Royal Society University Research Fellowships 2025

Support notes

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

• Part 1. Complete the online form. You will be asked to suggest three school staff who could competently review your full proposal later in the process. These reviewers may be invited to watch your presentation (see Note 2).
• Part 2. You must also download the Expression of Interest form, complete it, and send this by email to researchorg.geos@ed.ac.uk by the same deadline as the online form.
  • You should pay close attention to the Application Tips, particularly the Scientific Track Record section.

Note 2 - The presentation session(s) will take place in person in Edinburgh. Remote video presentations are possible where a trip to Edinburgh would be unaffordable, if you have are other commitments or travel plans, or if you are living or working in another timezone and it would be disruptive to travel for this purpose. There is space on the online form for the Expression of Interest where you can indicate what you need to do. 

At this presentation session you should concentrate your presentation in two parts

• Your research proposal
• Why it must be carried out at the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh - why here and nowhere else?
  • You suould pay close attention to the Application Tips, particularly the Scientific Proposal and Host Organisation sections.

The exact length of your presentation will be determined once we know how many expressions of interest we received, but you should plan for ~10-15 minutes. We will notify you before the session exactly how long to plan for. 

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 Royal Society submission system. 

   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). We can provide you with a contact within the University who must prepare your budget for you. Your budget can be in draft form until quite late whilst you take on board any feedback and peer review comments. Still, you should confirm early on if something is completely ineligible for support so that you can adjust your 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. It cannot be shared outside of the University with external applicants.   

   v) You may wish to seek advance support from any partners or collaborators outside the School who are important contributors to the project. If you need a statement or letter of support you may want to wait until you know for sure that you will apply, but please ensure you don’t leave it too late. We advise you to seek some informal 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 there are School academics who can help review your proposal, we will send your application to them for peer review. Otherwise, we will still try to get a light review of your full proposal from other experienced academics, including the Director of Research. Export your full proposal from the Royal Society system and send your complete proposal via email to researchorg.geos@ed.ac.uk by this date. The Head of School is required to provide a Statement of Support. You need to draft this in advance for our Head of School to review, edit, and use in the system once you are ready. We will contact the people who get to this stage with more details about this and a deadline by which 

The most impressive support letters are personalised, meaningful, and, where possible, should make reference to the special factors that make this school of this university the only place for you to hold this Fellowship. You should include details of the University or School-specific resources, training courses, networks, etc.

Note 6 - You might be one of many fellowship candidates targeting the submission deadline, and there will be staff submitting their own research grant proposals on the same day. You may not get our exclusive attention around the deadline. Normally, we ask for your proposal to be almost finished at least one week before the deadline. This is because before your proposal reaches the funder, the Edinburgh Research Office (ERO) will need to check it. to look carefully for any errors and to make constructive suggestions. If your proposal is almost finished at least a week before the deadline then there is time for you to make any late changes before you submit it. Please note that ERO needs to approve your application in the system after you've formally submitted it and before the deadline. You therefore must not leave it until deadline day for ERO to see the final version for submission.