An Interview with Dr. Haorui Wu

The U.S. grants climate is terrifying. I’m outraged at what changes mean for early career scholars. ​Speaking up​ about these impacts is critical. I can’t predict the unpredictable, but I can help you continue to hone your grant writing skills.

In that light, it seems like a good time to turn attention to Canadian funders. To understand Canadian Funders, I interviewed Dr. Haorui Wu. Dr. Wu holds the Canada Research Chair in Resilience. He’s secured over $9.5 million CAD in grant funding. He was fortunate to learn grant writing skills during graduate school and as a postdoctoral fellow.

Below, I asked Dr. Wu about his grant writing journey.

Q: What did your early grants do for your career?

One of my first grants was a SSHRC connection grant. This type of grant does not support research, but knowledge mobilization. I used that grant to collaborate with my postdoctoral advisor in Canada to host an international conference. We invited researchers worldwide to share their experiences about post-disaster long-term recovery. We also invited the media and governmental disaster and emergency agencies to promote knowledge translation to the general public and practitioners. The researchers and practitioners I met became involved in my next grant application. This early support helped me obtain bigger support later.

Q: Could you talk about a setback you had with grant writing and how you overcame it?

When I became a new tenure track faculty member, I drafted a grant based on my understanding of a call for applications. I later realized that I missed a lot of useful and required information in the call for applications. So I did not end up submitting that proposal.

For my next grant application, I carefully read the call for applications. This gave me information to put into my application and helped persuade reviewers to fund my project. I tried to address all the points in the call for applications. And that application was funded.

Q: What do people need to know if they want to write grants for Canadian funders?

Canadian funders have different streams for applications. Read the details and the instructions very carefully. Address all the details and prepare yourself to apply for the grant. What I mean by prepare is, the quality of the application makes up about 40 or 50% of the total score. Other things also matter. Reviewers will check your research experience and funding records, especially your publications. This is good news because you can improve your publication record while you’re working on grants. All these things help you persuade a reviewer to get your project funded.

Thank you to Dr. Wu for sharing his expertise. You can read more about his work here. To learn about other scholars’ career journeys, see the Scholar Voices archive. As always, thank you for reading and believing that scholars deserve support for incredible ideas.

Betty

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