Clinical Distinguished Investigator Program (Denmark)

Goals

• The overall goal is to support medical research with relevance to patients and human health. The research fields could be within, but are not limited to: Patients and disease related research, translational and clinical research, research in: disease mechanisms; treatment methods; disease trajectories, epidemiology; diagnostic methods; public health and family medicine, intervention studies, register-based research, proof-of concept studies, pilot projects, initial clinical trials and clinical testing, biomedicine etc.

Funding Information

• Each grant runs over 5 years and can be up to DKK 10 million in total over the 5 years.
• In the case of many applications of exceptionally high quality within one career stage within the Research Leader Programme, the committee may decide to transfer up to DKK 10 million from one career stage to another.

Eligible Expenses

• Approximately DKK 2 million per budget year can be allocated to project related expenses as specified below:
  • Salary for research and technical assistance required for the project, e.g. postdoctoral researchers, PhD students (incl. tuition fee up to DKK 80,000 per budget year, which must be specified/applied for in the budget), technicians and research-year students, etc.
  • Operating expenses, e.g. lab consumables, chemicals and reagents, research animals, sequencing/proteomics and other analysis services directly related to the project.
  • Equipment required for the project, however not exceeding 20% of the total budget.
  • Travel expenses in relation to the project, i.e. conference and workshop participation and presentation of research results, up to DKK 50,000 per budget year.
  • Other travel expenses directly related to the project, i.e. experiments carried out in other labs for a limited period.
  • Publication of results emanating from the research project, up to DKK 25,000 per budget year.
  • Administrative support, up to 5% of, and included in, the funding applied for.
  • Bench fee can be included in the budget for support of individual researchers to cover expenses needed to conduct the proposed research.

Eligibility Criteria

• The project must be a 5-year project and it must be anchored at a Danish university, hospital or other non-profit research institution.
  • Applicants must be an MD, specialist physician and should have a Ph.D. or a dr. med. or similar qualifications.
  • Applicants must be clinical professors. Applications can, in rare circumstances, be accepted from applicants who have been evaluated and found to be professor-qualified but is not yet in a clinical professor position.
  • Applicants must remain associated with clinical work / have clinical responsibilities throughout the entire 5-year grant period and it is expected that the applicant will spend between 20-50% of their time in the clinic, while 50-80% time can be spent on research.
  • A Clinical Distinguished Investigator grant cannot be used to cover substitute replacement salary for neither clinical nor teaching obligations of the applicant, as the continued commitment of the applicant to both is considered of great importance.
  • Applicants must have institutional support from the heads of both the clinical department and the department where the research is to be performed (hosting and support letters must be uploaded to the application, please see section 3.5).
  • ‘Clinical Distinguished Investigator’ grants are individual grants at the disposal of the applicant. If the applied project involves collaboration, the collaboration and the nature of the collaboration should be described in the project description, but the applicant must be the clear driver of the project (it is not possible to have or register co-applicants for specific this call).

Assessment Criteria

• NNF’s Committee on Clinical and Translational Medicine will primarily assess the applications based on the following criteria:
  • Quality of the research question and scientific impact
  • Scientific approach
  • Societal impact
  • Past performance
  • Research leadership and/or potential
  • Collaboration and research environment

For more information, visit Novo Nordisk Foundation.