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Student debt? But for grant review (I have reviewed NSF proposals before), I'd say that one of the biggest challenges is that there are a lot of people chasing a rather small amount of money (in the physical sciences). I think our committee had several strong people on it for the field and even if people were not listed as having a conflict of interest, they would volunteer if they had one and tried to be fair. However, when you have a small pot of money, you do have to think about how do you make awards. On the one hand, you do ask the question, what are the chances that this would work and if it did, would it be "transformational"? That is, it may turn out to be a loss, but if it works, then it could really advance the field--in our committee, we did try to fund those kind of proposals over incremental advances. Now, as to the question of reputation, I'm going to have to disagree. If you're going to give someone funds, how do you gamble? If they're young, then you can just look at their idea, their resources, and some indication that they have a chance at success. However, for a more senior researcher, they do have a track record. If they've received funds in the past and haven't accomplished anything with them, then why would you keep giving them money? If someone is publishing interesting results, then other people will try to duplicate and extend them If someone's research consistently fails these tests, then their reputation will suffer. As for domain knowledge/math skills--I have to say that I think that this is relatively useless. Do you have any feeling for how many grant applications come in (along with multiple proposers)? And you want to test them across many subfields, etc.? These people managed to get their phDs, so if they are not competent, then that should have either showed up earlier, or in their publications. I think there's a lot of merit in judging people by their results rather than simple tests which could be gamed. |