Call opens: 5 September 2022
Call closes: 14 November 2022
(Optional) Information and Q&A session: 16 September 2022
(Optional) Collaborative in-person workshop: 11 October 2022
(Optional) Virtual co-working sessions: 20 and 28 October 2022
Notification of outcome: By 23 December 2022
Award start date: 1 March 2023
Background and research topic
Launched in June 2021, the Turing-Roche strategic partnership is a five-year collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute (the UK’s national institute for data science and AI) and Roche (the global pharmaceutical company). The partnership’s ‘North Star’ is to enable the generation of insights to better understand patient and disease heterogeneity and its relevance to clinical outcomes at an unprecedented level of precision in order to improve clinical care.
Last year we ran a call and associated workshops on the theme of structured missingness, seconding two project teams into the Turing for 18 months. This year, the partnership is exploring the theme of predictive modelling and is inviting applications for funding.
Three main topics aligned with the North Star of the Turing-Roche partnership and involving predictive modelling development will be open to receive research project proposals. Proposals may encompass, and must specify, one or more themes:
Stream 1: Generalisation despite data heterogeneity
Stream 2: Prediction uncertainty in personalised healthcare
Stream 3: Algorithmic explainability and fairness for AI in healthcare
For further details, please see the open call and FAQs documents.
Information and Q&A session
We ran a virtual information and Q&A session about the funding call on 16 September. The core partnership team gave some quick background info on the partnership and the funding call. You can watch the recording below.
Associated collaborative workshop and co-working sessions
We will also be running an associated workshop at The Alan Turing Institute on 11 October 2022.
This in-person meeting aims to gather a diverse community of researchers to encourage and facilitate collaboration, which is a key pillar of how we foresee awarded projects working. Due to limited capacity, workshop attendees must apply to attend. The deadline to apply to attend the workshops will be 26 September 2022. Find out more about the workshops.
Whilst we encourage interested researchers to apply to attend the workshop, it is not mandatory and researchers are welcome to apply for the call even if they did not apply to or attend the workshop.
We will also be running two virtual co-working sessions on 20 and 28 October which will be open for anyone to attend (again, not mandatory). You can register for either or both of these sessions on Zoom: register for 20 October and/or register for 28 October. The aim of these sessions is to allow researchers to find others to potentially collaborate with for the funding call application, or can be used as set time to work quietly on your proposal.
Terms and conditions
Successful applicants and their teams (as applicable) will be engaged via a secondment agreement to the Turing. Although some specific terms and conditions may depend on the nature of the project, general terms of secondment will be as per the Turing template secondment agreement, or similar if using a previously agreed template with your university. These general terms are available to download within the application portal.
Eligibility
To be eligible to apply you must:
- Be part of a university or research institute (commercial organisations are not eligible).
- Have permission from your organisation to apply and for project teams to be seconded into Turing, if successful. For this, you will be required to submit an approval letter from your research/finance office stating that your organisation has approved:
- Terms and conditions
- Proposed costs
- Employee secondment and agreed FTE
You can download the template for the submission letter and it is also available within the application portal.
Funding available
This open call is designed to fund predictive modelling research through secondments and applications can follow two different routes depending on the type of the project:
A. Main projects (approx. 12-18 months): Designed for multiparty proposals boosting collaboration between Principal Investigators with senior expertise. We expect to fund two projects up to £300,000 each (including 100% overheads).
B. Pilot projects (approx. 6 months): Designed for early-career researchers seeking a first leadership experience while pursuing proof-of-concept research. We expect to fund 2 projects up to £75,000 each (including 100% overheads).
Other considerations in terms of funding:
- All salary and on-costs will be paid to the university.
- Overheads should be calculated at the Turing rate of £65,000 per FTE per year, 50% of which will be payable to the university and 50% of which will be retained by the Turing.
- 20% VAT is applicable to these secondments.
A breakdown of costs and a tentative timeline of the project will be required during the application. Both templates are available within the application portal.
How to apply
Applications will open on 5 September 2022 and will remain open until the submission deadline on 14 November 2022.
Applications must be submitted via the FlexiGrant application portal. If you have not already done so, all applicants must first register on the system and provide basic details to create a profile.
- Please read the instructions provided and answer every question. When templates are required, please download, complete and upload them back into the system.
- If you have any questions regarding the application form or using the online system, please contact the health programme [email protected].
If you are employed by one of the Institute’s 13 university partners, please contact your University Liaison Manager to make them aware of your application. They can provide support, answer questions and involve you as part of the Turing community at your university from now on.
If you are employed at a university that received a Turing Network Development Award, please contact your Award lead to make them aware of your application.
Contact
For any queries, please contact [email protected]. We aim to answer within three working days.