Aim 4: Developing people
Progress 2007/2008
During the third year of the Plan we:
- continued to provide career support to outstanding researchers at all levels, including:
* funding 17 new Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowships, which support the best newly qualified scientists embarking on independent research careers
* making the first awards to enable researchers and students to spend time in laboratories at the US National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute - provided new funding schemes to enhance clinical research careers, namely:
* Interdisciplinary Training Programmes for Clinicians in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics - training partnerships between academia and industry to provide clinicians with the expertise to undertake studies to develop and evaluate novel therapies in humans
* Postdoctoral Training Fellowships for MB/PhD Graduates - fellowships for the most promising MB/PhD graduates to embark on research careers
* start-up funds for clinical lecturers - grants for clinical lecturers to meet research costs through a scheme run in partnership with the Academy of Medical Sciences - launched an £80 million initiative to support the careers of Indian scientists, with Trust funding of £40 million over five years to be matched by the Indian Government
- supported a series of major Strategic Awards to support research capacity building in developing countries, with four awards totalling £20 million to initiatives in Africa and three awards totalling £15 million to programmes in India
- expanded the scope of our International Senior Research Fellowship scheme to now support researchers in Croatia, Slovenia and the Slovak Republic
- continued to develop our Advanced Courses programme, which provides training courses and workshops in state-of-the-art research techniques at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus and at centres in developing countries.
Future plans
During 2008/2009 we intend to:
- continue to provide and develop our portfolio of fellowship and studentship schemes to support outstanding researchers in the UK and overseas throughout their research careers
- provide a series of major awards to support the development of African research institutions through north-south and south-south partnerships
- take forward the Wellcome Trust-Department of Biotechnology India Alliance, providing the first round of fellowship schemes for current and future research leaders in India
- continue to foster interdisciplinary research training through the use of Strategic Awards and targeted calls for proposals where appropriate
- lead and participate in new initiatives in partnership with others to address issues related to research careers (including through the implementation of the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers) and to enhance systems for career tracking.
Indicators of progress
- During 2007/2008 we made a total of 142 fellowship awards to support the careers of researchers (including 135 biomedical science fellows and seven fellows in the medical humanities).
- Mechanisms used by the Trust to support training and capacity building include:
* PhD programmes - such as the four-year PhD programme in neuroscience at University College London [PDF 112KB], which has been training graduate students since 1996
* Strategic Awards, including a recent major award to Professor Shah Ebrahim for capacity building [PDF 160KB] and training at the New Delhi Public Health Foundation in India, with a focus on chronic disease. - Through our fellowship schemes we support outstanding scientists in the UK and overseas, such as:
* Professor Dorothy Bishop [PDF 80KB], a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow whose work on language impairment has led to improved diagnosis and treatment for children with language difficulties]
* Dr Cameron Simmons [PDF 64KB], a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow working in Vietnam to enhance our understanding of the virus that causes dengue, a disease of enormous public health importance in the region.