ARC grant success: part 2 – being an excellent scientist

Following last month’s interview with Professor Koopman on tips for great grant writing, we continue our conversation on winning ARC success, with a focus on improving as a scientist, and improving your investigator score.

To win grants, it’s wise to follow three simple rules: be excellent, create new opportunities to be excellent, and be seen to be excellent. Simple, right?

As already excellent scientists, you’re probably shaking your heads. No, not simple at all. “What is excellence?” you’re asking. “How is excellence defined when I’m trying to win an ARC grant? And what do I have to be excellent at?”

In the ARC Granting Program, research fellowships are awarded when linked to project proposals. To win a grant, both the candidate and project have to be excellent.

This month, we’re looking at how to be the best scientist you can be.

Professor Peter Koopman, a former member of the ARC College of Experts, says the key to excellence as a scientist and success as an ARC Fellowship applicant is publications. They kick start the ‘scientific wheel of life’ – without publications, scientists don’t win grants, and without grants, scientists can’t build a research team. Without a team of researchers, it’s hard to get publications.

“The responsibility falls to you to kick start the wheel,” he says. “You’ve got to take control and eek out every opportunity to publish as many papers as you can.

Up to 90% of the assessment score for ARC Fellowships is based on publication record. Excellent scientists publish widely and prolifically and your publication record allows you to be seen to be excellent.

Professor Koopman’s advice is to put a high priority on publications. He encourages you to look at your timeframe as a student or post-doc, and work out how many papers you want to aim for to allow you to proceed to the next step.

He also emphasises the importance of always working with a paper in mind, and to assess constantly how specific experiments will contribute to specific papers. Without this focus, your competitiveness as a prolific scientist will be reduced.

Ideally, your papers should be highly cited and in high-ranking journals. This is not always possible, however, and Professor Koopman suggests a good fallback strategy is to aim for a mixture of primary papers, reviews and commentaries in a mixture of high and low ranking journals. Reviews, commentaries or even meeting reports will boost your publication record if you’re not having much luck getting primary research papers published.

Also of some importance in assessing ARC Fellowship applicants is a candidate’s track record on winning grants.

“It is crucial you are conscientious about applying for grants”, says the Professor. “When beginning as a researcher, you don’t have to win big grants – start with smaller granting schemes. Consider the granting programs of your university, state government, and any scientific or professional societies to which you belong. Approach your supervising scientist for inclusion on grants and find creative ways of getting a foothold in the granting system.”

After publishing papers and winning grants, the next consideration in becoming an excellent scientist and ARC Fellowship candidate, is creating new opportunities to be excellent: diversify your experiences as much as possible.

Some of Professor Koopman’s suggestions are to participate in committee work, make it known you’re able to give seminars, present yourself well at conferences and networking events, ask your supervisor for opportunities to supervise a student and remind them that it’s part of their job to train you to review papers and grant applications properly.

In Professor Koopman’s lab, junior scientists typically get their paper reviewing licence after co-reviewing papers with the professor three times. In the fourth review, he delegates to the younger scientist, although he still checks their work.

More advanced scientists should consider other opportunities. In previous conversations with Professor Koopman, he emphasised the value of reading and learning from as many grant applications as possible.

“Being an OzReader or ARC College of Experts member puts you in a privileged position of having to read a lot of applications,” he reminds us. “You soon get a very, very keen sense of what works and what doesn’t, and that experience and exposure is invaluable in applying for your own grants.”

Be excellent, create new opportunities to be excellent, and be seen to be excellent: publish, win grants, and get as much experience in the business of being a scientist as you can.

How do you find the time for all this?

As a highly competitive and successful scientist, Professor Koopman says you just have to make the time.

“Everybody knows that you have to work hard to be a successful scientist. You have to go into this career with open eyes and know that it’s going to involve work and dedication. You have to know you’re going to spend time in the evenings reading papers and grant applications and reviewing manuscripts while the rest of the world presumably is watching television.”

He reminds us that Australian scientists have to work to the same rhythm as our international colleagues to be internationally competitive. And while the work is demanding, science is a career with great rewards.

“Being a scientist comes with responsibilities, but the privileges are many. We have a great amount of freedom to pursue questions we feel are important and interesting and to think about what we want to do, each day, each week and each year. That’s not a privilege that comes with every job.”

This article was based on an interview between Science Hub and Professor Peter Koopman in May 2009, and on his seminar, ‘Are we there yet? The long road to grant success’, presented March 2008 in the 2008 Career Development and Grant Writing Seminar Series jointly organised by the postdoctoral associations of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and Howard Florey Institute.

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