Britta Schläger has two tips for anyone applying for an EC grant: prepare your proposal carefully, and get managerial help as early as you can.

Easier said than done? Look no further. Britta – the first research technician in the Hentze Group, who started at EMBL in 1989 – is celebrating the fifth anniversary of her company, kobris, which offers project management services, including the management of EC grants. “These pose an incredible amount of work for institute administrators and grant coordinators,” she explains.

Nobody knows this better than Phil Irving, Head of EMBL’s Grants Services. She and her team provide managerial help ‘from cradle to grave’ to staff who are partners or coordinators of a grant, but sometimes it’s advisable to seek additional managerial help for the time-consuming tasks involved. “This need does not pose any financial restrictions on the scientific side, as many EC grants have a specific cost category for project management,” Britta says. Her company has successfully supported two projects at EMBL: the ‘ESTAR grant’ with Anne Ephrussi and Matthias Hentze and, at its final stage, the ‘symposi@embl grant’ with Peer Bork.

It may seem an unusual step after the responsibilities of a research technician, but Britta enjoys it. “I like organising and coordinating things, and a smooth-running project is simply fun,” she says. Of course, EMBL itself has changed a lot since Britta’s time, too. “When I started, letters were addressed to ‘Heidelberg, West Germany’. We shared one Mac [model II] between the whole group and read newspapers – this was before the internet conquered the world,” she recalls. “We needed three days to extract 100mg of DNA until Qiagen introduced the first plasmid kit!”

If you like more information or would like to contact Britta, visit www.kobris.de.