Research Funding Support

Registration

When you sign up for our programme, we ask you to complete a short Registration questionnaire to identify your funding opportunties and deadlines. If we have enough people in our cohort, we will use this to help match you to other people who are submitting to similar programmes so that you might support each other through the submission process. 

Dates for 2025/26

Once completed you will be prompted to sign-up for all of the sessions you can attend individually for either

• Autumn/Winter Run: Monday mornings beginning at 10am: weekly from October 27-December 8 2025
• Spring/Summer Run: Tuesday mornings beginning at 10am: weekdly from May 5-June 16 2026

Mid- and End-programme Q&A Sessions

We will use these shorte 90-min sessions to provide bespoke support and answer any specific questions you have about your funding application.

Buddys

We will also match you to a 'Buddy' in the first session. We would like everyone involved to have a go-to person to check in with about progress, ask quick thoughts of, and to troubleshoot issues you might encounter on the road to submission. You'll get an opportunity to check in with your Buddy at each session.

Part 1: An introduction. In this workshop, we will go over how research funding works in the UK. We'll also discuss how to find funding, the kinds of funding postdocs and early-career academic researchers should be considering to help grow their research profile, and what makes for a strong funding bid, when the time comes to apply.

Running Time: 3-hour interactive workshop

Part 2: Writing Support

All funding schemes will ask you to submit a CV of some kind, and like any situation demanding a CV, you should be tailoring it to make your case for funding. Funders are also paying more attention to your career development plans, whether for fellowships, new investigator grants, or standard grants. 

Half of this session will be spent on CVs (including Narrative CVs and R4RI formats), and the other half on writing about career and professional development. 

Running time: 3 hrs, including 1-2 hours of writing

This session also runs as a stand-alone workshop / writing retreat

Part 2: Writing Support - The Research Proposal

This is your main research proposal and will be the most scrutinised part of your application. Known by different names, your Case for Support, your Vision and Approach, your Research Proposal must convince the peer reviewers and panel of your research idea’s relevance, excellence, impact, and that you’ve planned it sufficiently well as to convince them of the project’s feasibility.

Successful applications will interweave narratives giving insight into the reseach impact strategy, plans for career development and research leadership, commitment to champion exemplary research and organisational culture, and good project planning and management.

Running time: 3 hrs, including 1-2 hours of writing]

Part 2: Writing Support - Titles, Abstracts, and Lay Summaries AND Application Readibility

Though these are some of the first things that people will read in your application, there is a logic to them being some of the parts of the application that you will finalise last.

We will also use part of this retreat to discuss writing style, voice, the approachability of your language choices (to those outside your discipline) and readability of your application narratives.

Running time: 3 hrs, including 1-2 hours of writing

Part 2: Writing Support - Additional Support Session (topics TBD)

We will use this session to dedicate to anything else that you want to focus, or revisit. This may include elements we’ve covered in previous sessions that we can focus on in more detail.

Running time: 3 hrs, including 1-2 hours of writing

Bespoke support in crafting responses to peer reivewers, and help to organise mock-interviews, as needed for applicants.

Contact Dr Rui Pires Martins to arrange this support directly.