Blog – Do you need research funding?

There is a question worth asking before you start filling in application forms, and almost nobody asks it. Do you need a grant, or do you need a job that comes with money attached? They are not the same thing, and confusing them costs people months.

Funding goes in cycles. Some years the calls are everywhere and charities are opening schemes faster than anyone can apply to them. Other years budgets tighten, studentships get paused, and everyone you speak to at a conference has the same worried look. I have watched both happen more than once now.

The reflex when things tighten is to stop applying. That is almost always the wrong reflex. The pipeline for most schemes runs a year or more ahead, so what looks like a drought is usually a gap between rounds rather than a door closing. Meanwhile the number of people applying drops, because everyone else had the same reflex you did.

So the first thing to say is: check before you assume. The funding directory on this website exists for exactly this reason, and the team keep it current. It leans UK-heavy, though we work at that, and there is usually more open at any given moment than people expect.

Your own money, or somebody else’s

Applying for your own funding means you become the person responsible for the idea, the budget, the reporting and the team. It buys independence. It also takes months, has a low success rate, and is a bad use of your time if what you actually want is to keep doing good work in a decent lab without running the thing.

Applying for a funded post means somebody else has already done that. The money exists, the project has a shape, and you are joining it. Less independence. Considerably less admin. Available now rather than in eighteen months.

Plenty of good researchers spend a year chasing their own grant when what they wanted was the second option and had not stopped to work out the difference. Equally, plenty of people take post after post because applying feels frightening, and find at forty that nobody will take them seriously as a lead applicant because they have never been one.

Neither route is the right answer. But you should know which one you are on, and why.

If you want your own funding

A few things hold true across schemes and across years.

Career development awards, fellowships and small project grants tend to run on annual or twice-yearly cycles, so if you have just missed one, find out when it comes round again and work backwards from that date. The application you start six months out is a different animal from the one you start six weeks out.

Look wider than the obvious funders. The big dementia charities are the ones everyone thinks of, but there are regional networks, applied research collaborations, disease-specific foundations, university internal schemes, small travel and pump-priming pots, and a substantial amount of money outside the UK that British applicants can access more often than they think.

Small grants are underrated. A few thousand pounds for a pilot study is easier to win, faster to write, and gives you something to point at next time. Nobody’s first application should be a five-year fellowship. Also think of charties that are ‘dementia adjacent’ , The British Heart Association, Stroke Association, Parkinson’s UK, MND Association (to mention just a few) often fund studies that are in the dementia space).

And for clinicians and healthcare professionals of any kind, from physiotherapists to neurologists: you are in demand. There is a sustained effort across the sector to get you into research, and schemes exist specifically to bridge people from clinical practice into research careers, including routes that do not require a PhD first. If you are clinically trained and think research is closed to you, you are working from outdated information. Many of the clinical research career funding schemes are being changed to run year-round on a rolling basis to ensure you can apply at any time.

If you want a funded post

Three things, none of them complicated.

1. Watch where jobs get trailed before they get advertised. Group leaders regularly mention upcoming posts on social media weeks before anything goes near a formal jobs board. Which platform this happens on has changed several times and will change again, so the useful version of this advice is: work out where the people in your field actually talk to each other, and be there.

You can also bring yourself to someone’s attention that way. Not by sending a message out of nowhere, but by engaging with what they post for a few weeks first. Ask questions. Say something useful about their paper. People check who is doing that. When you do eventually get in touch, or when you sit down opposite them in an interview, you are not a stranger.

Some people find this idea faintly grim. I understand that. It is also how a considerable number of posts get filled.

2. Register for the alerts. Both here and anywhere else that aggregates. Our team scan the main jobs boards, individual universities, social media and Alz Forum, and pull it into one place so you do not have to check nine sites on a Friday afternoon. That is free, and it takes a minute. If you download the Dementia Researcher App you can also get real-time push notifications when new jobs are added.

3. Send the cold email. Everybody dreads this and it works more often than it has any right to. There is a separate blog on how to structure one, so I will not repeat it here, except to say that the version that works is short, specific about why them, and asks for something small.

The bit I actually want you to take away – APPLY FOR THINGS!

I mean this slightly more literally than it sounds. The gap between researchers who get funded and researchers who do not is partly quality, and it is also partly volume. The people who succeed have usually been turned down considerably more often than you would guess from their CV, because rejections do not appear on CVs.

Dementia research remains a priority for funders across the UK, Europe and the US, and the support around early career researchers has improved a great deal over the last decade: mentoring schemes, better fellowship terms, longer awards, salary included where it once was not. It is not perfect and the job market is still hard. But the direction of travel has been the right one for a while now.

And the people who stand to benefit from your work need you to stay in it.

Author

Adam Smith was born in the north, a long time ago. He wanted to write books, but ended up working in the NHS, and at the Department of Health.  He is now Programme Director at University College London (which probably sounds more important than it is – his words). He has led a number of initiatives to improve dementia research (including this website, Join Dementia Research & ENRICH), as well as pursuing his own research interests. In his spare time, he grows vegetables, builds Lego, likes rockets & spends most of his time drinking too much coffee and squeezing technology into his house.

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