Rosetrees Trust Interdisciplinary Prize 2021

The Rosetrees Trust Interdisciplinary Prize is an open competition that aims to develop collaborative studies between researchers in different fields. This year the award is for collaboration between medicine and engineering including the area of healthcare technology.
 
The award is worth up to £300,000 over three years and can be used to support any directly incurred costs of the proposed research.
 
Internal expressions of interest are invited, from which the University of Oxford Medical Sciences and MPLS divisions will select one application to go forward to Rosetrees Trust. Each expression of interest must have two lead, tenured applicants, one from each of the two areas of research (medicine and engineering), and must be submitted by noon on Friday 12 March 2021 via the IRAMS online application system. Departmental approver sign-off must also be provided in IRAMS.
 
Please note the following:

• applications must be truly interdisciplinary in nature and clearly represent collaboration between medicine and engineering
• only submit proposals that do not have commercialisable background IP
• only submit proposals that are unlikely to generate any IP of commercial value
• funder guidelines relating to scope and criteria are available below

 
Once the successful internal applicant has been notified on or around 26 March, they must submit a full application to Rosetrees Trust in their Flexi-Grant application portal by the deadline of midnight on 30 April 2021. The application must include a combined letter of support from the heads of department of both lead applicants.
 
Please direct questions to research@medsci.ox.ac.uk

Rosetrees Trust guidelines

Aim

The 2021 Rosetrees Trust interdisciplinary award is an annual award aimed at developing new collaborative studies between researchers in the fields of medicine and other disciplines. The focus of this year’s award will be medicine and engineering including the field of healthcare technology. We hope that by stimulating research collaborations this award will result in breakthroughs that have real potential to improve human health. We will prioritise applications that have a clear line of sight to the clinic.

Value and support provided

The interdisciplinary award is for £300,000 paid over 3 years. This funding can be used to support any aspect of the proposed research. We will fund directly incurred costs associated with the project including salaries, consumables and other running costs. We will not fund directly allocated costs, indirect costs or PhD tuition fees. We will consider travel costs (maximum £1,000).

Eligibility requirements

Applications should be truly interdisciplinary and clearly represent collaboration between Medicine and Engineering. They can relate to any disease or medical condition which affects a significant proportion of the population. The 2 lead applicants (Medicine and Engineering) must be named and the lead applicants should be tenured academics within the host institution. Only one ID award application can be made per host institution. However, in exceptional circumstances we can consider applications from two departments in two separate host institutions if for example one of the institutions does not host a medical school. In these cases the lead institution will be the one hosting the medical department and will be the only application allowed from that institution. Please contact Rosetrees in advance if more than one institution is involved.

Applications

This substantial award draws many applications and it is for each university to select the single best for submission to Rosetrees. Once the best application has been selected, please contact Sheree Oxenham (details below) and a link will be provided to make a full application using our Flexi-Grant online application portal. Further details of the application process will be found in the instructions section of the online application form.
Briefly this will include:

• a 50 word lay overview
• a 500 word lay abstract
• a 6 page technical report inclusive of supporting figures and references
• CVs of the two lead applicants and co-applicants-max. 2 pages including publications (5 most recent
• and 5 most relevant) and grants held (please stipulate whether PI or CoI)
• letters of support from collaborators
• a combined letter of support from relevant faculty heads

Review process

All applications will be initially assessed by an internal Rosetrees Scientific Panel. Successful applications will then be reviewed by a panel of independent reviewers who will assess a range of criteria such as experience and track record of the lead applicants; importance of the research; the ‘interdisciplinarity’ of the project; how well placed the researchers are to carry out the study; impact of the research and potential for translation and future clinical benefit and whether the scale and nature of funding is appropriate. The shortlisted applications will then be reviewed by a panel of specialist reviewers who can comment on the specific area of work.

Contact information

If you have any further queries about this award please contact Sheree Oxenham by email at soxenham@rosetreestrust.co.uk