear Applicant,
I am writing in connection with your proposal for the above-mentioned call.As mentioned in our previous letter, your proposal was put on the reserve list. We are pleased to inform you that we are now in a position to propose your proposal for grant preparation.
Ella and I just looked at each other in a state of disbelief—with more than a little uncertainty. Did this mean the grant was funded? I jumped over to a very informative thread I had occasionally visited by other applicants, and I was not the only one in this situation and uncertain about what it meant, but it slowly became clear: this was the ERC way of saying ‘congratulations, you got the grant’. Just five hours after being waitlisted, the grant had been approved‽ How could that possibly be? It seems that it was probably because the ERC got access to additional budget (178.5 million euros), allowing them to fund more grants than in the initial approval round, but they still had to go through the normal waitlisting process first.
Suffice it to say, I brought a good deal of cake along to work a few days later.
What the panel and reviewers actually thought
At some point, maybe a week or two later, I finally had the headspace to read the decision letter and reviewers’ comments on my grant. A few things stand out from this. Firstly, it is clear that the panel generally liked the grant and my track-record as a PI, but that my performance in the interview had indeed failed to assuage the key concerns they had about the conceptual approach behind the grant.
The panel found that the interview did not clarify how the PI will deal with [redacted]. Finally, the panel found that the developmental WP4 was not very well integrated with the other WPs.
I was shocked to find that the grant had comments from eight expert reviewers. I had no idea that there would be so many people involved. The comments varied extremely, from ‘practically no innovation’ to ‘this is awesome and ground breaking’. I particularly appreciated Reviewer 8’s comment, ‘the project proposal itself demonstrates the applicant’s ability to conduct ground breaking research’. But honestly, I still haven’t fully taken on board all eight sets of comments; there’s a lot in there to process and think about, and it will certainly shape the way that the project actually plays out.
In the interim, there has been a flurry of activity—working with the science finance office at KU, dealing with project planning, preparing EU documents, etc.—but I am now well on my way to kicking off the project. It will start officially on 1 January 2025, and run for five years. This will be a total transformation of my lab, but I am extremely excited to see where it takes me and my burgeoning group!