In this episode I’m joined by Svenja Talv and Martina May from the EU Research Office at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) to look inside how a small, two-person pre-award team supports EU funding. Martina tells the story of how FAU first decided to create a central EU office and how she started out alone before Svenja joined as an EU liaison officer. Together they defined a clear mandate – more and better EU proposals – and spent their first months on internal networking: mapping who does what across post-award, ethics, export control, open science, data management, graduate services and the faculty-level research support structures, and then going on a long “information tour” so researchers would actually know they exist.

From there we zoom in on Postdoctoral Fellowships. Svenja and Martina explain why this funding scheme became such a focus: demand from early-career researchers is huge, but competition is exploding – with applications jumping from around 10,000 to 17,000 and budgets slightly decreasing, success rates are getting painfully low. They describe how they teamed up with a German national support organisation offering a Postdoctoral Fellowship Masterclass, invited potential applicants via supervisors, and brought postdocs from all over the world together online. The workshop covers tricky parts of the template and evaluation logic, while the FAU team backs it up with structured proposal review, regular check-ins and clear internal deadlines. We also discuss the emotional side of supporting postdocs in such a tough scheme, and how Svenja and Martina try to balance day-to-day proposal work with longer-term capacity building for the whole university.

Time codes:

00:02:05 Introduction

00:06:04 Fly in

00:08:35 Complementary backgrounds and team setup

00:12:34 Building the research office and strategy

00:23:21 Postdoctoral Fellowships support

00:42:12 Expanding the strategy

00:51:51 Reflections and advice

00:54:24 The toughest challenge