Workshop: Successful Grant Writing in the Natural and Engineering Sciences - Module 1: AI for Grant Writing

Details

Date: Tue, 17 March 2026, 09:00–12:30 h
Location: online via Zoom
Target group: Postdocs from the Natural and Engineering Sciences of the UA Ruhr universities (max. 25 participants)
Trainer: PD Dr. Daniel Mertens
Registration deadline: 3 March 2026
Contact for organizational Questions: event@rs.ruhr-uni.bochum.de

Description

AI-based tools enable researchers to work more efficiently and effectively. However, it is important for researchers to use these tools judiciously and with an understanding of their limitations and considering the policies of the funding agencies.
 
Although the range of tools is currently expanding exponentially, at the current stage the workshop will discuss and use the following tools: 

• extracting key claims, summarizing, brainstorming ideas and finding sources (https://www.perplexity.ai/) 
• enhanced literature review, connectivity of papers, interactive summaries of key information (https://elicit.org/, https://www.explainpaper.com, https://app.litmaps.com/ and https://www.researchrabbit.ai/)
• texting (https://www.deepl.com/write, https://chat.openai.com/chat)
• optimizing text
• generating scientific text de novo, e.g. paragraphs, titles, whole cover letters
• generating text for social media, e.g. tweets, LinkedIn posts etc. 
• brainstorming e.g. of experimental planning, strategic planning and many more (https://chat.openai.com/chat)
• how to use AI to brainstorm 
• which scientific questions are relevant and which scientific experiments can be used to ad-dress a specific question, which controls can be used in an experimental setup
• which questions might be asked by the reviewers of your paper, grant application, SFB panel review

The workshop will integrate questions/material/text/ideas from participants. Content/suggestions and questions from the participants will be implemented live online as input into the AI tools. These case studies and live exercises will help participants to apply the concepts and tools to their own scientific research and proposal writing.

Download Workshop-Description (PDF)

Trainer

PD Dr. Daniel Mertens is Biochemist, Lecturer and group leader at the German Cancer ResearchCenter (DKFZ) and at the University of Ulm. He shares his knowledge and experiences since several years as professional trainer.

* In order to provide you with a comfortable registration process, we use registration forms of our service partner eveeno®. Please note the information on the allocation of places on the program overview page.