Deadline: 17-Feb-23
The UK Research and Innovation is seeking nominations for its Ageing Research Development Awards to develop tractable areas of interdisciplinary research to secure better health and wellbeing for individuals as they age.
Funding Information
- You can apply for up to £400,000 in funding and UKRI will typically fund 80% of the full economic cost of the award.
- Awards will be for up to 24 months.
Research Areas
UKRI encourages the research community to be ambitious and to submit their best ideas for consideration. While UKRI will not pre-prescribe any priority areas of focus, awards must be interdisciplinary and could align with 1 or more of the following example areas:
- Enhancing mechanistic understanding of intrinsic and extrinsic ageing pathways;
- Understanding the impact of the external environment on health and wellbeing as individuals age;
- Use of cultural, creative, and natural environment assets to support health and wellbeing as individuals age;
- Use of national scientific infrastructures to support improved understanding of ageing;
- Improving risk prediction and intervention approaches to inform behavioral solutions;
- Target identification, biomarkers, sensing technologies or novel computational methods to support better health and wellbeing in later life;
- Co-design of health and care interventions for communities;
- Systems approaches to developing cost-effective tools and interventions.
Eligible Costs
Eligible costs are outlined:
- Investigator salary contributions;
- Research personnel costs;
- Direct research costs
- Equipment costs
- Estates and indirect costs.
Eligibility Criteria
- Be a researcher based in the UK and employed by an eligible research organisation or be based in an overseas MRC unit;
- Usually have at least a postgraduate degree, although they expect most applicants to have a PhD or equivalent;
- Show that they will direct the project and be responsible for its delivery, and direct research to address the remit of the opportunity;
- They encourage the inclusion of relevant investigators across the entire breadth of UKRI’s remit. While administered by MRC, applications to this opportunity are welcomed from across the UKRI research community.
Award Requirements
Development awards must:
- Link understanding of ageing pathways with wider determinants of health (for example: environmental, economic, social, or cultural);
- Clearly define the challenge that they aim to address, focusing on novel avenues of investigation;
- Take an interdisciplinary approach towards addressing the challenge, supported by an interdisciplinary team;
- Clearly describe the intended target demographic for potential interventions, explaining how the research would improve health equity across communities;
- Consider public and patient engagement where appropriate;
- Strengthen evidence to de-risk further development and implementation of potential interventions. This could include:
- Further developing the basic principles underpinning an approach;
- Strengthening pilot data;
- Establishing proof-of-concept;
- Testing the feasibility and acceptability of a potential intervention.
- Have a clear line of sight towards benefiting the health and wellbeing of older people, or as individual’s age. Results arising from the awards do not have to be immediately translatable, but applications must clearly define how results would be taken forward for exploitation;
- UKRI broadly defines an intervention as any approach, tool, technology, or treatment that has the potential to positively impact the lives of ageing individuals or positively alter ageing trajectories throughout life. This definition does not extend to clinical trials or population health-level interventions, which will not be supported through this opportunity.
For more information, visit UK Research and Innovation.