Successful Grant Writing - Module 3: How to present yourself

Executive Summary and Graphical Abstracts
An executive summary succinctly encapsulates the research, emphasizing its importance and potential impact. Strategies will clearly convey the central theme of a project, tailored for an audience that includes funding agencies and interdisciplinary review panels. The aim is to equip participants with the skills necessary to craft a professional and effective executive summary, enhancing the important first impression of their grant applications.

A graphical abstract is one single‐panel image that is designed to give reviewers an immediate understanding of the take‐home message of the scientific paper, poster, project, grant application a.s.f. The ideal graphical abstract should be self-explanatory. The reviewer should quickly understand it and get an overview over a grant project. Working on graphical abstracts will be considered on participants’ demand.

Structure
Ideally, a text is written on the same time-scale as it is being read. Obviously, this is only possible when writing is very well prepared by an elaborate outline. Preparing an outline is an underestimated step in (scientific) and proposal writing, and the final outline should be 50-70% length of the final product (!) and take approx. 50-70% of the time to produce. Unfortunately, the format required by different funding agencies differs. However, the workshop will look into the structure of the most common funding programs.

Visualization of Data
This part of the workshop will focus on how much impact the proper presentation of numbers has in peer-review-processes: processing of numbers, types of graphs, arrangement of sample order, use of col-ours, visualization of standard deviation are key in conveying the message hidden in research data, because unfortunately, the data does not speak for itself. This will lead into a discussion of examples of sets of data from participants, whose ideal presentation will be discussed in the plenary.

Trainer
PD Dr. Daniel Mertens is Biochemist, Lecturer and leader of his own research group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and at the University of Ulm. He shares his knowledge and experiences since several years as professional trainer.

• Time: Tue, 9 July 2024, 09:00–12:30
• Location: virtual via Zoom
• Target group: Postdocs of all research fields of the UA Ruhr universities; max. 25 participants
• Trainer: PD Dr. Daniel Mertens
• Registration deadline: 25 June 2024
• Contact for organizational questions: Dr. Ursula Justus (RUB Research School)

Further information and registration

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