Wellcome to launch new-style 7-year grants

Wellcome Trust headquarters in London. Picture courtesy Wellcome Images.

It says the Wellcome Trust Investigator Awards will provide researchers and their teams with the support to pursue individual, bold visions, giving them the maximum amount of freedom to be creative and innovative in their approach.

Mark Walport, Director of the Trust, said, “The watchword of Wellcome Trust Investigator Awards will be flexibility, in length and scale of funding. The challenge to all research funders is to nurture and support the best scientists and enable them to ask the most important questions. We intend to provide Wellcome Trust Investigators with the creative opportunities and resources they need to tackle tough problems.”

Together with the Wellcome Trust’s existing fellowships and Strategic Awards, the new Investigator Awards will help establish a community of researchers with the resources to interact and collaborate, build networks, translate knowledge and participate in public dialogue about science.

This marks a departure away from funding a large number of medium-term project and programme grants, which can tie researchers into a cycle of focusing on securing grants rather than tackling research problems.

In another departure, the grants will be awarded on the basis of interviews in which applicants will present and argue their cases to world-class peer reviewers. The interviews will focus on the excellence of the applicant, the importance of the question to be addressed and the proposed approach to tackling the problem.

Investigator Awards will be made available at two levels of experience and seniority: Wellcome Trust Investigator Awards and Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Awards. Researchers during the early stages of their independent research careers have sometimes found it hard to obtain grant support in competition with more established colleagues. This is paradoxical since there is evidence that researchers at the start of their independent careers are at their most creative. The Wellcome Trust Investigator Awards will be specifically targeted at this group of researchers. Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Awards will be reserved for fully-established independent researchers.

In addition to these new awards, the Trust will be introducing Enhancement Awards, which will be available to existing grant holders to provide additional funding to evolving research programmes and could, for example, support equipment, collaborations, and additional research costs.