Areas of Excellence Scheme
(A) The Exercise
1 Inclusive of indirect/on-costs
(B) Selection Panel's Comments for Applicants' Reference
1. Quality of applications (i.e. strengths, weaknesses and gaps of proposals):
| 1. | Number of eligible applications received: | 20 |
| 2. | Number of full proposals received: | 6 |
| 3. | Number of proposals recommended for funding: | 4 |
| 4. | Success rate (over the number of eligible applications): | 20% |
| 5. |
Total approved budget of the funded projects | $304.039 million1 |
| 6. |
Total funding amount from the RGC | $277.231 million1 |
(B) Selection Panel's Comments for Applicants' Reference
1. Quality of applications (i.e. strengths, weaknesses and gaps of proposals):
- The projects are all of high quality and truly worthy of funding.
- The research ideas are novel and the project teams are strong.
- The projects could be funded without reduced budgets if there were sufficient resources.
- Despite the time limitation of the interviews, the project teams took great efforts to make the interviews informative which enabled the Selection Panel to exercise critical judgement.
- The “right of reply” arrangements were implemented in this AoE exercise. The arrangements would be reviewed in 2021 after the completion of the Theme-based Research Scheme 2021/22 (Eleventh Round) exercise.