Evaluation & Selection Process

The evaluation and selection process will follow open, transparent and merit-based procedures to ensure that all applications are evaluated in a competent and impartial manner. Standard evaluation criteria and scoring will be used.

Selection Process Stages

  • There are 8 stages in the selection process including an International Peer Review stage, an Interview stage, Offer stage and Redress stage.
  • Feeback will be provided to applicants throughout the evaluation process.

Evaluation Criteria

  • Reviewers and interviewers will use 3 evaluation criteria: Excellence, Impact and Implementation when assessing the proposal and interview.
  • Weighting: The evaluation criteria are weighted differently and the set of weightings shown will be applied to the scores provided for each of the criteria.
  • Priority ranking will be used to rank applications that achieve exactly the same score.

Scoring

  • Eligible applications will be first scored during the International Peer Review Stage. Applications that proceed to the Interview Stage will receive a second score for that stage.
  • A score between 0 (very poor) and 5 (excellent) will be provided for each of the three evaluation criteria as a whole.
  • The corresponding weighting will be applied to the scores provided.
  • The weighted scores for each criterion will be added, producing a final weighted score. After each stage, the maximum final score for a given application will be 5 (excellent).

Thresholds

  • An overall threshold of 70% will be applied to the weighted score produced for each proposal. Therefore, only proposals with a peer review score equal to or higher than 3.5 will proceed to the interview stage. The same threshold will apply to the interview stage.

Ranking and Funding Decision

  • The final mark for each application will be produced by adding the weighted scores from the international peer review and interview stages with equal weighting leading to a final mark between 0 and 10.
  • Only applications scoring above 7.0 will be considered for funding.
  • The applications will be ranked taking into account the final mark and the prospective supervisor’s capacity to take in that applicant.
  • Upon a favourable funding decision, applicants will be offered an employment contract for the duration of their fellowship from their academic supervisor’s host institution. The remaining applicants scoring above the threshold will be placed on a waiting list.