The Medical Humanities and Social Sciences Collaborative scheme call 2 is now closed.

 

The Medical Humanities and Social Sciences Collaboration Scheme will support high-quality research within humanities and/ or social sciences that addresses any aspect of health (included, but not limited to, history of medicine, bioethics, sociology, health economics, ethology, literature and philosophy etc.). This award will enable UCD to strategically advance research in these areas and to leverage further external funding from agencies such as the EU and the Wellcome Trust, amongst other sources. Importantly, the fund will support excellent early to mid-career academics who have suffered a loss of track record due to external circumstances (e.g. changes in the national funding landscape; maternity leave, career break stage; heavy teaching load). The emphasis of this scheme will be to foster collaboration and interdisciplinary research with clinicians, health practitioners or other individuals in allied health professions within the medicaland veterinary medical field. Specifically, this scheme will focus on projects which set out to examine the Patient’s Voice and One Health initiative  i.e. research that translates into real benefit for human or animal patients and society. To enable inter­institutional activity, academics will be encouraged to seek collaboration with other Wellcome Trust funded institutions and research groups.

This scheme will operate as a competitive funding programme intended to facilitate career development and growth, with mentorship and staff development being key features of the programme. This award will support the researcher in generating significant research outcomes that can be leveraged to pursue extramural funding. Thus, only candidates whose research clearly has the potential to provide a launch-pad for larger-scale projects, either by the researcher or the research team, will be considered. There will be €60,000 available to fund one to two awards in this round. The funding can be used to cover research costs, salary costs for post-doctoral fellows and/or research assistants and a discrete amount can be used for teaching buy­out time (buy-out of one module per academic year).

**One Health integrates human medicine, veterinary medicine, and environmental science, and is ultimately aimed at preventing disease and improving the health of all species – animal and human.

 

Award features include:

• Successful candidates will undertake an interdisciplinary research project of up to 12-18 months duration supervised by a pre-identified mentor.
• Dedicated project management and grant writing support will be available to all awardees, linking in with the project management team within the ISSF Network of Excellence Scheme. This support will enable awardees’ bid for future external funding and generate high impact outputs.
• Successful candidates will be trained to disseminate their research in multiple formats and media achieved through programmes and workshops on advanced communications skills. This will be complemented by support from communications staff in the UCD Research Institutes.
• Successful candidates will participate in established seminar series which currently operate across the UCD Research Institutes and Centres which give students, research staff and invited guests an opportunity to meet each other, learn about current research and have topical discussions. These are excellent forums for emerging investigators to present their original research findings to their peers and to get feedback on their research progress.
• Where possible, successful candidates will have access to career development opportunities available within the university.