UKRI Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) Healthy Ageing Catalyst Awards 2020 (grants of up to £50,000)

Deadline: February 13, 2020

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), via the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), is inviting outline proposals for research grants for a period of up to 12 months.

The Healthy Ageing Catalyst Awards are part of the Healthy Ageing Challenge portfolio of activities, and are offered in collaboration with the US National Academy of Medicine (NAM) Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge, in order to catalyse transformative innovation and inform policies and priorities to advance healthy ageing and longevity globally.

The Catalysts Awards will provide approximately 20 grants per year until 2023 for academics based at UK Research Organisations to explore new, innovative, ideas with the potential to transform the physical, mental or social well-being of people across the world as they age.

Priority Areas

Applications will be expected to fit with the priority areas of the ISCF Healthy Ageing Challenge. These are:

Sustaining physical activity;
Maintaining health at work;
Design for age-friendly homes;
Creating healthy active places;
Supporting social connections;
Living well with cognitive impairment;
Managing common complaints of ageing.

Grants

The UKRI Healthy Ageing Catalysts Awards will provide £50,000 at 80% fEC for academics based at UK Research Organisations to explore new, innovative, ideas with the potential to transform the physical, mental or social well-being of people as they age. Awards will have a duration of one year.

Eligibility

Applicants must be based at a UK Research Organisation eligible for ESRC funding for the duration of the award.
Proposals are welcome from all discipline areas, but those covering areas normally associated with social science and the humanities are encouraged, as innovations in these areas are currently under-represented in the healthy ageing field.

Selection Criteria

Successful proposals will be expected to be:

Innovative, that is, they should challenge existing paradigms, employ new ways of doing, or thinking about, common problems of healthy ageing (e.g. markets, products, methodologies, or concepts);
Ambitious and impactful, that is, they should offer substantial potential future benefits to the physical, mental, or social, well-being of people as they age;
Scalable and have broad scope, that is, the benefits of the proposed work should not be limited to certain groups, communities or areas, and should have the potential to transform the entire field of healthy ageing;
Sustainable, that is, there is a plan to develop the proposed work beyond the timeframe of the funding;
Difficult to fund through existing routes. This may be due to the high-risk nature of the proposed innovation, or a lack of financial support for scaling or commercialising innovations in this area, or at the applicants’ institution.

Application

Outline stage proposals will be accepted via UKRI’s Joint Electronic Submissions (Je-S) system.