These 7-year awards provide applicants with protected research time and leadership development opportunities. It will enable applicants to transition from postdoctoral researcher to research leadership roles.
Applicants must be senior postdoctoral clinical academics. Please consult the “Who can apply?” section for full information about eligibility.
NIHR is particularly interested in receiving applications that will develop skills and experience within their strategic priorities: social care; mental health; public health; health data science; researchers working in a local authority setting; applicants hosted by post-92 HEIs and in non-university hospital practice settings. Applications received under these strategic priorities will still have to meet the same quality threshold required for funding. However, NIHR will prioritise applications under the strategic priorities if the number of fundable applications exceeds the maximum that they can fund.
NIHR requires contracting organisations to provide significant support including: contributing to tapered salary costs throughout the fellowship; committing to the provision of an open-ended UK based independent research or innovation position, to be taken up during or upon the completion of the fellowship (this must be in-line with organisational employment policies and practices). For more information on salary tapering, see the “lead applicant salary tapering” section of the call page.
For full information, please see the general call page and the cohort 1 call page. Please note that there will be a webinar for this call at 2 PM on 5 November, 2025, which you can sign up for here.
Schools have been asked to each provide a ranked lists of individuals they recommend to apply to this round of funding. Departments should therefore await communication from their School office to understand the selection/ranking process and timetable.
If there are more applications put forward by the Schools than the NIHR limit of 3, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research will review the numbers and rankings, and we will contact the Schools to confirm the number of applications each School may submit. Please note that applicants that haven’t been through the School ranking stage of the internal selection process will not be accepted or included in the University of Cambridge submission for this funding call.
The deadline for submission of full applications to UKRI is 3 March, 2026. The usual Research Operations Office deadline policies apply to this call and Departments should seek advice on accurate costing of the Fellow’s salary by contacting the appropriate ROO based team for your School.
Overview of internal process:
If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact researchstrategy@admin.cam.ac.uk.
Posted on 29/10/2025
