Australia's NHMRC briefing to Grant Review Panellists...

The Australian government's peak medical research funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has a webcast (like podcast but for all platforms and devices) of the briefing given to the multidisciplinary Grant Review Panellists (GRPs; 516 members this year) as they meet in Canberra this week to award this year's pot of money (Project grants were awarded $458 million in 2012) to the best of the 3,912 Project Grant applications.

If you'd like a peek behind the scenes, this is a great way to demystify some of the process behind the decision that gives many Australian researchers their future research funding for 1 to 5 years.

A couple of overview points from Prof Roy Goldie and Prof Warwick Anderson:

1. Assessments have been made prior to this meeting but panellists can still "rescue" those identified as "Not For Further Consideration" (NFFC; ist issues earlier this year to allow more focus on thise Apps that remain viable)
2. Project Grants are approximately 50% of NHMRC funding
3. 54/299 New Investigator grants were funded last year. 297 NI Apps this year
4. Mean requested budget in 2012 was $626,345 ($48k-$3,422k)
5. Project grants trending toward more multi-disciplinary teams and application content
>7,800 external assessments were received (14,300 requests sent out), 97.3% have 3 external assessments
6. Most panels have <100 Apps to consider before NFFC

The link to the full 1-hour long webcast is at http://webcast.gigtv.com.au/Mediasite/Play/ac7f74b9e0164561b15c914f07e108861d