The meeting of the panel at the Academy of Finland is quite interesting with panelists from such a very wide range of disciplines, covering most aspects of computational sciences. In particular, the approach to reviewing grant proposals appears to be highly dependent on the discipline in the sense that the arguments are more or less theoretical depending on the referee’s discipline. At the mathematical end of the gamut, I have stronger inclinations to be severe with proposals that are missing a minimal probabilistic background to validate simulation experiments, while bioinformaticians will most likely bite at projects with poorly motivated protein structures… This makes for interesting debates, when compared with an NSF statisticians-only panel. Overall, I am quite impressed by the extremely high quality of most proposals, some of which are clearly internationally leading-edge projects. A point of further interest I discovered this morning when entering its building is that the Academy of Finland is distinct from the Finnish Academy of Science: the former is in fact the funding body for public research in Finland while the later is working on the same principles as the National Academy of Science or The Royal Society… (Two Academy members with strong connections with Bayesian Statistics and MCMC are Elja Arjas and Esa Nummelin.)
Archive for grants
Vielä Helsingissä!
Posted in Travel, University life with tags Bayesian statistics, Finland, grants, Helsinki on September 25, 2009 by xi'anLyhyt matka Helsinkiin
Posted in Travel, University life with tags Finland, grants, Helsinki on September 23, 2009 by xi'anThis is the (possibly mistaken) Google translation for “A short trip to Helsinki” into Finnish! Indeed, being involved into an evaluation panel for the Finnish Academy of Sciences, I will be away to Helsinki, Finland, for the two next days. Although this activity is time-consuming, I always find this kind of experience rewarding as the evaluation of grant applications brings forward current (and future) directions of research in our field. In the current case, although I cannot unveil too much, the panel is broader than in the NSF Statistics and Probability grant panel I was involved with, say, but this is also interesting since colleagues from other fields will necessarily have different perspectives on which directions are more relevant. Contrary to a “popular” belief, I have never had the feeling that some panel members in those situations were clearly biased towards a subfield or a group of researchers, but on the opposite that discussions were quite open and objective. (Of course this may reflect my naïvety rather than truth!)
