Proposals


Submitting a proposal

Before submitting a proposal you need to create an account in CLS User portal. For a tutorial on how to create an account and submit a proposal please visit User Portal: How to Manage your Account. 

For proposal deadlines visit here.

Tips for writing a good proposal:

  • For new proposals, the research should be novel and the aim of the project be clearly identified.
  • For new proposals, please provide very good description of the sample structure (physical state, size, material, shape, density, etc.) and what feature or mechanism you are aiming to detect.
  • For new proposals, please provide evidence that the research group is capable of thorough data analysis.
  • For new and existing projects, all stages of the experiment including data collection and processing should be perfectly planned. Please provide justification on how you plan on using the requested number of shifts. If you have questions about the length of scans, please contact BMIT staff before submitting the proposal.
  • CLS, and thus BMIT runs 24 hours a day and the research group should schedule enough number of group members to ensure effective use of the entire 24 hours in one day.
  • Please confirm availability of BMIT staff with the beamline responsible if you would like to include a BMIT scientist to your experimental group.

Addressing the above points allows BMIT scientists to evaluate technical feasibility of the project more efficiently and select the best imaging technique, detector, and imaging parameters. Below you can find an example of nicely written proposals as a reference. Make sure you have addressed all questions in the proposal form.

An example of good proposal submitted to BMIT

After submission 

After submission of a proposal, it will go through a peer-review process. You will be notified of your proposal scores. If you are awarded beamtime a BMIT scientist will contact you regarding scheduling your beamtime several weeks in advance. You may be asked to provide more information about your samples, ethics, etc. Please make sure to respond to the questions promptly to avoid delays on approving your samples. 

A project (approved proposal) can be edited to update Material, Research Team Members, Equipment and Ancillary Facilities. Amendments require REVIEW and APPROVAL prior to being used. You will not be able to sign on to your beamtime session with Unapproved or In Progress amendments.

Please allow four weeks for reviews of Permit Amendments prior to the scheduled experiment. Amendments submitted after the four weeks are not guaranteed to be processed and the last valid permit will be used for the experiment.