The Rosetrees Trust Interdisciplinary Award is an open competition that aims to develop collaborative studies between researchers in different fields. This year the award will fund research aiming to explore the mechanisms of environmental impacts on public and human health. The funder is looking for proposals that investigate how factors such as air pollution, climate change, and exposure to environmental toxins, carcinogens and microplastics affect health from birth to adulthood.
Internal Expressions of Interest are invited (deadline 12 noon on Tuesday 11 February 2025), from which the University of Oxford will select one application to go forward to Rosetrees Trust.
The award supports only interdisciplinary research and applications must name two co-Lead Applicants, one clinical specialist and one non-clinical specialist from a relevant field, e.g. discovery science, environmental science, toxicology, epidemiology or public health. Applications must focus on understanding the underlying disease causative mechanisms and developing novel strategies for prevention, mitigation, and intervention. Proposals must emphasise the potential for translational research and real-world applications that can improve public health outcomes.
The award is worth up to £330,000 over three years and can be used to support any directly incurred costs of the proposed research.
Each expression of interest must have two joint co-Lead Applicants and must be submitted by 12 noon on Tuesday 11 February 2025 via the IRAMS online application system. Departmental Approver sign-off from the department of the PI submitting the application must also be provided in IRAMS.
Combine the EOI Form with short CVs for the two co-Lead Applicants into one PDF for upload to IRAMS. Please enter a rough costing into IRAMS of up to £330,000 showing how you intend to spend the award; you do not need to submit an X5 costing with your internal application.
Rosetrees funding terms and conditions include a specific intellectual property policy, the terms of which may require further discussion with Rosetrees if a project either (a) would not be fully funded by the Rosetrees award (i.e. other third party funding may be used) or (b) would bring existing intellectual property into the project for further development.
If the proposed project would fall under either (a) or (b) above then please include this information in the Expression of Interest.
Once the successful internal applicant has been notified on or around 20 February, they must submit a preliminary application to Rosetrees Trust in their Flexigrant application portal by the deadline of 03 March 2025. Research Services’ review and approval of this preliminary application will not be required, however the successful applicants will need to include an institutional letter of support jointly signed by both faculty heads of the clinical and non-clinical areas. The template preliminary application form is available in SharePoint.
Rosetrees will invite applicants who are successful at outline application stage to submit a full application by a deadline in June 2025. If invited to submit a full application, standard review by Research Services will be required.
Guidelines relating to scope and criteria are available on the funder’s webpage. Additional guidance including a template preliminary application form is available in SharePoint.
Please direct questions to research@medsci.ox.ac.uk
