NERC Independent Research Fellowships 2024

The School is providing earlier opportunities to hone fellowship applications with informal reviews and advice when preparing a proposal. 

This call is not demand-managed. There are no limits, rankings or other forms of selection. The purpose of this process is simply to give you a chance to incorporate advice and feedback into your proposal earlier on. Depending on eligibility requirements and circumstances, drafts intended for 2024 may be improved with time and better targeted at 2025. In any case, this would only be advice and not a barrier to applying in 2024.  

For comprehensive information about the scheme, please visit the funder’s website. (NERC has not yet announced the 2024 call, but we expect it to be similar to the previous one.)

NERC Independent Research Fellowships

Support notes

Note 1 – Register your interest to participate in the internal support process.  

This is a very simple and standardised way in which we are gathering expressions of interest for this stage.

Note 2 - The session will take place in room 304B in the Grant Institute, King's Buildings, (location) on Wednesday 15 May 2024 from 1pm until 4pm. This year, the session is part of the school process designed to support all fellowship applicants, and all individuals thinking of applying to the summer fellowship calls through the School are required to attend and pitch their ideas.  

The session is a great opportunity for individuals to showcase their ideas and receive valuable feedback from other applicants and experienced academics. Each applicant will have a strict 10-minute slot to present their idea by addressing the following questions: 

• what are you going to investigate during the fellowship? 
• why is this work important? 
• how are you proposing to do it? 
• why are you the right person to do it? 
• why is GeoSciences at Edinburgh the best department in the UK for you? 

Presenters are encouraged to bring any visual aids or materials that can enhance their presentation and help the audience understand the ideas better. Following each pitch, a Q&A session will allow everyone to ask questions and provide constructive feedback. 

Note 3 – When you are drafting your full proposal, there are some steps you should be taking in advance of submitting your complete draft. 

   i) Make sure you have registered and completed the set-up of your user profile on the Funding Service. 

   ii) Start thinking about your budget costings. Only you will know what your research plans are, but you should read the scheme terms and conditions to check for eligible costs. Pay close attention to allowable cost types and what type of partner/collaborator can receive funds (if any – many cannot). Once you have a plan of what activity you will be doing, consult with the School’s Research Grants team to set up an approved draft budget. These can be in draft form until quite late. Still, you should confirm early on if something is not eligible for your funder’s support so you can adjust your written plans accordingly. 

   iii) If you are going to be using any of the School’s research facilities, you must consult with the facility managers early to get accurate costings for use and to double-check capacity and capability.  

   iv) The Edinburgh Research Office (ERO) has a library of successful applications on its website. However, it is only available to current staff. There is only one NERC IRF in that library from 2016, so its format is becoming increasingly outdated. We do not have permission to share with any others.   

   v) You may wish to seek advance support from any partners or collaborators outside the School who are important contributors to the project. Whilst you can wait for a final signed letter of support until you know for sure that you will apply, ensure you don’t leave it too late. We advise you to seek advance agreement so that these entities can write a letter of support for you and get it to you in good time. Please ensure the letter of support is on headed paper and includes a recent date.

Note 4 - At this stage, if you have nominated School academics who can help review your proposal, we will send your application to them to review. Otherwise, we will still try to get a light review of your full proposal from other experienced academics, including the Director of Research. Send your complete proposal via email by this date.

Email: researchorg.geos@ed.ac.uk 

Please note that it is preferable to have drafted your proposal on the Funding Service by this stage and provide us with a single PDF. Often this is possible using the print/export function from the submission system. However, you may not be able to print/export your application in this way. In that case, we still ask for a single PDF document rather than dealing with multiple attachments. 

Note 5 - Even if you do not participate in the review process up to this stage, this is a mandatory deadline for us to receive your draft Head of Department statement of support. We have template/starting point letters for you to edit. The most impressive support letters are personalised, meaningful, and, where possible, should make reference to any in-kind or extra support the School will be providing to you. These templates are the bare minimum starting point, and you should take time editing them to suit you. You should include details of the University or School specific resources, training courses, networks, etc., to bolster your case for holding your fellowship in the School of GeoSciences at the University instead of any other department. 

To learn more, email: researchorg.geos@ed.ac.uk

Note 6 - You might be one of many fellowship candidates targeting the submission deadline. Normally, we ask for your proposal to be almost finished around a week before the deadline. This is because before your proposal reaches your funder, the Edinburgh Research Office will need to read it to look for any errors and to make any constructive suggestions. Then, they can return your application to you online to make any last changes before you submit it. Please note that the Edinburgh Research Office needs to approve your application before submitting it fully by the funder deadline, even without any suggested changes.