Applications open for Bioimaging Technology Development Awards

Awarded teams will develop tools and technologies to overcome barriers to progress in bioimaging. Specifically, they will advance technologies to investigate biological phenomena at the cell-tissue scale.

Areas

Potential areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Cell atlasing – how can novel bioimaging technologies and their combination with other omics help identify all cell types at the molecular level?
• Connectomics – how can novel bioimaging technologies pave the way to a full map of the neuronal connections in the mammalian brain?
• Dynamic biology – how can novel technologies improve temporal resolution in bioimaging to advance the understanding of how organisms function, adapt and respond to their surroundings?
• Systems – how can novel bioimaging technologies allow the characterisation of dynamics and structure of complete biological systems?
• Imaging data handling – novel data management strategies are needed to simplify image acquisition, analysis and data sharing. New tools are needed to support the integration of bioimaging data with other types of biological information.
• Overcoming barriers to bioimaging in low-resource settings – how can novel or existing technologies be adapted to advance discovery research in low-resource settings?

Career stage: Leading a research programme

• In this career stage, you’ll:
  • develop your research ideas and vision
  • train and develop less experienced researchers
  • build collaborations eg with other researchers, in industry or with policy makers
  • develop and maintain an international reputation for your research.

Phases

• The Bioimaging Technology Development Awards will be run up to 8 years, and assessed in two phases:
  • Foundation phase: initially, successful applications to this funding call will be funded for 1.5 years.
  • Scale-up phase: 12 months into the foundation phase, funded programmes will be invited to apply for the scale-up phase in a closed competitive funding call. Programmes that are successful for the scale-up phase will be able to request support for up to 6.5 additional years.

Funding Information

• Foundation phase: up to £500k.

Eligibility Criteria

• Lead applicant
  • You must be able to demonstrate that you can drive and lead a substantial collaborative research programme focused on technology development. Moreover, you must have the following:
    • international standing as a leader in your field
    • experience of leading innovative and creative research
    • a track record of managing and training others
  • At the point of application, you should have a permanent, open-ended or long-term rolling contract, or the guarantee of one. The contract should not be conditional on receiving this award.
• Co applicants
  • Co applicants can be at any career stage and based anywhere in the world apart from mainland China.
  • Each coapplicant must make a significant and essential contribution to the research proposal.
  • The organisation can be a not-for-profit or a commercial organisation. A not-for-profit organisation could be a:
    • higher education institution
    • research institute
    • non-academic healthcare organisation
    • charity or social enterprise
• The lead applicant must be based at an eligible administering organisation
• It must be in one of the following:
  • UK
  • Republic of Ireland
  • a low- or middle-income country (apart from India and mainland China).

For more information, visit Wellcome.