Key role in evaluation procedure: the evaluation panels and their members
The SNSF’s National Research Council decides whether or not to fund applications. The 89 evaluation panels handle the preparatory work on which it bases its decisions, assessing several thousand applications each year.
One of the key tasks of the evaluation panels is to ease the Research Council’s workload. Around 2010, the SNSF experienced a surge in applications. This in turn created a problem, as the 100 honorary experts who make up the committee had to increase their time commitment. Although some funding schemes already had evaluation panels, this was not enough. The situation prompted the SNSF to create other such panels, comprising members of the Research Council and university researchers.