Medical Research Foundation’s mental health clinical research training fellowship programme
This call is now closed for applications and is available for reference purposes only.
This competition is administered by the Medical Research Council (MRC) on behalf of the Medical Research Foundation (MRF). The MRF is providing 90 per cent of the funding and the MRC is providing 10 per cent. The scheme is fully supported by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
A recent MRC-led review identified a critical skills gap and capacity deficit within the UK to deliver innovation in mental health research. In response to this, the Medical Research Foundation is launching a new £2.2 million call to support one flagship fellowship training programme to provide innovative training in key areas of mental health research.
Research organizations are invited to start the process of forming consortia and subunit outline proposals to MRC for funding of their proposed programme.
- Background
- What is it? Structure and Critical components
- Aims and objectives of the research training programme
- Scope
- What applications will need to demonstrate
- What is a consortia in this context?
- Funding available
- Institute Commitment and Stakeholder support
- Special considerations with respect to funding by the Medical Research Foundation
- Assessment
- Key dates
- How to apply?
- Related opportunities
- Enquires
Background
The Medical Research Foundation is a long standing registered charity that receives funds from the giving public to support medical research, training, public engagement and dissemination of knowledge. The Medical Research Foundation has been successfully pursuing these activities for over 80 years.
The MRC is committed to supporting the training and development of a skilled research workforce and responding to strategic skills needs in healthcare research in the UK. The MRC and the MRF have teamed-up to develop this innovative programme. The trustees of the MRF have agreed to provide 90 per cent of the funding for this training programme and the MRC will provide 10 per cent.
The MRC-led review of mental health identified a need to foster research productivity in mental health through capacity building and increased capability to deliver innovation by exploiting the key scientific opportunities in this field. The funding offered here is aimed at enhancing research training and increasing critical mass in mental health research though a structured training programme that aims to deliver the research needs identified in the review.
The future skills needed in this field will embrace many disciplines (in particular, but not exclusively, epidemiology, statistics, developmental biology, social research) and involve many cutting-edge techniques such as imaging and genomics. To address a current lack of capacity and an imminent critical skills gap, a flagship fellowship training programme will be funded. One grant will be awarded to the most compelling and innovative case made by a consortium of institutions able to provide high quality academic training and clinical mentorship.
What is it? Structure and critical components
The core of the training programme will be a cohort of up to nine doctoral clinical research trainees who will receive pre-doctoral training components and benefit from any additional activities supported as part of the training programme. The programme will be flexible and allow for a four-year PhD. Training is expected to be multi-site and will preferably include some existing MRC and NIHR investments in this area. The duration of the programme will be up to eight years, allowing for:
- a staggered intake of trainees, over three or four years, starting, if possible, as early as 2011;
- the duration of any post-graduate training fellowships which can be (and should be if necessary) for four years research training towards a PhD;
- a structured clinical research training programme built across academic centres that collectively constitutes an identifiable high quality research and clinical training environment that supports and manages a cohort of clinical research training fellows with structured tuition and career advice;
- a programme that exploits the combined expertise of the consortia to deliver training across a range of key disciplines and methodologies.
Aims and objectives of the research training programme
1. to provide mental health research leaders of the future.
2. to provide researchers with the armamentarium of key skills necessary to address the ambitions set out in the MRC-led review of mental health research.
3. to ensure integration of high quality academic training with professional development.
4. to build capacity in mental health research.
5. to increase the capacity of the research community of the future to deliver new treatments for mental health conditions and preventive strategies for mental illness.
Scope
The Medical Research Foundation’s Mental Health Clinical Research Training Programme must attract and develop research leaders of the future in critical areas identified in the MRC-led review of mental heath research. The research training should therefore focus in the following areas
a) Promotion of preventive strategies through research:
- aimed at understanding the biological and social life-course determinants of mental illness and wellbeing, primarily by exploiting the UK’s research strengths in epidemiology, neuropsychology, brain imaging and genomics;
- developing primary preventive strategies based on early detection of high risk states;
- identifying the cognitive and neurobiological basis of wellbeing and healthy development.
b) Developing therapy and the research that underpins this, for example, through:
- experimental medicine research and phase II clinical studies to rapidly detect the efficacy of novel therapeutics;
- research that takes a cross-symptom approach: that is, that which seeks to understand the basis of aberrant processes such as inattention, impulsivity and aggression that may underpin maladaptive behaviour in different clinically-diagnosed psychiatric disorders;
- identifying individuals at risk in order to target intervention by, for example, using stratified medicine to identify subgroups with common pathogenesis that may be specifically responsive to existing and new drug or psychological treatments;
- exploiting new molecular genetic methods and UK expertise in developmental neuroscience including transgenic and behavioural animal models to further research aimed at developing therapy or diagnoses;
- making use of routine data sets, population based and longitudinal studies to assess the value of predictors of treatment.
Please note that the aim of the research training is to produce researchers able to draw on knowledge and experience of disciplines and cutting-edge techniques to take forward scientific opportunities identified in the MRC-led mental health review. This will include training in many basic research skills which will then be exploited for translational research. So for example, research training in genetics should normally be a key component of the training but the research projects for the PhD must focus on expanding the foundations for new treatments and prevention and not solely aimed at the discovery of further gene targets.
What applications will need to demonstrate
Applications will be invited from consortia (see definition of a consortium below) that exploit existing research and training excellence across more than one academic centre. Applications will need to show:
- that they can deliver the training that will provide the skills that will be required by the next generation of mental health researchers such as the learning and/or appreciation of key skills such as imaging, statistics, bioinformatics, genomics, and epidemiology and a thorough grounding in understanding the relationship of clinical diagnosis to the underlying traits in systems-based research;
- a record of successful integration of research training and clinical specialty training;
- that they can assemble and manage a world-class fundamental, translational and clinical research environment across a broad front;
- well-established NHS and industry partnerships;
- commitment to delivering research training that aligns with the opportunities identified in the mental health review;
- a coherent strategy for training and career development, during and after the fellowships;
- a sound justification for how the training programme will be structured and managed and assurance that there will be excellent leadership;
- A clear recruitment strategy, including the planned timeline of recruitment and any measures taken to ensure that only the most promising individuals are recruited.
Further information including criteria for assessment can be found in the outline application guidance notes.
What is a consortia in this context?
The premise behind this approach is that no single HEI or medical school in the UK will be able to provide the necessary breadth of research training that future innovation will rely upon and which the Foundation will wish to carry its name. Therefore, applications must come from an association or a combination, of at least two, but preferably more, academic institutions and stakeholders. The objective will be to pool resources for achieving the common goal of producing tomorrow’s research leaders.
To this end, there will need to be a formal cooperative arrangement between the institutions. The terms of the collaboration funded under this programme must be determined early in the proposal’s development and relevant agreements put in place by the start of the programme. Collaboration arrangements should ensure transparency in the decision-making process about how research training fellows will be allocated amongst HEIs. Consideration should also be given to issues such as: relative responsibilities, governance arrangements, indemnity and reporting and access to data and samples.
The MRF and MRC funding will not be released until an appropriate consortium agreement has been agreed and signed by all collaborative partners, and approved by the MRF and MRC (and any other collaborative funding partner or stakeholder).
Individual HEIs ay make more than one application but they can only be the lead Institution in one application.
Consortia should seek to establish innovative training links and not depend solely depend on traditional or geographically convenient partnerships.
Funding available
Research organisations will be invited to form a consortium to submit proposals for a programme of research training in mental health research costing up to a maximum of £2.2m. The core component must be a maximum of nine medical graduates who will study for a doctorate, but there will be flexibility to consider innovative ideas about how the remainder of the package is developed.
The Doctoral Clinical Training Fellowships will be modelled on the standard MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowships (CRTFs). These provide the trainee’s salary at specialist registrar level and up to £15k per annum in expenses (covering items such as fees, travel, consumables).
The other elements of the programme will be flexible (such as pre-doctoral training components [1]) and not prescriptive to allow applicants to consider novel ways of delivering training and meeting the needs of individual fellows
See guidance notes for further details.
[1] This might be waived for some candidates depending on prior experience, for example, any suitable ACFs
Institute commitment and stakeholder support
The programme already has the support of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Applicants will need to enlist the support of local Postgraduate Deans. Applications providing strong administrative and financial support will be welcomed. Institutional support should include:
- robust methodology for benchmarking the selection of candidates and performance criteria against national schemes;
- a method for monitoring the effectiveness and outcome of the programme;
- a plan for supporting fellows following completion of their PhD including a commitment to a substantive post if possible (e.g. earmarked intermediate research fellowships or clinical lectureships for at least some of the most able fellows);
- mechanisms for supporting fellows during their research such as technical support to maintain momentum of research projects during clinical sessions;
- the provision of informative and accurate career advice;
- how the broader career progression of fellows will be supported;
- administrative support of the training programme including the provision of office accommodation for the training fellows.
Applications which add value to, and gain value from, other research and training programmes will be accepted in recognition that investments in modular training courses for a small number of fellows per annum would be costly for HEIs to maintain. However, there must be a clear distinction in how the Medical Research Foundation’s Mental Health Fellowship Programme is maintained.
Special considerations with respect to funding by the Medical Research Foundation
IP
The MRF encourages research organisations, and researchers, to play an active role in ensuring the protection and exploitation of the intellectual property (IP) arising from research that it funds. Where MRF funded research leads to the generation of IP, the MRF will discuss revenue sharing in good faith with the research organisation based on the proportion of MRF funding that lead to the IP. The MRF terms and conditions of award provide greater detail.
Publication
Publications and other forms of media communication, including media appearances, press releases and conferences, must acknowledge the support received from the Medical Research Foundation.
Assessment
Proposals will be assessed in a two-step process with awards being made in the summer of 2011. The first stage involves the submission and review of outline proposals, which will be considered by a specially-convened panel. Successful applicants will then be invited to submit full proposals in the light of feedback, based on the review of outline proposals.
Key dates
|
|
Initiative launch |
September 2010 |
Deadline – Outlines |
16 December 2010 at 4pm |
Panel meetings to assess outlines |
March 2011 |
Feedback & invitation to submit full proposals |
March 2011 |
Deadline for receipt of full proposals |
May 2011 |
Panel meeting to assess full proposals |
July 2011 (TBC) |
This plan allows for recruitment of fellows as early as October 2011 but it is envisaged that the bulk of recruitment will start in 2012.
How to apply?
Following the review of outline proposals received, successful candidates will be invited to submit full applications. The funders anticipate making final funding decisions in July 2011.
Related opportunities
The first PsySTAR Annual Summer School in Mental Health Research will take place at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 21 – 22 September 2012.
The School is aimed at clinical trainees (FY1-ST4) interested in an introduction to cutting edge research relevant to psychiatric disorders. The topics to be introduced include epidemiology, clinical trials, neuroimaging, molecular biology, stem cell research and genetics.
For further information please visit PsySTAR Summer School website.
PsySTAR is funded by the Medical Research Foundation and the Medical Research Council.
Enquires
Please note that enquiries must be routed through the Dean of the Medical School or his or her designated person. The MRC is unable to answer or acknowledge any enquiries on this matter that are not addressed in this manner. For more information, contact:
Dr Gavin Malloch
Programme Manager – Mental Health, Medical Research Council
Telephone: 020 7670 5244
Email: gavin.malloch@headoffice.mrc.ac.uk