Wellcome Mental Health Data Prize in UK & South Africa

Deadline: 5-Jun-22

The Wellcome is inviting nominations for Mental Health Data Prize to support collaborative approaches to research into anxiety and depression in young people.

The Prize aims to generate tangible and scalable outputs that support the mental health research community.

A key aim of this prize is to build a multidisciplinary mental health data community by bringing together people with mental health research backgrounds and data expertise. By mental health science they mean any discipline that uses evidence in rigorous and transparent ways, whether based on observation or experimentation. This could include:

psychiatry
psychology
neuroscience
disciplines within the humanities, social sciences and computer sciences, among others.

Types of Tools

The types of tools that are considered in scope for the Prize.

Tools helping researchers to perform data analysis, for example a tool that can identify clusters of individuals who respond to specific interventions or active ingredients, or a tool that determines which factors can predict relapses.
Tools used to replicate data analysis, by making available the mechanism by which data is translated into research insights, for example, a new application of a machine learning algorithm that can be used on other datasets.
Tools that share the insights from data analysis, in a format accessible and digestible for multiple audiences, for example, a triaging tool for researchers that can highlight the active ingredients that work for different groups of young people.
Tools that facilitate data analysis by addressing barriers to conducting research, for example, tools that support data cleaning and manipulation or automatically extract relevant data from longitudinal datasets.

Tools considered out of scope would be:

Tools based on insights from data but not directly linked to data itself, for example, analysis shows that certain interventions are effective leading to a tool connecting individuals that use that intervention.
Apps aimed at individuals, for example, condition management, mood tracking, sleep/exercise monitoring apps or a digital tool that supports people directly with navigating existing services for themselves.

Funding Information & Duration

There are three phases to the prize, each six months long and with different levels of funding and support on offer:

Discovery phase: 10 teams will be selected to receive £40,000 of funding
Prototyping phase: 5 teams will be selected to receive £100,000 of funding
Sustainability phase: £500,000 will be allocated across 3 winning teams
Duration of funding: 6-18 months

Eligibility Criteria

Lead applicants:

must be based in the UK or South Africa.
may be at any career stage but must have a permanent, open-ended or long-term rolling contract, or the guarantee of one for the full duration of the award.

Lead applicant organisations should be either:

a higher education institution
a research institute
a non-academic healthcare organisation
a not-for-profit organisation.

Co-applicants:

can be at any career stage and based anywhere in the world, apart from mainland China.
can be self-employed, e.g. a freelance data scientist (as well as employed by the usual range of host organisations below).

Co-applicants organisations should be either: