BU Research Blog

The following funding opportunities have been announced. Please follow the links for more information:

EPSRC

Healthcare impact partnerships

Funding supports projects that progress previous EPSRC-funded research in the crosscutting capability areas of disruptive sensing and analysis, and medical device design and innovation, towards impact within a healthcare application. Proposals must address at least one of the following healthcare technologies grand challenges:

• developing future therapies;
• frontiers of physical intervention;
• optimising treatment;
• transforming community health and care.

Award amount max: Total budget – £5 million, unspecified for each project Closing date: Intent to submit – 27/8/2015, Full submission deadline – 24/9/2015

Academy of Medical Sciences

Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers

Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers offer funding of up to £30,000 to cover the cost of research consumables. The grants allow research-active Clinical Lecturers to gather data to strengthen their bids for longer-term fellowships and funding.

Award amount max: £30,000 over 1-2 years for consumables Closing date: 1/9/2015

Royal Society

University Research Fellowships

The scheme provides the opportunity to build an independent research career. Those appointed are expected to be strong candidates for permanent posts in universities at the end of their fellowships. The scheme covers all areas of the life and physical sciences, including engineering, but excluding clinical medicine and any researcher addressing a direct biomedical research question.

Award amount max: Up to £39,389.64 in salary, up to £13,000 for research expenses, estates & indirects for first year and specified amounts thereafter for 5 years. Closing date: 3/9/2015

NERC

Joint US–UK workshop on improving understanding of potential environmental impacts associated with unconventional hydrocarbons

NERC and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the Environment Sustainability & Energy Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry (ESED), are inviting applications from UK scientists to attend a jointly organised workshop on Improving Understanding of Potential Environmental Impacts Associated with Unconventional Hydrocarbons in Washington DC on 5-6 November 2015.

The deployment of hydraulic fracturing technology to exploit shale oil and gas reservoirs in the USA and now potentially in the UK has raised a number of environmental concerns.

Award amount max: All reasonable travel & accommodation expenses Closing date: 9/9/2015

Highlight Topics

NERC invites proposals for the second round of highlight topics, a route for funding strategic research. Highlight topics focus strategic research on defined subject areas, and will be delivered through independent projects.

The highlight topics in this call are:

• Evolutionary biotic response to environmental change: limits to adaptation.
• Coastal morphology: coastal sediment budgets and their role in coastal recovery.
• Quantifying climate risk for adaptation and resilience planning.
• Closing the global methane budget.
• Reducing uncertainty in the integrity of potential carbon capture and storage sites.

Award amount max: Total call budget – £16 million, maximum per highlight topic – £4 million Closing date: Notification of intent to submit – 21/9/2015, Full submission deadline – 8/9/2015

Innovate UK

Internet of Things cities demonstrator

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is to invest up to £10 million* in a single collaborative R&D project to demonstrate the capability of the Internet of Things (IoT) in a city region. The aim of this demonstrator is to show how the large-scale deployment of IoT – where everyday objects are connected to a network in order to share their data – can benefit citizens by offering environmental improvements, economic opportunities, and more efficient and effective delivery of services such as transport, healthcare and energy.

Award amount max: £10 million Closing date: Registration of interest – 23/9/2015, Full submission deadline – 30/9/2015

Stratified medicine: connecting the UK infrastructure

This SBRI competition aims to accelerate and/or increase the development and adoption of innovative diagnostic tools in order to offer better targeted treatment to patients within the UK healthcare system.

Award maximum: Up to £10 million Closing date: Registration – 28/10/2015, Full submission – 4/11/2015

BBSRC

Flexible interchange programme

Our FLexible Interchange Programme (FLIP) supports the movement of people from one environment to a different one to exchange knowledge/technology/skills, developing bioscience research/researchers and addressing our strategic priorities.

Award amount max: Up to £150,000 Closing date: 15/10/2015

Modular training partnerships

Modular Training Partnerships (MTPs) fund the development of industrially-relevant short training courses at Masters level. Training should be developed in close collaboration with industry, and evidence of industrial demand is a key requirement for funding.

Award amount max: Unspecified Closing date: 15/10/2015

Wellcome Trust

Seed Awards provide responsive, flexible funding, enabling researchers to develop a novel idea to a position where they would be able to be competitive for a larger award from the Wellcome Trust, or another source.

Their exploratory nature gives scope for the use of bold or innovative methodologies, and a broad range of possible activities; from pilot and scoping studies, to preliminary data gathering and proof-of-principle studies, to planning sessions and meetings of collaborative networks. They are not intended to fund discrete projects with no follow-on plans. We encourage applications which propose to carry out interdisciplinary research across our Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Innovations funding.

Award amount max: Up to £100,000 for up to 2 years Closing date: 22/10/2015

Medical Research Council

Skills Development Fellowships

Quantitative expertise: support training for very early career researchers in, or individuals changing disciplines to, areas covering mathematics, statistics, computation and informatics applicable to any biomedical or health-related data sources.

Expertise at the social science interface: with a focus on areas of health economics and/or mixed methods research.

Award amount max: Unspecified Closing date: 16 June 2016

Please note that some funders specify a time for submission as well as a date. Please confirm this with your  RKEO Funding Development Officer

You can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in  RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.