How a Grant Turns Scientists Into Managers
The Experiment That Failed Its Way Into a Career
Anna
Sandak submitted a research proposal to the European Research Council in April 2021, after six months of intensive writing, revising and reshaping an idea she had been refining for years. [2] The ERC is part of the Horizon Europe funding scheme, which focuses on researcher-led science — projects that come from the scientist’s own curiosity rather than from a preset institutional agenda. She then waited another six months for a response, a period during which the proposal was evaluated by the ERC’s review panels. The invitation to interview arrived in January 2022, and that alone told her something important: her proposal had been well received and would be eligible for resubmission if she ultimately missed out.
So she did something that looks, at first glance, like a mistake. After the interview, she began preparing for failure. [2] She rewrote her entire proposal for resubmission. She treated the rejection as the likely outcome and built her next attempt on top of that assumption. She turned off her message notifications, shut down her e-mails and stopped checking her phone, because the resubmission demanded her full attention.
The call that broke her focus came in March 2022, from her institute director. She had won the grant. She had been thinking of this achievement as the peak of her career — so much so that she had forgotten to imagine what her work would look like if she won. The preparation for failure, it turned out, was the most consequential thing she did. It forced her to articulate, in writing, exactly what the science was for and why it should exist at all. That clarity is what the reviewers rewarded. And she had no clue how much her job was about to change.
From Spectrometer to Spreadsheet
Sandak is a professor and head of the materials research group at the InnoRenew Centre of Excellence at the University of Primorska in Izola, Slovenia. [4] The instrument that made her new reality visible was not a sensor in the laboratory. It was the grant itself — nearly 2 million euros, or about 2.3 million US dollars, awarded over five years. [5] That funding immediately transformed her research group’s work. With it, the team could develop a new generation of living coatings for buildings: fungal-biofilm-based materials capable of self-repair and protection against ultraviolet light. These are coatings that behave less like paint and more like skin — they can mend themselves and shield the surface beneath them from sunlight damage. The money did not just buy equipment. It bought a mandate to build something that did not exist before.
What Sandak did not expect was how quickly the same grant would transform her own job at InnoRenew. Like many researchers, she had spent years learning how to design experiments, analyse data, write papers and compete for funding. Academic training taught her how to become a scientist. It had not prepared her to lead a growing team, manage people, navigate institutional structures and make decisions that affect the careers of colleagues and friends. The instrument that measured her output had quietly changed from a spectrometer to a spreadsheet of salaries, timelines and human expectations.
Landing a second large grant accelerated this shift. Two major awards turned a laboratory scientist into a manager, and the transition happened faster than any postdoctoral fellowship had prepared her for. Many academics experience a point at which they move from laboratory work to management, and that point can be an opportunity to foster growth in the next generation of scientists. But the opportunity arrives without a manual. The skills that win the grant — writing, revising, defending an idea — are not the skills that run the group the grant pays for.
The Figure That Redefined the Role
The final data point is not a measurement from the lab. It is the figure that redefined Sandak’s role: nearly 2 million euros over five years. That single number, awarded once, converted a researcher into a leader. It is the same number that funded the fungal-biofilm coatings, and the same number that pulled her out of the daily bench work and into rooms where decisions about other people’s careers get made.
Sandak’s account, published in Nature, reflects on what it means to contribute to research when the contribution is no longer a result produced at the bench. [6] The grant did not just change what her group could study. It changed what she does all day. And the preparation for failure — the rewritten proposal, the silenced phone, the assumption of rejection — turned out to be the most important discovery of the whole process. It revealed that the job she was training for and the job she now holds are two different professions wearing one title.
Sources
1. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-02184-2
4. InnoRenew Centre of Excellence
6. Nature