"Research Talks on Science Funding" with Professors Paula Stephen & Fabiana Visentin

This seminar will feature two speakers on the topic of science funding.
 
The first paper, by Paula Stephan et al., will focus on the meaning of risk in research and the role it plays in funding. It will be a general discussion of what risk in research means and will present results from a study of ERC grants.
 
The second paper by Fabiana Visentin et al. is entitled “Does it Pay to Be Novel? The Selectivity Patterns in Science Funding”.  Funding agencies aim to fund novel breakthrough research to sustain the radical innovations of tomorrow. However, the funding process is not always awarding the most novel scientists. Exploiting rich data on all applicants to a leading Swiss research funding program, Visentin et al. find that novel scientists have the same probability of applying for funds as non-novel scientists but they get on average lower ratings by grant evaluators and have fewer chances of being funded.