Research Reboot Scheme
Objectives: Many mathematicians have found themselves without the time to engage in research during the Covid-19 pandemic, due to illness, caring responsibilities, increased teaching or administrative loads, or other factors. The goal of this scheme is to help restart research activity. It offers funding for the applicant to leave their usual environment to focus entirely on research for a period from two days to a week, in order to restart their research activity, if they have been prevented from doing so by the adverse conditions of the Covid-19 crisis.
Please note that only one grant, per Scheme, per person, per LMS financial year (1 August - 31 July) is allowed.
Eligibility:
- Grant applicants should be a mathematician based in the UK, the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands at the time of application and when the research activity is planned. Please note that should a grant holder leave the UK before the planned research activity then the grant will be withdrawn.
- PhD students are also welcome to apply for a Research Reboot grant.
- Non LMS members will need to ask an LMS member to support the application.
- The time available for research arising from the grant should be at least two complete working days, and at most a working week. Applicants should explain carefully how this will be guaranteed if they apply for fewer nights’ accommodation than working days. It is possible to apply for two short periods in one application, but each period should be at least two working days.
Conditions:
- Applicants are responsible for making all the arrangements for the research time.
- The Research Retreat should take place within five months of the application deadline for the round in which you are applying. Please see the table below for the dates ranges in which Research Retreats should be held for each application round. Please note that should circumstances change, grant holders must notify the Society as soon as possible and the Society will aim to be as flexible as possible to accommodate any changes in circumstances.
- Applicants are generally expected to leave their usual environment for this. For most people this will mean booking a hotel or apartment for the duration of the research time, as it is difficult to completely ring-fence the time when working at home or in one’s usual department office. If this is impossible, a justification must be given, which includes a clear
- plan to ring-fence the time for research.
- The grant is only intended to support specific projects and not, for example, to contribute to the cost of a sabbatical visit.
- Value of award: A maximum of £100 per day is allowed for travel, accommodation, subsistence and other necessary expenses to enable the project. An additional £100 per day may be applied for to cover Caring Costs for those who have dependents.
Prioritisation: Priority will be given to applicants who had increased caring responsibilities, such as homeschooling, during the pandemic. This scheme is open to all career stages, with a priority for those with additional professional demands, such as teaching and administration.
Support network: This will be augmented by an optional light-touch support network (Slack group). Applicants who are not able to commit to a period of time away from home can still apply to join the support network.
Value of award: The maximum award (towards actual travel, accommodation, subsistence and caring expenses) is £1,000.
- A maximum of £100 per day is allowed for accommodation, subsistence and other necessary expenses to enable the project.
- An additional £100 per day may be applied for to cover Caring Costs for those who have dependents.
The life of an LMS Grant is two financial years (1 August - 31 July). All awarded grants need to be claimed no later than the 31 July in the second year of the grant, i.e., if a grant is awarded in the 2023/24 financial year, the grant will need to be claimed by the 31 July 2026. Any grants that have not been claimed within the two-year period will be withdrawn.
Deadlines and decision timetable:
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- Grants will not be made retrospectively.
Queries regarding applications can be addressed to the Grants Administrator or the Chair of the Research Grants Committee (RGC), who will be pleased to discuss proposals informally with potential applicants and give advice on the submission of an application.
Grants Administrator: Lucy Covington Email: grants@lms.ac.uk
Chair of the Research Grants Committee (RGS): Professor Amanda Turner
Guidance Notes Please read the guidance notes carefully before, and when, filling in the application form.
Application Form:
To submit an application, you must be logged into your user account or registered as a user.
Testimonials
“The research reboot grant was so valuable to me! As a mum of 5 and a husband working in ICU, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant increase in caring responsibilities. The uninterrupted time on my research that the research reboot scheme afforded me made a massive difference, allowing me to start to tackle the shortfall in research output that the pandemic caused. I’m really grateful to the LMS for offering this fund!” – Dr Ruth Bowness, Bath
“My research had been affected over the past 18 months by not only increased caring responsibilities but also additional workload to deliver teaching and administration in the challenging circumstances of Covid-19. The Research Reboot scheme has provided me with a unique opportunity to enable a period of intense focus on restarting my research. More specifically, the scheme has enabled me to wrap up a research proposal, which has been submitted to the EPSRC in August 2022”. – Dr Xiaocheng Shang, Birmingham
“An LMS Scheme 4 grant allowed Jessica Claridge (Essex) and I to spend an intensive week working on matrix channels for network coding, free of other distractions. It had been an ambition of ours to tackle a conjecture on the capacity of such channels, and we were delighted to be able to prove the conjecture by the end of our week. We would not have been able to do this without funding, and we are very grateful for the support from the LMS”. - Simon Blackburn, Royal Holloway
“With the Research Reboot grant support from the LMS, I was able to invest quality time thinking about a research problem, away from the usual work and family distractions”. – Dr Sofiat Olaosebikan
“The last couple of years have been the most beautiful and incredible for my private life, due to the birth of my baby boy, but, at the same time, the most difficult and challenging for my professional life. The maternity leave and the Covid-19 situation meant that the time I could dedicate to my research activity considerably reduced, making it very hard to organize research visits to collaborate with other academics. The LMS Scheme 4 Research Reboot allowed me to restart my research activity, funding a research retreat in Italy and giving me the opportunity to focus exclusively on my research for one week. Thanks to this research visit, I was able to co-author a paper on financial sustainability that was recently published on a financial mathematics journal”. - Dr Luciana Dalla Valle, Plymouth
Research in Pairs Scheme
Objectives: To support a visit for collaborative research either by the grant holder to another institution within the UK, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands or abroad, or by a named mathematician from within the UK, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands or abroad to the home base of the grant holder.
Please note that only one grant, per Scheme, per person, per LMS financial year (1 August - 31 July) is allowed.
Eligibility:
- Grant applicants should be a mathematician based in the UK, the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands at the time of application and when the visit is planned. Please note that should a grant holder leave the UK before the planned visit then the grant will be withdrawn.
- Please note that PhD students are not eligible to apply for a Research in Pairs grant but can apply to the LMS ECR Travel Grant Scheme to support collaborative research visits.
- Non LMS members will need to ask an LMS member to support the application.
- The time available for joint research arising from the grant should be at least four working days.
Criteria:
- Applicants are responsible for making all the arrangements for the visit.
- The grant is only intended to support specific projects with named collaborators and not, for example, to contribute to the cost of a sabbatical visit.
- Normally only one grant will be made per application in any academic year.
Value of award: The maximum award (towards actual travel, accommodation and subsistence expenses) for:
- Visits abroad or for visits from outside the UK, the maximum award is £1,200.
- Visits within the UK, the maximum award is £600.
- For all visits a maximum of £120 per day is allowed for accommodation and subsistence.
- In addition, the Society allows a further amount (of up to £200) to cover Caring Costs for those who have dependents.
The life of an LMS Grant is two financial years (1 August - 31 July). All awarded grants need to be claimed no later than the 31 July in the second year of the grant, i.e., if a grant is awarded in the 2023/24 financial year, the grant will need to be claimed by the 31 July 2026. Any grants that have not been claimed within the two-year period will be withdrawn.
Deadlines and decision timetable:
Applications should be submitted well in advance of the date of the visit.
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Application Deadline |
Decision Date |
Earliest Start Date of Visit |
|
15 September |
October |
February |
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22 January |
February / March |
June |
|
15 May |
June |
October |
- Please note that applications will not be considered between mid-June and mid-October.
- Grants will not be made retrospectively.
Queries regarding applications can be addressed to the Grants Administrator or the Chair of the Research Grants Committee (RGC), who will be pleased to discuss proposals informally with potential applicants and give advice on the submission of an application.
Grants Administrator: Lucy Covington Email: grants@lms.ac.uk
Chair of the Research Grants Committee (RGS): Professor Amanda Turner
Application Form:
To submit an application, you must be logged into your user account or registered as a user.
Other sources of funding:
Information about other funding offered by other organisations can be found here.
LMS Caring Costs Policy
The LMS wishes to enable carers and parents to take part in the activities that it supports. Applicants for grants across Schemes 1-9, for Early Career Research activities or who will run Society Meetings can request funding to help mathematicians with caring or parenting responsibilities to participate in their activities. In addition, individuals requiring support for caring to attend conferences, workshops, research schools and meetings or to make research visits - not necessarily organised by LMS - can apply for a Caring Supplementary Grant to contribute to such costs.
The Policy is available here.
Testimonials
"Due to long-COVID, my wife is currently not even able to look after herself, so I’ve become responsible for her care and also for our 3 kids. It is therefore currently very difficult for me to leave Loughborough to pursue research collaborations. I was therefore super pleased to receive LMS Scheme 4 Research in Pairs funding, because it allowed me to pay travel expenses for Dr Ben Goddard (Edinburgh) to come to Loughborough to work with me. His visit was hugely stimulating and very productive for us both. We’ve been working on mathematical modelling of various aspects of liquids evaporating and in contact with surfaces. In fact, as I write this now, 6 months after Ben’s visit to Loughborough, we are about to submit a paper based on our work on aerosol droplets evaporating in the air." - Prof. Andrew Archer, Loughborough
“The LMS "research in pairs" (Scheme 4) grant helped me to start a new collaboration. It was not obvious that the collaboration with Pol Vanhaecke, who I met a few times at conferences, will work, since our expertise and background are rather complimentary. It was not obvious at all that we will be able to achieve reasonable progress in a genuinely new and uncharted territory. A short visit to Poitiers, supported by the LMS, helped us to formulate the problem rigorously. The following week-long visit of Pol to Leeds, supported by the School of Mathematics Research Visiting Centre, enables us to complete the principal part of the project. We are very happy with the outcome, aiming to submit a paper in a high-profile journal. There are no doubts that our collaboration will continue beyond this project”. - Prof. Alexander Mikhailov, Leeds
“The whole process was simple and the queries I had were always answered quickly and clearly (I needed to change the travel dates, for example). My university then took control of the LMS small grant from which I was able to claim my expenses. This meant that I lost no time during my visit to Sweden to administrative tasks, and my collaborator and I were able to make excellent progress with our research project”. – Dr Charles Garnet Cox, Bristol
“I thoroughly enjoyed my research visit and the meetings with my collaborators, which proved to be highly productive and inspiring. When I contacted the LMS regarding the application and requested changes to the travel dates due to illness, they were consistently responsive and supportive. I am very grateful to the LMS for their support, as it has had a tremendously positive impact on my career”. – Dr Yang Han, Manchester
“I am writing this testimonial to express my deepest thanks to LMS for the generous grant support under a Scheme 4 `Research in Pairs’. The grant support enabled me to visit a long-time foreign collaborator for the intensive research investigation of mathematical aspects of a research topic. The frequently face-to-face communication is a good integral to speeding up research progress and making more discoveries in shorter time periods. As a direct result of the grant, we have submitted three joint papers for the publication in the leading scientific journals.’’ – Prof. Keming Yu, Brunel