2013 Tsinghua-Gates Mini Grant contest for students

(By 09/05/2013)

Guideline:

This competition is to encourage generation of creative, but testable hypotheses by young scientists in training.  You do not need to have a background in global health to enter -- many of the best and creative ideas come from people from outside of a field, since they are not limited in their thinking by the current dogmas. 

To have a good chance of winning, your proposal needs to have the following elements:

a) A really great idea!  Try to be as imaginative as possible, but remember that any ideas you have must be testable.

b) A well written, logical proposal.  There is no need for preliminary data or too many references -- although if you are basing your idea on something you've read that is out of the ordinary, it would be helpful to cite.  As with most proposals, you will want to introduce the idea with some background, and then outline the specific experiments that you want to propose to confirm or reject your hypothesis. 

The timeframe for the outlined experiments would normally not take more than 1 - 1.5 years.  This should be sufficient time to test 'proof of principle' -- is the idea promising or not?  It does not need to cover a complete story in that timeframe.

Remember that space is limited -- diagrams can be very useful to convey more complex ideas or experiments in a smaller space.  But do make sure that the figures are easy to follow.

c) Is your proposal easy to follow by a non-expert in the field?  The scoring committee comes from very different backgrounds, most of them not in the mosquito control field!  So your proposal needs to make sense to them.  Ask a friend to read over the proposal to make sure it reads well and makes sense.

d) Think about future experiments and ideas beyond the timeframe of the original proposal (briefly).  If your idea were to turn out to be a good one, how would you extend the findings to really show it can work.

e) Look at http://www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Pages/GrantsAwarded.aspx for examples of genuine creative ideas funded by the Gates Foundation.  Consider writing a real proposal for the next round of GCE Challenges! 

And good luck!

Coverage page

·         Application deadline: 09/05/2013

·         Two pages maximum (coverage page not included);

·         One applicant per application;

·         Applications will be reviewed by Committee in an anonymised manner;

·         In English;

·         Creativity encouraged, but must be testable (i.e. experiments should be able to start right away);

·         Please send your application to chenshurong1973@gmail.com and cc to yijiang@biomed.tsinghua.edu.cn. Please put “2013 Tsinghua-Gates Mini Grant contest for students” in your email topic.

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