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Wellcome Trust looks to youth and ‘high-risk’ research

C0058571 Jeremy Farrar

Jeremy Farrar

Wellcome Library, London

The United Kingdom’s largest biomedical charity is to shake up the way it forks out its funding, with an increased emphasis on ‘high-risk’ research and stronger support for less-experienced scientists.

The director of the Wellcome Trust, Jeremy Farrar, announced today that his charity would seek to “significantly improve” certain areas of research funding. Farrar took charge of the trust nine months ago, and this is the first indication of how he may shake up grants from the United Kingdom’s largest non-governmental biomedical funder.

As well as boosting support for early- and mid-career researchers, the trust will launch what Farrar called a “major new scheme for collaborative research” and a programme of smaller grants “to promote the development of innovative or high-risk research ideas”.

“Our plans remain a work in progress, and I hope you will understand that we have not yet worked through the details of what they will mean for specific funding schemes,” he wrote on the trust’s website. “I thought though that the research community would find it helpful to know a little more now about our direction of travel.”

Read an interview with Farrar at Nature Medicine.

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