Professor Michael Stumpf

WORKSHOP: Writing your first grant

This workshop will shed some light on the processes of grant writing and grant review. It is intended to equip you with some basic tools to write persuasive grants that others want to fund. You can use this as an opportunity to pitch and refine an idea you have for a research grant or fellowship application. This workshop will take you through some of the steps that are relevant for most grant applications, and you will sit on a mini grant panel to choose a winning application. Each grant application has to appeal to different target audiences whose needs you have to balance: expert assessors want to see sufficient detail to reassure them that what you are doing is possible; the grant review boards or panels (where they exist) want to see that it is worth funding and important.

Keywords: Developing ideas; writing and editing grants; grant review; rejoinders; mock grant panel

Relevance: This workshop will be most relevant for people thinking about submitting or developing a grant or fellowship application in the next 12-18 months. At registration please indicate which grant body you want to apply for.

Requirements: Bring a good idea for your grant; ideally come prepared with a 1 to 2 page grant proposal that you want to have “peer reviewed” and receive feedback on.

Note: this workshop will be capped at 30 participants

Professor Michael Stumpf

Director, Melbourne Integrative Genomics
Professor, Theoretical Systems Biology Group, University of Melbourne

Michael Stumpf is a professor of theoretical systems biology in the School of BioSciences and School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Melbourne. His research focuses on using mathematical, statistical and computational methods to understand how cells make decisions, and how we can influence their decisions. Michael was awarded a 2022 Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship to develop mathematical models of biological cells.