Back in the Fall, I spent most of my time writing a grant proposal.

In Europe, getting a European Research Council (ERC) grant is how you know you’ve made it as a researcher. Covering both science and the humanities, ERC grants give a lump of funding big enough to hire a research group, turning you from a lone expert into a local big-shot. The grants last five years, and are organized by “academic age”, the number of years since your PhD. ERC Starting Grants give 1.5 million euros for those with academic age 2-7. At academic age 7-12, you need to apply for the Consolidator Grant. The competition is fiercer, but if you make it through you get 2 million euros. Finally, Advanced Grants give 2.5 million to more advanced researchers.

I’m old, at least in terms of academic age. I applied to the ERC Starting Grant in 2021, but this last year I was too academically old to qualify, so I applied to the Consolidator Grant instead.

I won’t know if they invite me for an interview until June…but since I’m leaving the field, there wouldn’t be much point in going anyway. So I figured, why not share the grant application with you guys?

That’s what I’m doing in this post. I think there are good ideas in here, a few research directions that fellow amplitudeologists might want to consider. (I’ve removed details on one of them, the second work package, because some friends of mine are already working on it.)

The format could also be helpful. My wife is more than a bit of a LaTeX wiz, she coded up Gantt charts and helped with the format of the headers and the color scheme. If you want an ERC proposal that doesn’t look like the default thing you could do with LaTeX or Word, then take a look.

Finally, I suspect some laymen in the audience are just curious what a scientific grant proposal looks like. While I’ve cut a few things (and a few of these were shorter than they ought to have been to begin with), this might satisfy your curiosity.

You can find the proposal in a zip file here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/WTVN0F16HG#mYaz0edaOGha . I’ve included pdfs of the two required parts, B1 and B2, as well as the LaTeX files used to generate them.

For those of you still in the game, good luck with your ERCs!