November 8, 2024

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60106 Research Proposal Writing

The final assessment task is designed to help you apply skills for convincing, in writing, a review panel to award funding for your proposed research.

You will develop skills such as explaining how the proposed research fits within the existing body of knowledge and the proposer’s expertise; writing in adherence to funding scheme instructions and funding scheme selection criteria; writing text that is easy to read, easy to understand, and convincing to a non-specialist responsible for deciding whether or not to award funding.

It follows the module Practical advice on writing for grant proposals, and is worth of your 55% total mark.

This assessment task due by the end of Week 12 at 11:59 pm.

Your report will have a plagiarism check via turnitin.

Preparation Activity: Read the rubric and download the cover sheet

Read the marking rubric below and refer to it when preparing your assessment.

Download the cover sheet Download cover sheetand attach your file to it. You can also use this biosketch template. Download biosketch template.

Part 1: Research article and mock funding scheme

Step 1: Select an article as the basis for your research

Select a recently published journal article that reports breakthrough research in an area of your interest. When selecting an article bear in mind the scheme objectives and associated priorities. Also bear in mind that you want to turn the research reported into a ‘project’ for which you will seek funding. Given that the research has been carried out, you can assume that a compelling argument for funding the study has been established.

The research reported in the article is the research you are going to propose for a mock funding application. You will be writing as if the research has yet to be carried out. You must not plagiarise the information from your chosen article.

You will need to extract from the article information regarding:
The research findings	See the abstract, results, bottom of introduction and discussion.
The context of this research within the literature	See the introduction and discussion.
How this research has advanced the knowledge base	See the abstract and discussion.
What question the research was asking	See the abstract and introduction.
Why this is an important question	See the abstract, introduction and discussion.
What approach and methods were used to achieve the research outcomes	You can work this out from the methods.
What influence this research will have	See the abstract, discussion and conclusion.
What expertise was required	Look up the authors and find out from their university staff profile page what their area of expertise is. Are all the authors from the same field or related fields (e.g. a bio-informaticist and a geneticist). Or are they from unrelated fields? (e.g. a materials scientist and an aluminium expert). It may be that an author was a PhD student and does not have an easily accessible listing of their expertise. In such a case, assume their expertise is the same as for another author.
Determine where the project took place	If all the authors are lab-based but are from from different institutions, write the research proposal by assuming all necessary equipment is held in one university. Name that university as the administering organisation for the research proposal. You can make that university UTS if you like.

For the following elements you can be creative:
Length of time required to complete the project	You can invent a time period. This will be acceptable within the research proposal, as long as it fits within the specified time-frame of projects funded by the mock scheme (see below).
Existence of preliminary data or pilot studies	e.g. testing out the efficacy of a methodology. You can invent this, and it can be imaginative.

Step 2: The mock funding scheme

The scheme you hope with fund your research claims to deliver outcomes of benefit to Australia and build Australia’s research capacity through support for:

Excellent, internationally-competitive research by individuals and teams;
Research training and career opportunities for the best Australian and international researchers;
International collaboration; and
Research in priority areas.

Priority areas:

Cyber-security.
Diverse Energy sources.
Environmental issues associated with resource extraction.
Advanced manufacturing including high performance materials.
Environmental change.
Any area of health and medical research from discovery to implementation, but not clinical trials .

Criteria

The scheme’s criteria for assessing applications is listed below:

Research Quality and Innovation (40%)
Significance (20%)
Feasibility (20%)
Benefit (20%)

For the purposes of this mock proposal, the track record of the named investigator can be assumed to be outstanding and does not need to be specifically written about in the proposal. Note, however, that having the appropriate and proven high-quality expertise for the proposed project forms part of the argument for the project’s feasibility.

Project description

Your proposal must be no more than five A4 pages.
You must provide the following information using these headings in this order:

Project title
Introduction
Background, significance and innovation
Project design and methods
Benefit
References

Formatting requirements

Follow the 'house style' explained here, but briefly this means:

All non-heading fonts must be Times New Roman 12 point
Line spacing must be 1.5
Margins must not be less than 1.5 cm on all sides
Margins should be justified
Text must not be in columns
Maximum of five A4 pages for both parts (excluding references)
Must be in Australian English (e.g. organise, analyse, summarise)

The task provides an opportunity to practice the skills of getting a research proposal written down on paper, rather than the additional skills of preparing the proposed research. When writing bear in mind that it is not necessarily the case that there would be a perfect fit between a three-year research project and the research later presented in one paper published in Cell.

Preparation Activity: Read a sample mock research proposal

Read this sample mock research proposal, and the related journal article to help you get started on your proposal.

Part 2: Biosketch

Part 2 does not relate to the journal article selected for Part 1. The aim of Part 2 is to give you practice in writing about your own track record.

Your task:

Provide a bio-sketch based on your own track record as per the example NIH bio-sketch given, except:

Do not include an eRA user name.
Do not include a position title.
If you did not do research in high school, that is fine; do not feel obliged to have a section for high school.
The section on graduate research can refer to a literature review done as part of Masters by Coursework by way of describing involvement in research.
Do not include a statement of your scholastic performance. Instead, have a section titled ‘Other additional information’ for anything relevant that you would like to mention. Do not feel obliged to fill in ‘Other additional information’.

Preparation Activity: Read a model biosketch

Read this example to help get you started on your biosketch. Note that this biosketch is written in the first person. You can also write in the third person, just be consistent.