ARC 2010: How did we do?

[Chris Lloyd]

Melbourne Business School did extremely well this year - four successful grants from 5 submitted. I did not apply - so no sour grapes around here! How did statistics do? I went to the ARC outcomes page and searched each file for RFCD code 2302. Here is what I got:

• Zhou from Macquarie University (looks like Applied mathematics)
• Sisson from UNSW (Bayesian statistics)
• Jayasnal from University of Sydney (Biostatistics, bioinformatics)
• Street and Donavon from UTS (Design of choice experiments)
• Andrew and Yu from Swinburne (telcomm network protocols)
• Anderson and Deistler from ANU (econometric macro model)
• Maller and Klueppelberg from ANU (Financial stochastic modelling)
• Welsh et all from ANU (Interdisciplinary project on climate change)

As I noted a couple of years ago, few of these are what we would call statistical methodology and theory. While some new statistical ideas could potentially come out of them, most are either not really statistics at all or are no-doubt-worth applied projects. Obviously there are some grants that involve statisticians and statistical theory that do not appear on this list. They were submitted to a different panel, for instance business and management if they were in econometrics or marketing science. (My colleague Mike Smith received a grant with Peter Danaher on applying copulas in marketing science).

The fact remains though that if you want to get some money for Ph.D scholarships for students to support research into the sort of reserach that will appear in Biometrika or JRSSB or JASA, you had better expect to get be disappointed. Peter Hall received one last year. As always though, we need to no how many apply for such grants. Not just total applications, but their nature. This is always the difficulty with assessing the outcomes - we do not see the proposals that were rejected.

Looking more broadly at ARC as a whole, I read in the Australian that the success rate is slightly up (to 22%) but the proportion of requested funds granted is down (from 67% to 63%). Where does this leave the principle of “full funding“?



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