Funding opportunities

JDRF offer a wide range of funding schemes for researchers in the field of type 1 diabetes and its associated complications, including Strategic Research Agreements, Industry Discovery and Development Partnerships, Innovative Grants and conference grants. They also offer training grants including postdoctoral fellowships, advanced postdoctoral fellowships, career development awards, early-career patient-orientated diabetes research awards and psychology fellowship awards.

The following JDRF funding opportunities are administered by our central office in New York. Read our guidance on applying for JDRF funding for more information about the application process.

Postdoctoral Fellowships

• Open to those at a relatively early stage of their career
• PhD, MD, DMD, DVM, or equivalent received no more than five years before the application is submitted. Must not be simultaneously serving an internship or residency
• Up to  $57,984 to $69,060 per year, for up to 3 years

Advanced Postdoctoral Fellowships

• Open to qualified and promising health scientists, to provide an opportunity to receive full time research training, and to assist these promising individuals in transitioning from a fellowship to an independent (faculty-level) position
• PhD, MD, DMD, DVM, or equivalent received no more than six years before the application is submitted. Must not be simultaneously serving an internship or residency.
• Up to $95,000 per year, for up to 3 years

Career Development Awards

• Open to individuals at an early stage of their independent academic career
• PhD, MD, DMD, DVM, PsyD or equivalent and in an academic faculty-level position since less than 3 years before the submission date
• The applicant must hold an academic faculty-level position (including assistant professor or equivalent) at the time of submission of the proposal at a university, health science center, or comparable institution with strong, well-established research and training programs for the chosen area of interest
• Up to $200,000 per year, for up to 5 years, including up to 10% for indirect costs

Kellogg Family Early-Career Patient-Orientated Diabetes Research Awards

• Open to clinical researchers at a relatively early stage of their independent career
• MD, MR-PhD or PsyD and in their first faculty-level appointment less than 5 years before the submission date
• Applicants must hold an appointment or joint appointment in a subspecialty of clinical medicine in a clinical department, and conduct human clinical research.
• Up to $200,000 per year, for up to 5 years, including up to 10% for indirect costs

The Kennedy Trust is delighted to announce the launch of an innovative new funding scheme: the Research Ignition Awards. 

The Kennedy Trust is a focussed charitable trust whose mission is to provide sustainable, long-term funding of medical research into rheumatic and related musculoskeletal, immunological and inflammatory diseases. With the goal of stimulating new and ambitious avenues of research, the Trust’s new Research Ignition Awards will provide up to £100k over 1-2 years to support incisive and cutting-edge projects in areas that that have a clear relation to pathways in these conditions, where the scientific evidence is still being accumulated and needs a major boost, and/or where questions are not being routinely investigated by other researchers.

The awards will be highly flexible and designed to support a wide range of research costs to seed funding of larger programmes of ambitious clinical, translational or basic research. They will be available to investigators at all stages of independent research careers, although the Trust would like to particularly encourage applications from mid-career investigators.

They commit to ensuring that applications will be rapidly evaluated and approved for funding within 5 months of the submission deadline (26th June 2023). Before submitting your application, please ensure that you have carefully read the accompanying application guidance notes. Applications should be emailed to submissions@kennedytrust.org by 23:59 on Monday 26th June 2023.

For any further information, please contact the Kennedy Trust’s Grants Manager Zoe Montanaro at z.montanaro@kennedytrust.org.

Apply for funding to:

• improve the methods used by others in biomedical and health research
• take the next step towards becoming an independent principal investigator

You must

• focus your project on an area within MRC or NIHR remit
• be a researcher who will be employed by an eligible research organisation (this includes MRC units and centres)
• have research organisation support
• have the appropriate skills and experience for this award
• You are not eligible if you are already considered an independent researcher.

Your project can be up to £625,000 (100% full economic cost). MRC and NIHR will usually fund up to 80% of your project’s full economic cost.

Projects typically have a duration from 18 to 36 months.

Who is eligible to apply

To be eligible to apply for this funding opportunity you must:

• have research organisation support
• be able to show that your skills and experience match those in the ‘transition to independence’ stage of the MRC applicant skills and experience table, such as showing evidence of career progress and clear plans to develop your own research niche
• provide a clear rationale of why this grant will best support your long-term career goals and chosen career route
• be the sole intellectual leader of the proposed project, although we will allow co-investigators when they bring expertise to the project that is outside the applicant’s field
• focus your application on biomedical and health research methods

You are also eligible to apply if you:

• are employed as a postdoctoral research assistant, but this grant cannot start until your current work finishes
• hold a lecturer appointment, a junior fellowship or another research staff position
• hold, or have held, an early career training fellowship such as an MRC skills development fellowship
• do not have a contract with your chosen host institution
• are not currently based at the eligible research organisation, that has agreed to host your new investigator award are either a non-clinical or clinically active researcher

You do not need any postdoctoral experience to be eligible to apply.

Catalyst Pump-Priming Projects
Catalyst funding for pump-priming projects is available to support collaborations between Network members in bacterial vaccinology to explore new approaches and strategies to advance their vaccines in partnership with LMICs and industry, and acquire the data to support substantive funding applications.

Catalyst Pump Projects

The catalyst funds are flexible, typically up to £50,000 and expect to provide deliverables within 6 months post-award. This catalyst funding scheme prioritise projects that:

• Facilitate onward progression of bacterial vaccines along the pipeline to licensure
• Offer robust solutions to overcome the difficult preclinical to clinical transition
• Advance the ability to tackle the global challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR)
• Involve BactiVac partnerships, particularly new partnerships, with a long-term work plan
• Include LMICs and/or industrial partners
• Demonstrate a clear pathway to impact
• Have realistic plans in place to demonstrate intellectual property (IP) has been considered
• Include plans for achieving further substantive funding at the end of the project

How to apply
Applicants will need to be members of the Network to be eligible to apply. The allocation of funding will be decided by their Network Management Oversight Board.

Follow them @BactiVac using the hashtag #BactiVacFunding. 

Apply for funding for up to 2 years. The scheme is for current fellows whose research has been affected by several issues. It will allow you to:

• regain research momentum
• achieve the objectives of your fellowship

You can apply if you:

• currently hold an MRC career development award or clinician scientist fellowship
• are in the final 18 months of your fellowship

They will fund:

• half of your salary
• salaries of existing staff members
• a small consumables budget

They support individuals and research teams to work in a way that suits their personal circumstances. This includes:

• career breaks
• support for people with caring responsibilities
• flexible working
• alternative working patterns

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) has a wide variety of funding opportunities for researchers at all career levels. 

All the British Medical Association (BMA) Foundation grants have National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) partnership status.

A variety of fellowships, career development awards and research grants opportunities offered by the Medical Research Council (MRC).

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) offers a variety of funding opportunities focusing on numerous different areas of research.