The Population and Systems Medicine Board funds research to unlock the complexity of human health and disease across the life course.
Our remit includes population health and the impact of environmental factors including the social environment on health outcomes.
The research we support includes the physiology and pathophysiology of all the major organs and systems, with the exception of the brain and the immune system which are normally supported through our other research boards.
Research we fund includes, but is not limited to, the following areas:
- cardiovascular
- respiratory
- musculoskeletal
- gastroenterology
- renal medicine and liver function
- endocrinology and reproductive health
- maternal health and the early origins of health and disease
- nutrition, metabolic regulation, diabetes and obesity
- trauma, acute medicine and surgery
- inflammation in relation to disease processes and the resolution of the inflammatory response
- medical sociology
- lifestyle, socio-economic and behavioural impacts on health
- health inequalities
- population and disease related cohorts.
Find out more about the science areas we support and our current board opportunity areas.
We encourage you to contact us first to discuss your application, especially if you believe your research may cross MRC research board or research council interests. If your application fits another research board remit better we may decide to transfer it there to be assessed.
MRC population and systems medicine research grants:
- are suitable for focused short or long-term research projects
- can support method development or development and continuation of research facilities
- may involve more than one research group or institution.
We will fund projects lasting up to five years, although projects typically last three to four years. If your project will last more than three years, you must justify the reason for this. For example, if you need time for data collection or follow-up.
If your project will last less than two years, it must be for proof of principle or pilot work only. We expect proof of principle proposals to support high-risk or high-reward research by critically testing a key hypothesis or demonstrating feasibility of an approach that could lead to fundamentally new avenues of research.
Contact one of our programme managers for advice if you would like to apply for a short or long-duration project.
You can request funding for costs such as:
- a contribution to the salary of the principal investigator and co-investigators
- support for other posts such as research and technical
- research consumables
- equipment
- travel costs
- data preservation, data sharing and dissemination costs
- estates and indirect costs.
We will not fund:
- research involving randomised trials of clinical treatments
- funding to use as a ‘bridge’ between grants
- costs for PhD studentships
- publication costs.
