Astronomy Grant Outcomes
While this is by no means an official outlet for news from the Science and Technology Facilities Council nor the Astronomy Grants Panel (AGP) thereof, but I am on the AGP so I thought I’d take the opportunity to pass on a bit of news to the UK community, or at least those members that read this blog.
An email by Colin Vincent of STFC was circulated this evening via the ASTROCOMMUNITY email list, which includes the following:
As part of the process for improving the feedback to the community of outcomes we have just published a more detailed listing of the recommendations for all projects. This can be found at
http://www.stfc.ac.uk/Our%20Research/12214.aspx
We hope that the community will find this helpful. This information supplements what is already available in STFC’s ‘Grants on the Web’ pages.
The link included there takes you to a page that includes a general description of how the AGP works and what it tries to do, and also for the first time (as far as I’m aware) a link to a document that contains a ranked list of all the projects rated fundable, whether funded or unfunded.
Speaking personally, i.e. not in my capacity as an AGP member, I think making this amount of detail public is an extremely good move, as I think it makes the process much more transparent. There’s just a chance, however, that the actual list might ruffle a few feathers here and there, and probably in other places too.
As always, please feel free to comment through the box below, but if you do so please remember that this is a personal blog and I’m passing this on as a community service. I can’t respond on behalf of the AGP, so please don’t ask me to!
UPDATE: 29th June 2012. The document containing the AGP outcomes has been removed from the STFC website. Don’t ask me why…
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In the Dark 
June 28, 2012 at 11:38 pm
Interesting read, Peter. Thanks for posting. Having skim read it to pick out the IoA Cambridge-related activities I can see that “Science with Planck” is funded, but “Cosmology with Planck” is unfunded. Do these kind of discrepancies mean separate projects were submitted to STFC by different PIs and they’ve just lumped funding into one block, or do they care more about separate science than cosmology? There appear to be more than one of these instances.
June 29, 2012 at 8:06 am
Chris
I can’t talk about individual grants or projects, but there were many cases where grants included multiple requests in similar areas in proposals with similar titles. The titles in the document refer specifically to the cases as submitted by the PI; ach was graded separately and some parts of the work in a given area obviously did better than others…
Peter