I am a panel member

FWO’s regulations governing the internal and external peer review lay down the conditions of the evaluation and award procedure for the research support programmes managed by the FWO. These regulations also contain FWO’s general code of conduct for panel members and FWO representatives. At the start of your appointment as panel member with FWO you sign this code of conduct, indicating you agree to respect our rules and regulations.

Our review processes are fully digital and conducted via the FWO e-portal. Please use your e-mail address to log in. If necessary, passwords can be recovered via the log-in page.

To avoid any administrative problems, we ask that you keep your FWO e-portal updated with the most recent information. To do so, log in to your FWO e-portal and select the ‘edit your personal details’- option on the homepage of the FWO e-portal.

Please make sure the following sections of your e-portal are up to date at all times:

• Your personal details: (including your personal bank account number). Our system can only process IBAN account numbers. If you have a different account number (from outside Europe), you need to send this to expert@fwo.be, stating your foreign account number. Then this will be added to your account.
• The posts/career section: please provide a full overview of all your (past and) current academic affiliations. Please include affiliations to research institutions (e.g. VIB, IMEC, …), research centers, etc. Affiliations are constituted by all formal ties to an institution, including appointments as guest professorship
• Contact details: please enter your home and work address, email address(es) and phone number
• Disciplines: please select the (maximum 5) disciplines that match your expertise the most.
• Panel members who are subjugated to Belgian tax regulations, please provide your 'national registration number' (rijksregisternummer). FWO needs this in order to declare the working fee directly to the Belgian tax authorities.

The date(s) of the panel meeting(s) are determined well in advance to allow panel members to free up their schedule and participate in the meeting(s). You are informed of the panel meeting date for the following year as soon it has been determined. An overview of the meeting date(s) for your panel can be found here.

When panel meetings are organised in Brussels, we encourage panel members to travel to Brussels and participate in person. However, we do offer the possibility of online participation. If you opt to participate online, please inform us as soon as possible. Please also note that panel meetings typically take place during business hours CE(S)T.

When a panel meeting takes place in Brussels, FWO will provide hotel accommodation for all our panel members coming in from abroad (no overnight accommodation is offered to Belgian members). Well in advance of the meeting you will receive a hotel reservation form asking you to indicate the nights for which you require a hotel room. We offer accommodation the night before the panel meeting and all nights of the meeting itself.

Please note that you should book your own travel to Brussels, which we will of course fully reimburse. We would like to ask you to book your travel as soon as the meeting dates and times have been set. We thank you in advance for trying to keep the expenses reasonable.

FWO is more than happy to cover your travel and hotel expenses. However, should you have to cancel your hotel room for some reason, please inform us as soon as possible. In some situations we can recover the costs; late cancellations are typically charged in full to FWO. Please be aware of this when you request a hotel room.

FWO offers a fee per meeting day (including half days). This fee is intended as compensation for the work you do for us; we do not offer separate fees per review. 

For members of our expert panels fundamental research (fellowships and projects) as well as strategic basic research (fellowships and projects), information about the panel’s review procedure is provided on the following page with training videos. In the available videos we discuss the review procedure and focus on the role panel members play in this process. We touch on technical aspects (how to use the FWO e-portal) as well as content related issues (the role of internal reviewer, the rapporteur, the timeline of the process, the use of the scoring grid, etc.).

We also organize an interactive online Q&A for members of our panel members fundamental research (fellowships and projects) as well as strategic basic research (fellowships)  in which FWO staff members answer any remaining questions panel members might have.