Veni is an dutch science foundation grant for researchers who are within 3 years of the acquisition of their Ph.D.. This is the first personal grant I have applied for. I spent about 3 months working day and nights, working on the proposal, application, and rebuttal. The result is that the three reviewer reports are overall very promising, leading to great hopes, but the funding committees don’t find the proposal (let’s call it proposal A) that appealing. I am completely fine with it, but I do want to speak out my opinions about the bias in the evaluation process.
In comparison, I have a proposal B written afterwards which is with extended methodology and data sources, but a much confined study area — global-scale for the Veni proposal vs. a European country for the proposal B.
My collaborator told me the proposal B was ranked the second, almost in, only my relationship with University is slightly weaker compared to the top ranked, and most people reading it found it strong.
The proposal A even fall out of the “very good” category, that is a shock. The most negative criticism for proposal A is that it is too ambitious and they would prefer a more confined study to fully consider all the uncertainties and interpretations, and this “too ambitious” is then followed in the entire evaluation, even saying my academic performance does not match up with this ambitious goal. This is a very unfair point but this is not what I want to discuss.
I want to share my opinion on this comment of “too ambitious”. I acknowledge that in the beginning I shared the same view with the reviewers, and even argued emotionally with my current supervisor. As a data person in core, I care about uncertainty and interpretability as much as any serious data scientist, which means I also preferred a small study area with lots of data to fully evaluate all the uncertainties and the physical meanings of the atmospheric processes. However, with time passing by and with more knowledges, I do grow a convincing view of the global-scale study, as besides the social and academic impacts, this is the only way of appreciating the heterogeneities between regions, and importantly, with global coverage satellite imagery and more and more geospatial data, it is a matter of time that we make high quality, high resolution global maps, then the next step? A better exposure assessment. I want to shout out that all these evolutions will be happening within the next three years! However, for researchers never gave the global-scale modelling a deep thought, “too ambitious” is going to be the intuition, based on their many years of experiences as professors.
The other point that the committee raised is about the uncertainty from data sources, this part was in the beginning elaborated but suggested to be removed by my supervisor. This is clearly due to different perspectives from researchers from different background caring different aspects. My supervisor thinks no-one would care about the uncertainty. The proposal is limited to less than 1800 words, I agreed purely because I got to elaborate my plans, otherwise the critics would be the plan is not clear.
Reflecting on the two points, before working on the global mapping, I am completely in-line with the committees. If I were the committee, I would reach to the same comments and would also prefer the proposal B, but the key point is, my opinion changed after setting hands on the global mapping — I like both proposals equally! For the globals-scale study, I was not stating the accuracy is the same everywhere, but I did promised uncertainty assessment everywhere. Importantly, if the global mapping is not started, it won’t ever started because the committee will always find it too ambitious. And for the challenging areas there will never be an estimation, and the estimation will never be improved!
Here comes my critics for the grant system: for something no-one has done before, the judgement may be greatly biased! This problem is exacerbated by the word limit. It is hard to both convince the committee and write a plan in limited words. Some changes are needed. At least the rebuttal should be allowed to be longer. Second of all, the committee should analyse the opinions from all the reviewers carefully. It is now clearly indicated in the letter that the committee is not obliged to follow the referees’ report completely.
Autumn sunshine 