My winning proposal: Mobility not needed for career advancement

BBSRC Fellowships do not require a change of lab—but make sure you justify staying put

Top tips

• Fellowship assessors want to sense your excitement and motivation to work on the proposed project
• When describing your experience and skills, craft every sentence to make them specific to you
• In the long build-up to the bid, take advantage of opportunities to build your network outside of your institution
• If you are not moving host institution for the fellowship, in addition to giving a strong justification for that, build in trips to partner institutions

Formerly known as the Discovery Fellowships, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Fellowship is a pivotal scheme for helping biological scientists boost their independence.

With no limit on the value of the grant, and with a duration of up to three years, the fellowship encourages applications for early career researchers looking to gain leadership skills and advance a groundbreaking research project of their design. The BBSRC Fellowship is open once a year and the 2024 competition is now closed.

Ruth Carmichael, a researcher with a background in neuroscience and cellular organisation based at the University of Exeter, was announced in August as one of the 15 winners of the 2023 round. She discusses her journey to success.

Can you give a brief overview of your project in layman’s terms? 

Cells are divided into compartments that perform different functions—they have functions on their own, but they also need to cooperate and coordinate these functions together. In my previous research, I’ve been interested in two of these so-called organelles—peroxisomes and mitochondria—which perform a lot of metabolic work. They have their own functions but they also need to cooperate, particularly when breaking down fats and managing stress. One way they can communicate about this is by physically contacting each other. As I have a background in neuroscience, I was intrigued as to how these two compartments were communicating in the brain.

What was already known on that topic?

While we know they form physical contacts, we don’t know what they’re talking about, in a manner of speaking, and how this controls their independent and shared functions. The aim of this project is to figure this out and how that helps the brain stay healthy—the idea being that, ultimately, there could be a therapeutic target. We could modulate this as a way to treat possible diseases because we know this communication goes wrong in degeneration, for example. 

How long before applying did you have a BBSRC Fellowship in your sights? 

Not necessarily a BBSRC Fellowship specifically, but I was thinking about a fellowship for around a year or so before I applied. This was based on conversations I’d had with my colleagues, my supervisor at the time, our director of research, about the trajectory of my research and what the next steps would be. And they thought I was in a good position, with my transition to independence, to be applying for a fellowship. 

I looked at a few other fellowships: at the Royal Society and the UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowships. But I was advised that this would probably be the best for my career stage and the remit of my project. 

Fellowship schemes tend to encourage mobility but you stayed at your previous host institution, the University of Exeter. How did you justify that? 

I’d been working at Exeter for about five years prior to starting the fellowship. I thought about applying elsewhere for the fellowship but I could justify it strongly in terms of both the science and my existing relationships.  

In my experience, staying at my host institution was never seen as a negative. It was never questioned, probably because I could confidently justify it with the existing strong collaborations I had in the department, as well as the strong personal relationships with people there. 

What were the things that you wanted to impress upon the panel, and how did you do it? 

Advice I got from a mentor was to show how motivated and enthusiastic I was regarding the science. I think it’s quite easy to think that, particularly for a fellowship, it’s all about you and the career development. However, you’re talking to a group of scientists, and they want to hear that the science is top quality and you’re excited by it.  

The next step was showing that I am the best person to be doing this, that I’m in a position of technical expertise, support and independence to be able to carry out this work. In addition, it was important to show I had a short-term and a long-term vision.

I also have an industrial partner, which I think was seen really positively by the panel, in terms of having a kind of translational aspect of this research, of making it medically relevant.  

How did you show that you’re ready for the level of independence necessary to manage the grant? 

This was important, particularly because I was staying at the same institution, being hosted by the same lab. Before applying for the fellowship, I tried to develop an independent profile. So this included things like being listed as a co-investigator on research grants, becoming a co-corresponding author on papers and being able to establish my own collaborations. I did this partially so I could stress during interview that I was building my network as an independent scientist.

Also, the way I designed the project showed a lot of independence because it took my unique skills, which are slightly outside the sphere of expertise of the people I’d been working with previously. I combined what I’d been doing in my most recent postdoc on peroxisomes with my background in neuroscience, which meant that I came up with a new and original research direction that I was in a unique position to deliver. 

What personal development and training elements did you include in the bid? 

I costed in some formal leadership training, so being able to travel to an Embo [European Molecular Biology Organization] course, to a lab leadership course. I also arranged for a lot of informal leadership training, which involves having mentors in place, and builds my ability to supervise students and develops that side of things. 

A really important thing was to build in plenty of travel to national and international partner institutions. Again, this helped with justifying staying at Exeter. In addition to being hosted there, I will also work at other excellent places to do different pieces of work. To travel helps not only to build skills, but also to then build these networks and connections on my own.

What was the most valuable piece of feedback that you received during the bid preparation? 

I did get a lot of feedback and had excellent support from my mentors at Exeter. The feedback was sometimes a bit brutal, but it worked. Probably the most valuable piece was around writing very generic statements and not being sufficiently confident in myself. I was advised to reread every sentence and ask myself “Could anyone else write this sentence?” If so, I needed to change it. The idea is to make everything really specific to your achievements, so don’t write, “I have published ‘x’ many papers, but rather “I have published ‘x’ many papers in these areas and they impacted the field in these specific ways”.

This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact [email protected]