Grant Writing for Quantitative Economics, Social Sciences, and Public Health

Aims

• Equip students with essential skills for writing competitive research proposals with quantitative methods in economics, sociology, political science, public health, and epidemiology
• Provide an interdisciplinary approach to grant writing, highlighting credible quantitative research designs and improving proposed research designs
• Facilitate the generation and refinement of research ideas, ensuring they align with funding priorities and academic standards
• Improve students' skills in presenting and defending their research proposals through iterative feedback sessions including peer feedback
• Teaching how to highlight the feasibility and significance of their research given data limitations and research design

Content

In this research proposals and grant writing course for quantitative social sciences, epidemiology, and public health, students get prepared to write research proposals and grants including idea generation and compelling grant writing. This course mainly focuses on research designs and help in selecting and developing the idea into a competitive (it therefore complements other grant writing courses). This advanced interdisciplinary course is tailored for PhD students and Postdocs (as well as advanced Master students) focusing on quantitative research. The focus is on research proposals for PhD studies, as well as on applications for Ambizione and Postdoc.Mobility fellowships from the Swiss National Science foundation and grants from the Forschungsfonds at the University of Basel for excellent young researchers. In addition, we will look at project grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Participants will gain an understanding of the intricacies of grant writing, including identifying and getting an overview of funding opportunities, situating research questions, becoming aware of and articulating risks of the projects, highlighting feasibility, developing robust methodologies, and presenting their work-throughout focusing on the credibility of the quantitative research design. With a topic focus on empirical work in social sciences, economics, epidemiology and public health, students will learn how to align their proposals in these fields. Previously, students from psychology, economics, public health, epidemiology, and nursing sciences have attended the course structured as a colloquium.

The colloquium consists of three parts i) identifying the appropriate funding opportunity and generalities of grant writing with quantitative research designs, ii) intermittent feedback on funding scheme selection, idea, research design, and questions regarding the specific funding scheme, and iii) presentation of funding proposal, feedback, and discussion.

Methods

• Lectures on funding possibilities, idea selection and development, as well as essentials of credible quantitative research designs
• Presentations of i) idea and research design, ii) outline of full funding proposal
• Feedback sessions in the plenum

Target Group

Admission requirements: Postdoc or PhD student in a quantitative field broadly related to human behavior, such as economics, social sciences, psychology, humanities, public health, epidemiology, nursing sciences, sociology. PhD students from other fields who do empirical research are welcome to attend, but may not benefit as much (this course will likely not be useful for people in the natural sciences, biomedicine, etc.).

Requirements

Admission requirements: Postdoc or PhD student in a quantitative field broadly related to human behavior, such as economics, social sciences, psychology, humanities, public health, epidemiology, nursing sciences, sociology (or advanced master student with the goal of doing a PhD in such a fields). PhD students from other fields who do empirical research are welcome to attend, but may not benefit as much (this course will likely not be useful for people in the natural sciences, biomedicine, etc.).

About the Trainer

Professor Armando Meier, PhD, is a Professor of Health Economics at the Faculty of Business and Economics. His interdisciplinary research in health economics touches on labor economics, health policy, and behavioral science using large data sets and experiments. For example, his research has studied how to increase vaccination rates with various policy measures. His research has been published in the journals Nature and Science.
Armando Meier studied economics at the University of Basel. Research stays took him to Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago (all in the USA) and the University of Lausanne.

Workload

Hours of preparatory work / post workshop work: >60 hours, students need present twice
Hours of work in presence: 3 workshop days

Course attendance: 28h
Hours of preparatory work: 62h

Feature

Once registration is open, applications will be collected for 24 hours and course places allocated by lot. All registrations received after the initial 24h period will be put on a waiting list and assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Course places/places on the waiting list will be confirmed by e-mail. Course registrations can only be canceled before the registration period ends (send an e-mail to grace@unibas.ch). Full course attendance is mandatory. Participants who fail to attend a course without prior notification or withdraw after the registration deadline are subject to a fee of CHF 30. In addition, participants who cancel their course registration at a later point in time, are absent without an excuse or do not attend the entire course will, for reasons of fairness, not be considered for course registration in the following semester and will be removed from other courses offered in the same semester. Please find the detailed regulations on the Transferable Skills Homepage.