What characterises a good ERC application? For many researchers, the answer is not only academic strength, but also insight into what a winning application actually looks like in practice.
The Research Council's ERC application reading days provide precisely this insight. Through access to previously funded applications, researchers gain a concrete understanding of what is required – and how they themselves can structure and sharpen their own projects.
"I gained a broad understanding of different ways of formulating and structuring the application, while at the same time seeing what the common features are for a good and successful application," says Iselin Åsedotter Strønen.
From inspiration to concrete improvement
For many, the reading days serve as an important turning point in the application process. By participating both early and late in the work, researchers can find both inspiration and concrete tools.
"The first time gave me an overview and understanding of the scope. The second time, I went more in-depth and used the applications actively in the work on my own," says Strønen.
By studying how others have structured the application, it becomes easier to make conscious choices in your own text. Everything from how the introduction captures the reader's attention, to how research questions, goals and progress plan are presented, can be decisive.
"I noted a lot along the way – how they formulated the introduction, how they structured the project, how they described the state-of-the-art and what took the project forward. It gave me a concrete starting point for developing my own application.
Security in structure and level
Ida-Marie Høyvik also highlights the insight into what actually characterises a good application as particularly valuable.
"It was useful to see that there were large variations in how a good application was structured, and to get a sense of the level of detail the applicants had focused on. At the same time, I saw how specific the applications were," she says.
She participated in the reading days before she started working on her own application.
"It made me feel more confident in choosing a structure that suited my theme.
Her advice to other researchers is clear:
"I would recommend everyone who is going to apply to participate. It is good to gain insight into how specific you should be about what you want to do and why.
Research with global significance
Strønen's project focuses on gender inequalities in the fisheries and seafood sector globally. Despite the fact that women make up a large part of the workforce, their efforts are often little recognised, and they have weaker access to rights and influence than men.
The project will investigate why these inequalities are so difficult to change, through fieldwork on several continents and analyses of the interaction between local conditions and international politics and administration. For this work, she has received an ERC Consolidator Grant of around NOK 23 million over five years.
Strønen is an associate professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, and conducts research on gender, inequality and natural resources with extensive international fieldwork experience.
Developing new models for molecular systems
Høyvik is a professor of theoretical chemistry at NTNU and researches the development of electron structure theory for molecules and molecular systems. She has previously worked with cost-effective algorithms and models to describe the behavior of electrons, including through so-called coupled-cluster methods and multilevel models.
Today, she focuses in particular on systems where the number of electrons is not constant, for example in interaction with the environment or in non-equilibrium situations. In a project funded by the Research Council of Norway, she is developing new wavefunction models for such systems, and has also explored how this can be used to describe redox processes.
From the ERC project, she has received a Consolidator Grant of EUR 2 million.