UKRI Mental Health Platform Hubs

UKRI Mental Health Platform Hubs: to establish a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary mental health hub which will be a flagship investment drawing together relevant expertise from across the UKRI spectrum to carry out impactful research on serious mental illnesses.

The University may put forward one application to UKRI to establish a Mental Health Platform Hub. UKRI will fund up to five hubs nationwide that will jointly form the MH platform. Each funded hub will focus on one or more severe mental illnesses and include themes that will form cross-cutting strategic threads between hubs.

The award provides funding of £2 million – £3.5 million at 80% full economic cost over five years. Awards will have a fixed start date of 01 April 2024.

How to Apply

Internal applications comprising a 500 word summary of the proposed Hub must be submitted via the IRAMS online application system by 12 noon on Tuesday 25 April 2023. Departmental Approver sign-off must also be provided in IRAMS. It is not necessary to submit a costing with your internal EOI.

To apply, please upload the completed Internal EOI Form (Case for Support Template) and short CVs for the Lead Applicant and Co-applicants as a single PDF.

UKRI are running a webinar about this scheme at 12pm on 20 April 2023. Interested applicants must register on the UKRI website.

Applicant eligibility

These hubs represent a significant investment and are therefore expected to have a strong and preferably multidisciplinary management team. The Lead Applicant on the internal EOI must be a senior academic with a strong track record in mental health research. The application should include a number of co-applicants who are also senior researchers in the relevant fields to demonstrate the management structure of the hub.
 

Remit of the Mental Health Platform Hubs
 

The focus of this funding opportunity is on severe mental illness (conditions that have a significant impact on people’s lives), including but not limited to:

• severe depression
• schizophrenia
• bipolar disorder
• obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
• panic disorder
• post-traumatic stress (PTSD) and borderline personality disorder

Applications for hubs must incorporate one or more of the following strategic themes that will form cross-cutting threads throughout the MH Platform:

• in-depth understanding of those who experience severe mental illness
• markers and targets for intervention
• exploratory studies

Research within this overall focus may be across the life course. However UKRI particularly welcome applications focused on children and young people’s mental health, and on the mental and physical health interface (including when experiencing more than one illness concurrently).

Research must be grounded in basic and fundamental understanding and determinants of serious mental illness. It can be drawn from across disciplines, from biological, social, environmental, physical and medical science to humanities, with interdisciplinarity across disciplines that may not typically work together encouraged.

Understanding mechanisms or clusters of symptoms that are common across different areas (sometimes called transdiagnostic approaches) are particularly welcome. Bringing communities together across different diagnoses and across different stages of the research, treatment and intervention pathway (for example from basic science to clinical dimensions) is strongly encouraged.

Research focusing on depression, (more common) anxiety and, general mental wellbeing is out of scope. Research should be primarily focused on the UK.

The primary emphasis of the hubs should be to provide mechanistic understanding of mental illness, identifying early and best treatments, interventions and support in a range of settings to deliver improvements in health. Research focused on animal models including the development of new animal models is out of scope. However, discrete use of animals such as in backward translation opportunities may be incorporated.

Applications may involve a wide range of methodology across disciplines, and applications involving the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and other innovative data technologies are particularly encouraged.
 

Once established, the hubs will be expected to network with each other to address shared challenges and develop common approaches, such as those with respect to methods, measures and ethics. Future funding will be made available through a separate process to enable this aspect.
 

Applications for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary hubs should be in partnership across multiple organisations and bring together the best UK talent and groups to provide a holistic approach from across the breadth of arts and humanities, biological science, social science, data science, environmental science, medical science and physical science.
 

If selected to apply to UKRI, your application must demonstrate strong engagement with people with lived experience (PWLE) throughout the research process, and clearly explain plans for this within your application. Your application must demonstrate a clear and compelling explanation of the potential impact on the lives of people with a severe mental illness.

Eligible costs

It is not necessary to submit a costing with your internal EOI or the mandatory EOI to UKRI. For information, as part of these Hubs UKRI will fund:

• directly allocated contributions to salaries of the leadership team and other established researchers, usually between 15% to 30% of their time, in line with their research contribution
• directly incurred salaries of research staff, technicians and direct support staff, such as project managers, where there is a clear justification for each critical role
• research consumables and other costs directly related to the project
• external stakeholder activities including public engagement and involvement
• travel and subsistence enabling members to meet to exchange ideas and expertise
• administrative support for coordination of the hub
• directly incurred costs for international partners (an exception funded at 100%) may be requested, up to a maximum of 30% of the FEC requested
• NHS research costs of a study (funded at the appropriate FEC rate, usually 80%)

Timeline

• UKRI are running a webinar about this scheme at 12pm on 20 April 2023. Interested applicants must register on the UKRI website.
• Applicants must submit an internal EOI in IRAMS by 12pm on 25 April 2023 for consideration to be selected for Oxford’s bid.
• The Medical Sciences Divisional Office will notify all applicants of the outcomes on or around Thursday 04 May 2023.
• The successful applicant ONLY must then submit a mandatory EOI form to UKRI by 4pm on Tuesday 09 May 2023. Content from the internal EOI form can be entered directly into the UKRI EOI form, upon which it is based. Applicants failing to submit or submitting late will not be permitted to submit a Full Application to UKRI.
• The Full Application must be submitted through the UKRI Funding Service (replacement to JeS) by 13 June 2023.

More Information

Guidelines from the funder are available here.

Please direct questions to research@medsci.ox.ac.uk