BU Research Blog

From one NIHR Fellowship to another!

This week I complete my 3-year, 100% FTE NIHR Career Development Fellowship. After the Christmas holiday I then start on a new NIHR Clinical Trials Fellowship.

If you’re not familiar with NIHR fellowships you can find out more here: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/our-research-community/NIHR-academy/nihr-training-programmes/fellowship-programme.htm. The NIHR have re-packaged their fellowship programme and so the Career Development Fellowship is no longer available, as it has been superseded with an Advanced Fellowship.

The Career Development Fellowship has been a career-changing experience. It not only provides you with funding to lead a multidisciplinary team to conduct a research project of importance, but the opportunity to undertake a training and development programme. This has enabled me to further develop my skills and expertise in clinical trial research methods so that I can undertake larger, more complex studies, and therefore go on to produce much higher quality work with greater impact.

The new fellowship that I will start in January 2019 is a Clinical Trials Fellowship. These are designed to provide further advanced research methods training in clinical trials. They provide hands-on experience with several trials at different phases of progression and are to be based in a clinical trials unit. For me, I will be based at PRIMENT, the Clinical Trials Unit at UCL with expertise in trials conducted in primary care and to do with mental health, including my area of dementia. This will help consolidate the experience I have gained so far and training from completing an MSc in Clinical Trials, with further hands-on experience in dementia trials at a leading trials unit.

I can highly recommend NIHR fellowships and happy to discuss them with colleagues interested in applying for one.

Dr Samuel Nyman