March 4, 2022

The Ministry of Education Tier 1 Grants, administered by the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, have 2 to 3 calls every financial year. The application is open to all tenure track faculty members and the grant supports projects in the social sciences and humanities with a total project value of below S$180,000 over three years. The next grant call closes on 4 March 2022. Learn more about the grant at FASS Research Intranet.

Assistant Professor Juwon Seo (NUS Economics), in her 2018 and 2020 Tier 1 grants, produced the following papers: 1) Randomization Tests of Copula Symmetry, with Brendan Beare; 2) Copula-based Redundancy Analysis, with Ji Yeh Choi; 3) Randomization Tests for Equality in Dependence Structure; 4) A Projection Framework for Testing Shape Restrictions That Form Convex Cones, with Zheng Fang, 5) Parametric Conditional Mean Inference with Functional Data Applied to Lifetime Income Curves, with Jin Seo Cho and Peter Phillips.

 

 

 

 

Why did you decide to apply for a Tier 1 grant rather than another type of grant (e.g. HSS seed fund, Tier 2 etc.)? 

I think the Tier 1 grant was the most approachable research grant for me. When I started my career, I did not have much information on research grants. I remember most of my colleagues recommended the Tier 1 grant. When I decided to apply for a Tier 1 grant, I considered the possibilities of getting the grant along with the scale of the grant (the Tier 2 grant takes a lot more time before it is approved, and I did not need that much money as a junior; perhaps the Tier 1 grant is more popular in our department).

 

 

What do you think were the strengths of your grant application that led to it being funded? 

I wrote about several ongoing projects rather than others in the initial stage. Thus, I could write very details about the contents of each project. I could also provide a clear justification for the budget. For instance, quite a large portion of my grant was to be used for manpower. I asked my research assistant to provide a record of what he had done for the last seven days and submitted it along with our email correspondences to justify the estimated working hours.

 

 

Did you face any challenges implementing the grant? If so, what did you do to overcome those challenges? 

During the pandemic, travelling was not allowed, so I could not travel to meet my co-authors. As neither of my co-authors could visit NUS, I was unable to spend the travelling budget. I asked for an extension of the grant’s termination date.

What do you think the Tier 1 grant enabled you to achieve that you would not have been able to do without it? 

The Tier 1 grant was strategically useful in managing time. It enabled me to write many good papers in a short time. As an econometrician, I do many simulations, computer coding, and data work. I would not have been able to write this number of papers without hiring research assistants.

Before the pandemic, I could spend the grant to invite senior co-authors to speed up the progress of research. Your co-authors may be busy with writing many other papers, but they will pay attention to your paper during the visit (and they will always love to visit Singapore!).

 

What do you think you would have done differently if you could start all over again? 

Once the application is approved, it is not easy to make changes (although it is possible); a separate document is required for all grant variations within or across budget categories. So, it is better to plan thoroughly in the application stage.

Thank you very much for sharing your experiences with the Tier 1 Grant, Juwon! We wish you the best in your current and future research projects!

 

For more Tier 1 Success Stories, check out the following:

• Associate Professor Jinping Wang’s “A Cultural History of Quanzhen Daoism in Thirteenth-Century North China”
• Assistant Professor Alex Mitchell’s “Exploring ‘Literary’ Devices for Poetic Interactivity” and “Understanding Repeat Engagement with Dynamically Changing Computational Media”

For HSS Fellowship Success Stories, check out the following:

• Professor William Bain’s “Political Theology of International Order”
• Associate Professor Ian Chong’s “Buying Out, Cashing In: Non-Leading States, Aggregated Reactions, and the Problems of Power Transition”

Stay tuned for forthcoming features on FASS Book Grant Awardees!