Child Development - RESEARCH

To apply for a research grant

First stage applications should submit an Initial Application following the guidelines below. Successful applications will be notified within 2 weeks (by email) with an invitation to prepare and submit a Full Application.

Please ensure you have read all the information related to our Child Development Research calls available on our website to get a good feel for our fund before putting together an application.

Initial application

Please provide the following information:

1. Project title (and shortened project title – max 5 words)
   
   
2. Principle Investigator (name, contact details and ORCID ID) and name of university
   
   
3. Co-applicants and affiliations
   
   
4. Proposed start date, end date and duration of project
   
   
5. Lay summary
   
   
   1. Please provide a summary of your proposed research that people who may not be familiar with the subject can understand. It should be no more than a page long, and should include:
      
      
      1. background to the research problem
         
      2. research questions / hypotheses
         
      3. your approach (participants, measures, etc.)
         
      4. expected impact of your work.
         
         
6. Estimated budget (table format)  - this does not need to be completely finalised at this early stage and can be adjusted for the full application but we want to ensure that applications at this stage have considered whether the proposed project can be completed within the maximum grant award (£65k) so please give thought to whether there is room in the budget for additional expenses such as dissemination activities. We can also consider select grants that have intrinsically high consumable costs (such as MRI, GWAS, or shotgun analysis) up to £80k, but if you wish to apply for this level of funding, please clearly include these costs in your estimated budget with an explanation below for why this expense is necessary.

Full application

Successful applications will be asked to provide the following information which will be sent to external peer reviewers. Please only send in the below information if requested to do so.

We suggest that you aim the application at a scientist from a different discipline. It can be up to 6 pages long, and must include the following.

1. Please head it with the: 
   
1. Name of your university/organisation
2. Title of the project
3. Please provide a shortened title for reference purposes (<5 words)
   
   
2. Information about who you are:
   
1. The name of the Principal Investigator.
2. Contact details of the person to reply to:
   
   • Email.
   • Phone number.
   • Postal address.
   • A link to your individual, project, and / or team website.
3. A contact in the university’s central Research Management, Research and Development, or Development Office department.
4. The name and email address of all collaborating researchers, with their university’s name.
   • For each investigator, please state the amount of time (s)he will commit to the project throughout its duration, along with other work commitments such as clinical, teaching, supervision, and administrative responsibilities.
     
     
3. Information about your project:
   
1. Scientific abstract of the project.
2. Lay summary of the project.
3. Theoretical and scientific rationale (i.e. a literature review).
4. Practical impact of the project: who will benefit, and the likely timescale of benefit.
5. Research design. This should include: control procedures, proposed sample with power calculation, recruitment channels, proposed outcome measures and method of analysis, inclusion/exclusion criteria and hypotheses. We are interested in whether the design you have chosen is the most appropriate for the topic, so do give an explanation of why your proposed method is most appropriate.
6. How ethical issues have been addressed:
   
   • What ethics and institutional approvals are needed for this project? Which are already in place? Please specify the further approvals required and the estimated date of securing these (with and without amendments). Please note that all such approvals must be in place prior to the period of active funding beginning, and we must have copies. If the application includes any animal research, it must demonstrate how it follows the 3Rs and ARRIVE guidelines.
     
7. Service user involvement: (See here for more information) Please describe fully how you have involved, and plan to involve, service users throughout the project. This could be through consultation, where service users are consulted with no sharing of power in decision-making, through collaboration, which involves an active on-going partnership with service users in the research process, or through leadership, where service users design, undertake and disseminate results of a research project. In particular, comment on service user involvement in the following stages of the project:
   
   • Study development
   • Conduct of study
   • Dissemination of study findings
   • Sources of advice you have used during the development of your proposed project. 
     
     
     
4. Costings:  
   Please note that TWF typically offers funding of between £40,000 and £65,000 per research project. A special exception is for projects with unavoidable directly incurred high-cost materials, where we can accept projects up to £80,000, with justification of costs. If your budget is higher than this, we are unlikely to be able to consider your project. One open access publication can be included, we do not support FEC and prefer not to cover the costs of an already permanent member of staff (i.e. salary costs for a research assistant/post doc position is fine but not for time commitments of already existing members of staff). A maximum of 5% can be for conference attendance.
1. Please supply a budget in table format as an appendix. By all means group items through using additional columns, but each item must be listed in a separate row. Furthermore, for projects spanning more than one year, the budget must indicate which funding is required in each year (this is related to your project timeframe and not necessarily by calendar year).
2. Timescale, in calendar months. This should include a plan with key milestones, and can be presented as a Gannt chart in the appendix. Please remember to include ethical approvals prior to study start date and give an indication of the planned start date (month, year). 
3. Viability, including track record of recruitment with such samples. 
4. A summary of job descriptions for any posts included in the application. 
5. Any other sources of funding involved. 
6. What will happen if your application to partner with us is unsuccessful.
7. Information about the expected impact of your project

 

5. The key beneficiaries of the project – who they are and how many there are.
1. How you will disseminate this to the relevant patient, family, and professional groups.
2. How you will disseminate this to the public community at large.
3. Where you expect to disseminate this academically.
4. Which open access publication you will consider submitting to.

Appendices to include:

Brief CVs for PI and all co-applicants(2 -3 pages) including publication and citation metrics, which must include the h-index.

References

Key articles: Please enclose 3 key articles with your application.

Can also include expanded budget and Gannt chart 

Within your application email:

Please suggest three independent reviewers who would be suitable to review your project. They must be from a different institution to you, and not have worked with you for a minimum of two years. Please give their names, institutions, email addresses and where possible a link to their research webpage.

1. If there is anyone you would like NOT to review your application, please also provide their name and institution (maximum of two).
2. Please provide reviewer information in the email and NOT in the main application document.

The application must be in Word and page numbered. Please use 12-point Times New Roman font with at least 1” margins.

This may seem a prescriptive list of guidelines. However, we have been asked all of these questions, and this is our full answer to save you time. We are far more friendly than this sounds!