Guidelines for applying for a grant from the Simons Foundation Fund:

The foundation awards grants for scientific visits, conference visits, and deserving activities such as the organisation of scientific meetings in the field of human genetics.

Grants for conference visits and scientific visits are made available to PhD students and postdocs, as well as clinical genetics specialists in training (not for MSc students).

The applicant must be in the temporary employment of a Dutch institute at the time of the subsidised conference visit / or scientific visit.

Grants will not be awarded for activities that form part of a formal clinical genetics training programme, for thesis printing costs, for courses that are a compulsory part of your training, or similar activities.

The maximum amounts awarded for conference visits are as follows:
Within Europe: € 600
Outside Europe: € 800

For each workshop / conference, there is a limit for each department / institute; i.e. a grant will be awarded to a maximum of two persons per institute / department. If more than two applications are granted for the same workshop / conference within one department / institute the money will be divided among the applicants.

The applicant can submit a maximum of one application per year. The total number of grants that can be awarded per individual applicant has a maximum of three.

If the budget of the Simons Foundation Fund is not sufficient the board will also consider whether the applicant has had grant applications awarded before.

In the case of scientific visits, in most cases it will be necessary to secure additional funding from other sources. Please indicate at which funds you applied for a grant and what part of the money will be paid by the Simons Foundation Fund.

The max amount to be awarded for a scientific visit is € 1200.

You must explicitly specify what proportion of the project's total annual funding for travel this grant will represent.

Decisions on applications will be made twice a year. Travel grants required for the first half of the year must be applied for before 31 December of the previous year. Applications for travel grants in the latter half of the year must have been received before 30 June.

After a conference/scientific visit a personal report, describing the relevance of the conference/scientific visit on your work has to be submitted. Also, you must provide documented proof of the actual costs incurred, i.e. a financial statement including all invoices, receipts etc. (Please note that a booking confirmation and an e-ticket do not count as invoices). If you do not include such a financial statement nor attach the receipts and the amounts on the financial statement do not correspond with the tickets and invoices your personal report will not be taken into consideration. The report and financial statement with enclosures have to be submitted as one pdf file.

In case of a conference visit a proof of active attendance (i.e. oral presentation, poster presentation or a scanned copy of your abstract published in the abstract book including a copy of the cover page) has to be submitted together with your visit report.

Awarded grants will only be paid out to your employer following the receipt and approval of this report. The report must be in the board's possession before the end of the six-month period during which the visit took place, or within two months of the return date. This means before June 30 for travel in the first half of the year, and before December 31 for travel in the latter half of the year. If your return date is less than two months before the end of the six-month period, you may still submit the report, as long as it is received no later than two months after your return date. If on such date we have not yet received your report, no grant can be claimed.

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