Apply for Wellcome Discovery Awards

What we offer?

• A Wellcome Discovery Award provides funding for research expenses.
• The award usually lasts for 8 years, but may be less for some disciplines, such as humanities and social science.
• The award may be held on a part-time basis. They will extend the duration of the award to reflect this.
• The award includes:
  • staff
  • continuing professional development and training
  • materials and consumables
  • animals
  • equipment
  • access charges
  • overheads
  • travel and subsistence
  • overseas allowances
  • fieldwork expenses
  • inflation allowance
  • open access charges
  • clinical research costs
  • public engagement and patient involvement costs
  • contract research organisations
  • other costs

Eligibility Criteria

• You can apply for a Wellcome Discovery Award if you are a researcher who wants to pursue bold and creative research ideas. You must aim to make a major contribution to your research field by:
  • generating significant shifts in understanding
  • developing methodologies, conceptual frameworks, tools or techniques that could benefit health-related research
• You will be expected to actively promote a diverse, inclusive and supportive research environment within your team and across your organisation.
• Your research can be in any discipline – including science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), experimental medicine, humanities and social science, clinical/allied health sciences, and public health – as long as it has the potential to improve human life, health and wellbeing, and aligns with the funding remit.
• The research can be in a single discipline or multidisciplinary.
• An award can be held by an established researcher or a team of researchers led by an established researcher.
• Lead applicant
  • Whether you are applying as the sole applicant or the lead applicant for a team, you must have:
    • international standing as a research leader in your field
    • experience of leading innovative and creative research
    • a track record of managing and training others
  • If you are the lead applicant for a team, you must also be able to demonstrate you can drive and lead a substantial collaborative research programme.
  • You must be able to contribute at least 20% of your research time to the programme.
  • You must be based at an eligible host organisation that can sign up to the grant conditions. It must be in one of the following:
    • UK
    • Republic of Ireland
    • a low- or middle-income country (apart from India and mainland China)
  • It must be a not-for-profit organisation. It can be a:
    • higher education institution
    • research institute
    • non-academic healthcare organisation
    • charity or social enterprise
• Coapplicants
  • Coapplicants 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, for example designing the research, writing the application and/or managing the programme. They must be able to contribute at least 20% of their research time to the programme.
  • Coapplicants must be based at an eligible organisation that can sign up to the grant conditions.
  • The organisation can be a not-for-profit:
    • higher education institution
    • research institute
    • non-academic healthcare organisation
    • charity or social enterprise.

Who can’t apply?

• You are not eligible to apply as a lead applicant on a Discovery Award if you are the lead applicant on two other Discovery Award applications and you are waiting for a decision.
• You cannot apply if you intend to carry out activities that involve the transfer of grant funds into mainland China.

For more information, visit Wellcome.