Category: Grants

GRANTfinder 4 Education – new provider for research funding information

The College no longer subscribes to Research Professional and has moved to a new provider for research funding information, called Idox GRANTfinder 4 Education, offering a searchable database of funding opportunities and the option to subscribe to alerts.

GRANTfinder 4 Education allows academic institutions in the UK to service all their funding search requirements in one place: GRANTfinder for wider projects such as capital investment and spin-offs, RESEARCHconnect for research projects and POLICYfinder to keep track of relevant policy to support funding applications. This resource offers the ability to search for up-to-date funding opportunities and share information across defined groups and the wider communities at Imperial College and to deliver these in a cost-effective manner.

How to use GRANTfinder 4 Education

Information regarding how you can access and effectively use GRANTfinder 4 Education can be found in the Research Office bulletin (12 Nov 2018) and the quick start guide for RESEARCHconnect.

There will be a training session will be on 12 December. Antony McKay from Idox will deliver the training and there will be 3 sessions, all in room SKEM 315. Registration is via Eventbrite. The second session of the day will be tailored for research managers and the other two sessions are open to all College staff. Please register for the session you would like to attend. If you are unable to attend these sessions there will be more scheduled for the early part of 2019. (more…)

The Francis Crick Institute: Opportunities open for application

The Crick and its partner universities are launching two initiatives for staff from all departments:

  • The call for the 2018 round of attachments is now open with a deadline of 10 April 2018. The programme of attachments offers Imperial staff the opportunity for their research group to be seconded to the Crick, to establish a satellite group in a Crick lab or to spend up to a year with the Crick on sabbatical. Find out more and apply.
  • The new Networking Fund call for applications has a rolling deadline, the first of which is 23 February 2018. The Fund supports staff to develop connections across disciplinary boundaries with researchers in related fields and other world-leading biomedical scientists at the Crick. Find out more and apply.

£525k funding for 3-year brain-imaging study

CT scan

My group has been awarded £525,000 by NIHR Invention for Innovation Programme from Novomber 2015 for a 3 year project, titled: Decision-assist software for management of acute ischaemic stroke using brain-imaging machine-learning.

The project involves developing imaging analysis techniques for prognostication in acute stroke, using standard clinical CT scans (see pictured right; one such method already developed by our group for lesion detection), and entails a collaboration between Imperial Brain Sciences (Paul Bentley), Computer Sciences (Daniel Rueckert) and Neuroradiology (Amrish Mehta). The enterprise will include collating one of the largest early-stroke imaging databases available worldwide, for the purpose of identifying and quantifying features relevant for outcome prediction. The techniques developed will be incorporated into a bedside software facilitating emergency treatment decisions by doctors, and communication of these decision to patients and relatives.

Dr Paul Bentley MA MRCP PhD
Clinical Senior Lecturer in Clinical Neuroscience
Honorary Consultant Neurologist

 

Two new grants within the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre

ERC Consolidator Grant

HajkovaPetra Hajkova, the head of the CSC’s Reprogramming and Chromatin Group, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant of €2 million. The grant will fund cutting-edge research into the dynamic character of nucleic acid modifications during embryonic development in mice. Elucidating these mechanisms will prove crucial to further our understanding of the regulation of epigenetic information in vivo and during reprogramming back to pluripotency in vitro. “Studying the mechanisms underlying reprogramming could enhance our understanding of epigenetic changes observed early in cancer,” says Petra. “I’m very excited about the grant because it will give us the opportunity to carry out some outstanding experiments,” she adds. Altogether 5 CSC researchers have been awarded one of the highly endowed ERC grants. Besides Petra Hajkova, these are Jean-Baptiste Vannier, Irene Miguel-Aliaga, Till Bartke and Amanda Fisher.

Imperial JRF

SarkiesPeter Sarkies from the CSC’s Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution Group has been awarded a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) from Imperial College London. Peter, who joined the CSC from the University of Cambridge in October 2014, says the funds will be directed towards in lab evolution experiments with Caenorhabditis elegans to study the interaction between transposon-silencing mechanisms and evolutionary novelty in real time.

“It’s going to really help me make the transition from being a post-doctoral researcher to running an independent group, and give me the support I need to develop an innovative research programme,” says Peter. “I’m looking forward to strengthening links between Imperial and the CSC, so together we can conduct cutting-edge research,” he adds.

Peter Sarkies is the CSC’s third Junior Research Fellow, Andre Brown and Tobias Warnecke (both from the Institute’s Integrative Biology Section) received theirs in 2013.

 

Almut Caspary
Institute of Clinical Science
Faculty of Medicine