NIHR will provide £2,000,000 over 5 years to undertake research that focusses on addressing global health challenges. NIHR welcome applications from different professional backgrounds, clinical and non-clinical. This is a professorial-level award that funds outstanding academics who are on track to become future Global Health research leaders. Applicants should not already be established leaders in their field but should instead be close to professorial level or recently have been appointed as a full professor. It is expected that applicants would not have been employed at the professor level for more than 5 years as of September 2025. The award promotes effective translation of research with direct primary relevance to health challenges of ODA eligible low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Thus, you must have at least 1 partner organisation in an ODA eligible LMIC in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia.
For more information, please see the call webpage, the scheme webpage and full eligibility information.
To be eligible, applicants must:
Salary recycling:
The basic salary of the Global Health Research Professor is funded by NIHR. Host institutions are required to recycle the salary costs released from the Professor’s previous role. This means the institution must reinvest those funds to build research capacity, such as hiring new academic or research staff, supporting early career researchers, or enhancing research infrastructure. This plan must be clearly documented and is assessed as part of the application.
Institutional support and future employment:
Institutions must demonstrate a strong and sustained commitment to the nominee. This includes ensuring that the individual has access to appropriate administrative and research support and guaranteeing the availability of necessary infrastructure and facilities. In addition, institutions are expected to support the nominee’s leadership development, including their participation in the NIHR Leadership Programme.
NIHR restricts the number of nominations Higher Education Institutions (HEI) can put forward to this funding call as a host or contracting organisation. There are no limits to the number of applications on which the University is listed as partner (i.e. if not leading the application).
Therefore, this call will be managed according to the University’s restricted calls procedure.
Schools have been asked to submit individual(s) they recommend to apply to this round of funding. Departments should therefore await communication from their School office to understand the selection process and timetable. 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.
Internal deadline for Schools to submit ranked candidates: 18 May 2026
Funder deadline: 30 June 2026
If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact researchstrategy@admin.cam.ac.uk.
Posted on 23/04/2026
