Research grant writing is no easy task. This skill is an important know-how that all scholars, new or seasoned, have to acquire and keep improving. CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) has been paying great efforts to boost the research culture among faculty members and support them to achieve research excellence. To equip our faculty members with better grant proposal writing skills, CLASS organised a series of training activities in August and September this year, inviting past grant awardees and an academic writing expert to share their valuable tips on writing successful proposals.
The first event was an online sharing session held on 22 August 2022. Two awardees of the Research Grants Council (RGC) Senior Research Fellow Scheme and Research Fellow Scheme, Prof WANG Zuankai (Chair Professor of Department of Mechanical Engineering) and Dr Alicia AN Kyoung-jin (Associate Professor of School of Energy and Environment) were invited to share their experience in securing the funding. In the last part of session, Dr Edmund CHENG (Associate Professor of Department of Public and International Affairs) was invited to share his experiences in nominating doctoral graduates for the Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme in the past two consecutive years.
Same as previous years, CLASS held General Research Fund (GRF) and Early Career Scheme (ECS) Grant Writing Workshop again this year on 29 August 2022. Nicholas CASE, Founder and Chief Operations Officer of a copy-editing company and an experienced language improvement course instructor, shared experience in supporting faculty members in preparing research grant proposals, particularly GRF/ECS and other RGC grants.
On 1 September 2022, another online sharing session was held to invite two awardees of GRF/ECS from CLASS, Prof Sylvia KWOK LAI Yuk-ching (Professor of Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences) and Dr CUI Wendong (Assistant Professor of Department of Chinese and History), to share with faculty members their practical examples and useful tips of writing successful grant proposals which appeal to reviewers and panel members.
The training and sharing sessions were well received by nearly 80 CLASS faculty members. They seized the opportunities to raise questions and discuss among themselves. It is believed that a healthy and robust research culture is being developed in the college and hopefully more competitive research proposals will be produced by CLASS academics.
