Funding opportunities: DFF

Just a short update. Currently I’m interested in funding opportunities, so I’ve been reading mostly about different sources of funding. Last Tuesday (2nd of September) I attended an information meeting from the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF) at Aarhus university, which was actually quite interesting. Especially, the Q&A part. Here I’ve prepared an infographic presenting some of the basics about DFF and its councils, the funding instruments, and what is relevant to Natural Sciences and an early research career.

DFF’s secretariat presented the Autumn 2014/Spring 2015 call for proposals and what’s new in it, as well as answered questions from the audience. The call description can be found here and a overview of the instruments and their deadlines can be found here. They promised to upload the presentation from the meeting at DFF’s site some time next week.

So, the main 3 changes from the previous call are:

• a mandatory project description template has been introduced;
• an earliest and latest starting date for each funding instrument has been defined;
• an on-line application system (E-grant) has been fully implemented.

Talking about the last call… I was surprised to find out that the average success rate (number of grants vs. applications ) was 19%. Statistics for each of the councils and a time series (2004-2013) on the success rates, grants, and applications can be found in the Annual report of DFF for 2013.

The deadlines are ultimo October and ultimo April, but for some of the instruments can be applied either in October, or in April.

Anyway… I have prepared an infographic on the information which was relevant to me (next to no experience, PhD dissertation submitted, but not defended yet). It is far from a comprehensive summary, so for further information look at the source, i.e. the Call for Proposals Autumn 2014 and Spring 2015 on the DFF site (here).