Trust launches Investigator Awards
12 November 2009
Wellcome Trust Investigator Awards will provide researchers and their teams with the support and freedom to be creative and innovative in their approach.
The scheme will operate at two levels of experience and seniority: Wellcome Trust Investigator Awards and Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Awards. Funding will be awarded by interview, giving the opportunity for researchers to present and argue their cases to groups of world-class peer reviewers.
In an opinion article in Times Higher Education, Trust Director Sir Mark Walport outlined the benefits of this approach compared with the short and medium-term grants upon which researchers currently rely. Such project and programme grants can tie researchers into a cycle of focusing on securing funding rather than tackling major research problems.
"The watchword of the Awards will be flexibility, in length and scale of funding. The challenge to all research funders is to nurture and support the best scientists and enable them to ask the most important questions," said Sir Mark. "We intend to provide Wellcome Trust Investigators with the creative opportunities and resources they need to tackle tough problems."
