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!

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Update from November 2024:

I wanted to include a bit more information for those who want to build off some of the ideas in the proposal.

I did end up getting offered an interview for this grant, and since the ERC doesn’t give any way to withdraw in their system I ended up going through with the interview. I didn’t get the grant, but I think it would have had a solid chance if I had had the time to focus and prepare for it (rather than mostly being busy applying for industry jobs). If anyone wants to write their own proposal building on some of the research directions I’m proposing here, I’m happy to chat and give you advice. In particular, a few things to keep in mind:

• You need a good list of pheno applications. In particular, unless you focus your proposal heavily on the gravitational wave side, you need a good list of particle physics applications, because the particle physicists generally won’t think that the gravitational wave side “counts”. I was asked in the interview to name three particle physics measurements this would help with, I had mentioned two in the proposal and could only come up with one off the top of my head. You can do a lot better with preparation.
• Relatedly, you need some idea of what the pipeline looks like, what these calculations eventually get used for, including the looming question of “why do this analytically rather than numerically?”
• If you’re including the N=4 super Yang-Mills side of the story, you’ll have to overcome some skepticism. Some of that skepticism can be brushed aside by emphasizing the theory’s track record (canonical differential equations probably wouldn’t exist without research in N=4 symbols), but a meaningful source of skepticism is just whether you can work with dim reg. This is an issue currently facing a few other approaches, so it’s good to have a good answer for it!
• If you’re relying a lot on the expertise of the people you plan on hiring (I definitely was, especially in planning to hire a mathematician) then ideally you should have some idea of who you could hire. I wasn’t in a position to do this for obvious reasons, but anyone that has a stable position should consider talking to potential hires in advance so you have a list of names.
• Have justifications in mind for your budget. Yes, you’ll be encouraged by your home institution to just increase every budget line as far as you can get. But you will be asked about anything unusually high, so you really need a picture for what you will spend it on. Along these lines, if your institution imposes any unusual expenses (since my budget was written for the CEA, it had to pay for Mathematica and Maple licenses since the CEA is technically a private business and doesn’t have access to site licenses at academic rates) then you need to be able to justify why it’s still a good host despite that.