Fully funded research fellowship? I want one of those!

For an early-career researcher (ECR) looking to carve out a career in academia and make the eventual transition to research independence, the funding landscape can look dauntingly sparse. It’s a super-competitive world out there, and while options such as the UKRI Research Councils’ standard-funding schemes may in theory be open to some ECRs looking to win substantive funding (you’ll need to have an employment contract in place with your eligible host institution for at least the duration of the grant), the reality is that you’ll be up against some very senior, very experienced competitors. As I write this, many higher-education institutions in the UK are strapped for cash, meaning that research-focused ECRs who have yet to pull in some substantive grant funding often feel vulnerable and may struggle to secure long-term research positions.

One potential funding stream that can look very attractive to those in the early stages of a research career is the fellowship route. Although not exclusively the preserve of the ECR, many research-fellowship schemes are specifically designed to support less-experienced researchers to develop professionally and to gain the valuable knowledge, skills and experience that will equip them for a career as a leading independent researcher.

Fellowship scheme features

While every scheme is different, fellowships commonly include the following features:

• Salary support for the fellow for some or all of the duration of the fellowship, in addition to support for eligible project costs
• Time and resources set aside for skills acquisition and professional development
• A commitment from the host institution to support the fellow, during and sometimes after the fellowship period
• A mentorship/sponsorship support element, providing input and guidance from experienced senior academics
• A requirement that most or all of the fellow’s working time is devoted to the fellowship

Budget finances may be set at a particular limit or, in some cases, uncapped. UKRI-funded fellowships and some others include an element of overhead funding to cover institutional costs, which will warm the hearts of those people in your institution charged with balancing the books. Securing such funding won’t do any harm for your standing in your department, faculty and institution either. Some ECR fellowship schemes specify a maximum limit for the number of years post-PhD in their eligibility criteria, while others take a more flexible approach and assess each applicant on a case-by-case basis. Some funders offer several different fellowship schemes, with each being designed to support researchers at a particular stage in their career.

Nothing not to like so far, then. Unsurprisingly, however, competition for early-career fellowship places is intense, even in the absence of much more experienced senior applicants. Funders are looking for the very best candidates, with the best research ideas and projects, hosted within the institution/s that are best-placed to support them. I point this out not to deter would-be fellowship applicants – all of us probably question our credentials from time to time, and succumb to occasional bouts of imposter syndrome – but simply by way of a reality check. If you’re planning to go to the effort of putting together a fellowship application (and trust me, they do require some effort), then an objective self-appraisal with close reference to the funder’s criteria and evaluation guidance is a very useful starting point.

Bear in mind though that very many senior academics got to the top without ever winning fellowship funding, so it’s not for everyone and it’s certainly not the be-all and end-all of a successful academic career. In some ways, securing a fellowship is more like winning a prize than, say, getting a job or even being awarded a standard research grant. And by definition, there’s not room at the very top for everyone – not everyone can win the big prize. That said, someone has to win it, and you’re only an excellent proposal and perhaps an interview away from that someone being you. So if after some dispassionate self-reflection you still have the stars firmly set within your sights, then by all means shoot for them.

A catalyst to make special things happen

Key to determining whether you’re competitive for a fellowship scheme – and, if you are, to informing how you should pitch your fellowship proposal – is the answer to the question “why should anyone give me a fellowship?” Or, more specifically: “How will fellowship funding add value over and above standard project-grant funding?” In other words, what are the special things that will only happen if you’re awarded a funded research fellowship?

Let’s assume that your proposed research project is a good one. You’ve chosen a scientific, societal and/or economic problem that’s demonstrably worth addressing, and you’ve set a suitably-ambitious yet achievable project aim that promises to make an impact against that problem. Your research objectives seem likely to deliver your aim, and they’re backed up by a novel, robust and well-thought-out methodological approach. You have the right team on board, and access to the research environment and infrastructure that you’ll need to complete the project successfully. On balance then, you have a project proposal that would seem to be highly competitive for some flavour of standard project-grant funding. So why not pursue that?

When they grant a research fellowship, a funder is investing in two things: your project, and you. Sure, they’re looking for a great project, and scientific or scholarly excellence and possibly impact potential are likely to be important evaluation criteria. But funders understand that you’re an early-career researcher, and as such they’re not expecting you to change the world. Not yet, at any rate. Rampant over-ambition in a fellowship proposal will kill it just as surely as a stolid, cautious approach that smacks of comfort-zone dwelling and a lack of vision. What they really do want though is a thoroughly invest-able individual who shows great potential for future impact (scientific, scholarly and/or societal) as one of tomorrow’s research leaders. And they’re looking for individuals who might not fulfil all of that wonderful potential without the catalysing spark that fellowship funding would provide. Consider the following hypothetical example:

Anya is a postdoctoral researcher in the area of computational modelling who has had a successful career to date with some good papers and other outputs to her name, having made a significant contribution to research. She’s started developing her own ideas and research questions around using computational-modelling techniques in oncology, stimulated by but diverging from the research that she’s doing with her current supervisor (whose focus is in the field of cell growth and tissue mechanics). Her supervisor isn’t very interested in pursuing this new research direction though, and in any case their institution, The University of Here, doesn’t really have the resources or expertise needed to pursue it.

However, Anya is aware that in another institution, The University of Somewhere Else, there’s an academic whose laboratory is doing some of the most exciting cutting-edge research in computational oncology, working within a very well-equipped facility. Moreover, in a different department at that institution, another leading researcher is working in the separate but complementary (for Anya's research) discipline of artificial intelligence in radiology, within which Anya will need to gain new skills if she’s going to pursue this new research direction. The University of Somewhere Else is keen to recruit and support promising early-career researchers like Anya who are working in her particular field, and after discussions with the academics and departmental heads involved they agree to support a fellowship application for her to come and work there.

Assuming that Anya’s research ideas are good ones, if she can identify a funder whose mission and remit would be served by the project and by the future potential of her interdisciplinary research focus (several funders spring to mind) then she has an excellent chance of attracting fellowship funding. Importantly, without such fellowship funding she may never get to pursue her novel ideas, and her long-term potential for future impact in an important area of medical science might never be realised. Fellowship funding is very clearly the essential catalyst here for making something rather special happen.

Do I have to move institution then?

The fellowship in the above example involved a move to a new institution. This was once more or less a prerequisite for securing a fellowship, but it’s perhaps less so now as acceptance grows that, for various good reasons, excellent researchers don’t necessarily need to be highly mobile. Examples of leading researchers who still work in the same institution where they completed their PhD and even their undergraduate degree abound. Nevertheless, consider this: is the team, group, department, faculty and institution that you’re in now demonstrably the very best place to pursue the next stage of your research career? If you’re genuinely among the best of the best then the world really is your oyster, so you’ll be expected to feast on the juiciest bits of whatever’s on offer out there.

Certainly, you’ll be expected to build things like external mentorship, time spent in other institutions or groups, externships and other horizon-expanding activities into your fellowship proposal to show that you’ve put together an integrated package of high-quality experiential opportunities and support. Equally, it’s absolutely essential to show that you’re branching out in a new direction, moving away from your supervisor and expanding your own research horizons, rather than simply developing ideas and activities that fit within the bailiwick of your existing group and/or represent a linear continuation of whatever it is you’re going at the moment. If you’re at a very early stage in your research career, be warned that fellowship funders are emphatically not looking for ‘PhD 2.0’!

So not all fellowships look like the above example, not all involve a move to a new institution, and there are different ways of putting together a strong fellowship proposal that will resonate with the funder. But all successful fellowship proposals will have in common an essential ‘added-value’ element that makes the case for investing in the individual and their future potential, enabling them to pursue and achieve something worthwhile that they might not otherwise be in a position to do.

The Wellcome Trust gives some helpful case-study examples of successful fellowship scenarios in their guidance for applicants to the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme (Word document – see page 3).

So how do I show that I’m invest-able?

You’ve put together a great project based on a novel idea, and you can describe it clearly and compellingly. You’re planning to do the research in an excellent environment and you’ve lined up appropriate support from leading academics in the field. This already goes a long way to demonstrating your invest-ability as a would-be fellow. But there’s no getting away from the fact that evaluators will want to see evidence that you are what you claim to be – an ECR with clear potential to become a leader in your field. Perhaps the easiest way for them to do this is to look at what you’ve already achieved to date by examining your track record. This is something you can’t really do much about in the short term, but over the longer term it really pays to take a strategic approach to developing a track record that, when you need it to, will back up your claim to being among the best researchers at your particular career stage.

Your publications record is an obvious starting point, and reviewers will typically look for a reasonable number (for your career stage) of first-author publications across a decent spread of high-impact journals. Depending on your field and discipline there might also be books, book chapters and monographs. Other outputs and contributions to research like abstracts, conference presentations, invited lectures and similar will further build your track record, as will indicators of esteem such as prizes and awards. Internal and external (to your institution) positions and responsibilities that you’ve taken on, such as editorships and editorial-board memberships, professional-society leadership, institutional committee posts and other administrative roles, will all evidence a willingness to contribute, lead and make your voice heard. Anything that shows early evidence of leadership, initiative and nascent research independence really is a definite a plus.

Depending on your career stage, one thing that can be great to have in your track record is some evidence that you have already sought and won some research funding in your own right. Of course, if you’ve previously secured substantive funding as the principal investigator then this is likely to rule you out of most fellowship schemes, as you’ll be deemed to have progressed too far down the road towards research independence to be eligible. But bidding for and winning small pots of funding will send a clear message that you’re branching out in your own direction and seeking to pursue your own research agenda. It will also demonstrate that other funding bodies have considered you to be invest-able, and it can help to give comfort that you have some experience of undertaking, managing and delivering a research project. A track record of contributing to other projects as a co-investigator can be helpful in this respect too.

Another really important indicator of your invest-ability as a research fellow is the extent to which you have a vision and a plan for your future development as an academic researcher. You will need to set out clearly what your ambitions and career aspirations are in this respect, and describe convincingly – and specifically – how the proposed fellowship would support these. To this end, you’ll need to put together a concrete training plan for the fellowship, in which you describe the package of learning and skills-development activities, opportunities and experiences that will equip you for your transition to research independence. This essentially involves a gap-analysis exercise, to determine:

• What skills, knowledge and expertise you already have
• What you will need in addition to these in order to complete your fellowship and subsequently succeed in your post-fellowship career
• What you can build into your fellowship plans to address these needs       

OK I’m sold – where can I find a funded research-fellowship opportunity?

There is quite a wide range of different research fellowships available in the UK from a number of different funders. Some accept applications in a broad range of disciplines or even any, while others are focused on a particular discipline or subject area. 

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the umbrella body for the UK’s government-funded Research Councils, is currently co-ordinating the Future Leaders Fellowships scheme, under which applications can be submitted in any discipline (or combination of disciplines). Most of the individual Research Councils run their own remit-focused fellowship schemes too. The Medical Research Council, for example, has several different schemes available for ECRs.

Several large research-funding charities also fund fellowships. The AXA Research Fund, for example, is a scientific-philanthropic organisation that supports fellowship projects in the broad areas of health, environment, new tech and socio-economics.  Many charities focus their research efforts in quite a specific area – the Wellcome Trust, for example, funds fellowships that serve their scientific remit of improving health, while others such as the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK have an even more focused remit.

Researchers in the health and medical sciences (the area within which I work) would seem to be particularly well served for fellowship opportunities – other funders in this area or research include the National Institute for Health Research and Health and Care Research Wales. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences shouldn’t despair though – fellowships in these disciplines are offered by several different funders, including the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.   

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.