Impact of COVID-19

ON THE 2020 FUNDING ROUND

HE PITOPITO KŌRERO | 2020

With the pandemic bringing widespread disruption, we remain thankful that the 2020 funding round was able to proceed, albeit with some modifications.

During the COVID-19 Alert Level 4 lockdown (MarchApril 2020), the Marsden Fund Council saw a clear need to simplify the Marsden Fund Expression of Interest (EOI) selection processes and ease the pressure and burden on the convenors, panellists and Royal Society Te Apārangi staff, as well as the wider research community. These changes allowed the EOI round to go ahead, without EOI panel meetings taking place. Panellists graded each proposal, aggregate panellist scores were used to form a ranked list of proposals, and an algorithmic approach was used to set Full round cut-offs. This allowed convenors to recommend a list of EOIs to go through to the Full round. Unfortunately, due to this modified process, it was not possible to give qualitative feedback to EOI Fast-Start applicants in the 2020 round. However, all Fast-Start and Standard applicants still received quintile feedback for their EOIs.

Although Aotearoa moved down to COVID-19 Alert Level 2 in mid-May 2020, COVID-19 was still highly likely to impact the preparation of Full proposals. Therefore, the Full round deadline was extended by one week to Wednesday 24 June 2020. Fortunately, the rest of the 2020 Marsden Fund round ran according to plan. Full proposal meetings were able to take place through a mix of online and face-to-face meetings, with one panel meeting entirely run online. Impacts of COVID-19 on researchers Existing Marsden Fund contract holders also experienced significant disruption to their research due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These disruptions have prevented international travel, hampered recruitment of postgraduate students and staff, caused significant delays in shipments of research consumables and complicated international collaboration. As an indicator of the tremendous scale of this disruption to our researchers, the Society has observed a 2-5 fold-per-month increase in requests for Marsden Fund contract variations since June 2020.

Digital support for applicants in 2021 This year the Society team recorded a virtual roadshow on ‘how to apply to the Marsden Fund in 2021’. We also ran a number of live sessions online to respond to questions from the research community. This new approach provides a safeguard against potential domestic travel restrictions which might prevent delivery of our usual roadshow. The digital channel also gives us wider reach to interested parties, and should improve the availability of application information to diverse organisations across the sector. Slides from the presentations are also available as a PDF. We also created a Vision Mātauranga web resource which is a conversation with Associate Professors Melinda Webber and Angela Wanhalla that gives some guidance from previous Marsden Fund applicants and current panellists on different approaches to Vision Mātauranga.

Read more: Bit.ly/MF56-41