Fifty four discovery research projects have been awarded a total of £108 million to push the boundaries of our knowledge and unlock potential new insights into life, health and wellbeing.
We know that breakthroughs in our understanding of human health are not limited to specific research areas or disciplines. We hoped our new schemes would encourage applications from a breadth of disciplinarity, promoting team research and interdisciplinary research, and that our funding would reach diverse people and places.
Our new awardees include clinicians and researchers from the UK, Republic of Ireland, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Brazil, as well as 23 different institutions.
From investigating the reasons behind brain asymmetry to exploring whether engineering new biomaterials can reduce the use of animals in research, our awardees embody the scope of inquiry our new strategy is designed to foster.
We’re also investing more funds in this area and funding is available over longer periods, which is designed to encourage a broad range of applications, increased diversity of candidates, and bold projects.
With 75% of researchers reporting feeling stifled in their creativity, our aim is to enable our funding awardees to pursue their creative visions in a research environment geared towards quality of research, not simply outcomes. We’ve designed our funding to alleviate these pressures and allow room for discovery.
Our Early-Career Awards provide the time and resources for those who are ready to develop and establish their own research identity and begin the journey towards independence. For our Career Development Awards we’re funding researchers who are ready to take responsibility for the creative and bold projects that will establish them and their research groups on the international stage.
Among the latest awardees are researchers tackling questions as diverse as whether we can improve malaria responses by better understanding the natural world to which pathways viruses like SARS-CoV-2 use to enter our cells.
This area of funding is designed for established researchers and teams in their fields. Our new awardees include researchers investigating what solidarity means when it comes to global health, how physical forces form the shape of a developing embryo and much more.
These fantastic awardees represent a great start to this new phase of Wellcome’s focus on Discovery Research. We recognise that there’s more we can do to promote diversity of people, places, topics and disciplines seeking opportunities and that this is key for our future work.
Watch these webinars for more information on the application process, criteria and other frequently asked questions about Discovery Research.
Fifty four discovery research projects have been awarded a total of £108M to push the boundaries of our knowledge and unlock potential new insights into life, health and wellbeing.