Naturejobs Podcast

Many grant funding decisions are random, with luck playing a large part. How can the system be improved, particularly when funds are tight? In the final episode of our six-part series on funding, Feric Fang, a professor in the departments of laboratory medicine and microbiology at the University of Washington, Seattle, describes how a two-tier "modified lottery" could be a fairer process, with grants randomly prioritised to applications that had some merit but did not attract funding first time round.New Zealand's Health Research Council already operates a similar system, says Vernon Choy, the council's direct of research investments and contracts.Its Explorer Grants panel does not discuss rankings but instead judges if an application's proposals are viable and if they meet an agreed definition of "transformative." These applications then go into a pool and a random number generator is applied to to allocate funding based on the budget available.Because applications are anonymised, Choy says there is no bias