Workshop: Next Level Grant Writing: Strategic Use of AI Assistants

Details

Date: Wed, 10 March 2027 09:00–12:30 h + Thu, 11 March 2027 13:30–17:00 h
Location: online via Zoom
Target group: Postdocs from all research fields of the UA Ruhr Universities (max. 25 participants)
Trainer: PD Dr. Daniel Mertens
Registration deadline: 24 February 2027
Contact for organizational Questions: event@rs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Description

A competitive grant proposal depends on the same thing good research planning does: an accurate, external view of where you actually stand - what's genuinely known, whether the addressed gap is relevant and competitive, and how your argument and narrative will convince the reviewers. 

This session applies that more objective external perspective directly to grant writing - using AI assistants to systematically uncover the unknown unknowns in your own proposal, from the literature gap you're claiming to the project management of your grant application up to the reviewers who will judge it. 

In this workshop:

• Gap analysis as strong lever: structured literature search to identify genuine gaps, then testing them for relevance, innovation, and competitiveness by analyzing the research environment and collaboration networks around your topic
• Reviewer analysis — anticipating how your proposal will be read, by whom, and against what
• Optimizing the narrative arc of your proposal — making the argument land for a reader encountering it cold
• Identifying and onboarding potential collaborators effectively: describing your research ecosystem
• Disclosure and authorship — what funders (DFG and others) currently expect when AI assistance is part of the process, and how to stay clearly on the right side of it
• Verification as a discipline — catching what an assistant gets wrong before a reviewer does

Participants leave with instructions for a proposal built on a gap and a checked against the literature and a narrative optimized for reviewers.

Please note: Basics of working with AI assistants and will not be covered in this workshop. For this please participate in the workshop “AI Assistants Can Increase the Quality of Your Research: A Foundations Workshop”.
 

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 as is an expert for responsible use of AI in research.

* 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.