Faculty of Education and Health Sciences Seed Fund for EHS Emerging and Early Career Researchers* 2023 The EHS Research Committee is delighted to announce a seed funding competition, with the aims of supporting emerging and early-career researchers who wish to develop new research projects, to ‘pump-prime’ original projects to facilitate application for external funding, and to enhance research-related outputs, e.g., publications, impact statements. The call is to acknowledge and accommodate emerging and early career researchers. The total sum allocated to this call is €60,000.
The funding will be dispersed through a competitive, peer-review selection process. Applications should be led by emerging or early career colleague and, where appropriate, involving collaboration with more senior academic researchers and external organisations (if appropriate). Such associations aid larger external bids in the future so one intention of the call is to assist in developing such relationships. While this is encouraged, emerging or early career colleagues submitting an application on their own does not negate consideration of the application.
Small sums of money are available for activities to support each of the current four EHS priority research areas – (i) Optimising Health, (ii) Physical Activity and Human Performance, (iii) Professional Practice and Education, and (iv) Social Inclusion.
Aligned to the Faculty strategy, Knowledge with Impact, this call aims to support the development of external collaborations and engaged research activities. Engaged research aims to improve, understand, or investigate an issue of public interest or concern, including societal challenges and sustainable development goals in collaboration with societal partners. Societal partners include service users, product users, policymakers, civil and civic society organisations, industry partners, members of the public, and other relevant stakeholders (see https://www.campusengage.ie).
Details on Application Process
Applicants may request sums of between €500 and €7,500 to be used within eighteen months of the award.
The EHS Research Committee will oversee the seed funding call. An independent committee will review and score applications using the following assessment descriptors:
(i) Significance and innovation of the proposed research (40%)
(ii) Evidence of the applicant’s track record of research activity (30%)
(iii) Explanation of how proposed research aligns with and develops at least one of the EHS priority research areas and/or contributes to the implementation of UL@50 Strategy and EHS Strategy Knowledge with Impact (20%)
(iv) Multi/inter disciplinary -and/or inter-sectoral/collaborative aspects of proposed research (10%)
Applicants should submit a maximum of three A4 pages (Times New Roman text; font 12; 1.15cm spacing; not including references) using the current version of the application form covering each of the criteria listed above.
Requests for funds should be emailed to ADR.EHS@ul.ie by 5pm on May 15th 2023. Please title your email ‘EHS Seed Fund 2023 submission’.
General conditions of the call:
Applicants may only submit one application.
In all cases, applicants must be an EHS faculty or research member who will be employed for the duration of the award.
Staff employed in adjunct or honorary positions cannot be named as an applicant.
Applicants must be either multi-annual appointments or on contracts with two or more years to run.
Budget requests may include o Research assistant salaries o Research equipment, materials and consumables o Consultancy, dissemination and publication costs
Budget requests may not include: o Salary supplementation for investigators o Staff buyout from teaching
Awarded funding must be held in a UL research account.
Orders and expenditure must be processed through the UL accounting system.
Specific conditions of the call:
Applications with budgets ≥ €5000 must convincingly demonstrate the project will produce a competitive research grant proposal that will be submitted within 18 months of receipt of funding;
Applications with budgets ≤5,000 must convincingly demonstrate one researchrelated output (e.g., peer-reviewed publication, impact case study) within 18 months of receipt of funding.
Awardees must deliver a short progress report to the EHS Research Committee at the project midpoint and a final report no later than one month after the end of the funding period.
Examples of acceptable requests for funding:
1. Pilot studies to demonstrate viability of larger projects.
2. Development of base data necessary for further research.
3. Equipment, materials and consumables necessary for research projects**.
4. Salaries for research assistance required to develop a grant proposal or run a project.
* Definition of an emerging and early career researcher: For this call, emerging and early career researchers are no more than eight years post PhD award. Where researchers have not been research-active for extended periods of time this should be clearly qualified and documented in their application. Periods of maternity / career and parental leave will extend this time-period (using the same criteria adopted by the European Research Council).
** In line with UL Research Finance policies.