Dr Cecilia Busari, a psychiatrist and mental health researcher, is offering a tailored programme aimed at research and academic colleagues who are interested in equipping themselves with wellbeing skills and tools to enable them to reduce stress, improve wellbeing and strengthen healthy performance to mitigate mental illness for better career success. Participants will be invited…
The Society for the Study of Addiction (SSA) is currently advertising funding for two PhD studentships and a postdoctoral funding scheme for addiction science research. The deadline to apply for both opportunities is 13 March 2025. Find out more about the schemes on the SSA website: https://www.addiction-ssa.org/funding/
We are very happy to announce that we will be running not only one but two writing retreats for mental health researchers in 2025! New for next year is our fellowship application writing retreat, which will take place from 1-3 July 2025 in Gladstone’s Library, in North Wales. And following on from great feedback, we…
Career development funding awards from the Three NIHR Schools Mental Health Programme are open now to apply for until 15 November 2024. Proposals of up to £30,000 are invited and if successful, you’ll become a member of one of the NIHR Schools, and have a personalised training and development opportunities related to that. It’s a…
Do you work in an addiction service? Or are you an academic researcher of addiction? The MHR Incubator is offering two distinct types of funded placement opportunities for addiction service providers and university research groups to host researchers. Through our placement and internship programmes, we’re seeking to enable you to ask and answer the right…
The NIHR has recently announced changes to its funding and application process, in order to facilitate inclusion in health and care research. In order to support the NIHR’s mission of improving the nation’s health and wealth, applicants will now be required to demonstrate how inclusion is is found in all areas of the research design….
Applications for the NIHR mentoring programme are open! Are you interested in developing your career? Have you been funded by NIHR? Why not think about applying to be part of the NIHR’s mentoring scheme. Applications are open now. This scheme partners late-PhD and postdoctoral NIHR Academy Members (researchers who’ve received career development awards/fellowships of various…
Do you need some headspace to write? We at the Mental Health Research Incubator are announcing our first fully-funded writing retreat for mental health and addiction researchers. Specifically aimed at ECRs who have recently completed fellowships or a PhD, the retreat offers headspace, structure, and a tranquil environment in which researchers can make the most…
‘Solving the crisis in mental health services: global solutions across the life span’ is an international mental health conference held in Glasgow. It’s a great opportunity for mental health researchers interested in global mental health issues to get together and share research. Now in its 5th year, this annual conference run by the CeDAR team…
There are some funding schemes out there that can set up early career researchers and provide support for those tricky few years before research independence. The thrice yearly Wellcome Early-Career award is one of them, and therefore should be of significant interest to mental health and addiction ECRs. Even if it might seem a far…
Calling all registered health and care professionals! The NIHR recently launched a funding call specifically to help you prepare for a research grant application on any of NIHR’s funding streams. This is a great opportunity for anyone working on the front line of delivery who wants to develop a research component to your career by…
NIHR’s Three Schools Mental Health programme has just announced that it has launched its second phase of funding calls with an additional £4.98m available, so we thought we would do a little overview about each offering to help you understand more as they are really great opportunities. The first of the three open calls is…
This is a great opportunity for mental health researchers focusing on maternal mental health who are wanting to supervise a PhD student. Just for clarity: The application is for universities in the UK to apply for funding to host the scholarships, they are not open to potential PhD candidates to apply for. Mental Health Research…
This is a key one for ECRs in mental health research – the NIHR Pre-Application Support Fund! Read on for more info on why it is so useful. What is it? The fund is aimed at providing short term, 12 month, support to enable researchers to carve out time or otherwise prepare for an application…
All mental health researchers are rightly concerned about conducting ethical, valuable and reproducible research. Open science is a movement towards making research not only totally transparent, but also accessible. This can only be a good thing for research, and particularly mental health research, right? In our latest explainer post we briefly talk about open science…
We’re happy to confirm that the Mental Health Research Incubator will be continuing in our mission to build a vibrant and supportive cross-disciplinary community of mental health researchers across the UK – hurrah! The coming years will see more cohorts of our GROW programme for postdoctoral researchers, as well as internship and placement opportunities, writing retreats…
Are you wanting to take your mental health research career to the next level and thinking of applying to the NIHR Doctoral Fellowship? The current round is open until 1300hrs, 1 February 2024. However, it comes up twice a year in April and October so check out these resources and be ahead for the next…
The McPin Foundation turned 10 this year and has been celebrating by rounding up a set of 10 excellent resources which bring together McPin’s expertise, learning and research in lived experience involvement from the last decade. These are all amazing resources for any one working in mental health research but especially anyone just starting out…
Getting a big grant or fellowship application together takes a very long time – often much longer than you might expect – certainly longer than the active application window. Many people have told us that it took them more than a year to get their application together. These funds are usually open to people from…
A PhD programme for primary care clinicians funded by the School for Primary Care (SPCR) and Wellcome Trust is now open for applications with a closing date of 20 December 2023. Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners (PWPs) are among the mental health clinicians who should definitely take note of this fantastic opportunity! The programme is currently being…
The NIHR has just launched a new fund aimed at helping researchers prepare for one of their larger career development funds or fellowships. This is great news for all mental health researchers and definitely worth considering if you don’t feel quite ready for a fellowship application! The Pre-Application Support Fund launched on 19 September,…
The NIHR have just launched their third annual call for Doctoral Local Authority Fellowship applications. The submission deadline is 7 December 2023. Mental health researchers in local authority settings have benefitted from this scheme in the past – do take a look at our case studies for examples. The NIHR Doctoral Local Authority Fellowship…
The next round of applications for the King’s PhD programme in mental health research for health professionals has opened! Clinicians both from within and outside disciplines traditionally involved in mental health are strongly encouraged to apply. Supervisory teams will combine clinical and non-clinical academics to ensure that PhD fellows gain expertise in technical and scientific…
Our latest Explainer should be helpful to all mental health researchers, whether early, mid or even late career – what the heck is a narrative CV?! You may have heard that funders and research adjacent organisations are driving a shift towards a resume format called a ‘narrative CV’. This shift is supported by several…
Registrations for the MHR Incubator career development webinar are now open. Register for your free place here: tinyurl.com/yc8znr5w and join the discussion on Tuesday 5 September.
Our GROW programme participants loved Dr Rachael Kelley’s tips on putting together a great funding application for mental health research so we’re really happy to be able to share Rachael’s valuable experience and advice on putting together a great research funding application with the wider community of mental health researchers. In this 16 minute presentation,…
Next in our Q&A series is a member of our current 20203 GROW programme, Floraidh Rolf who transitioned from front line work to mental health research. “her experiences over time exposed her to the power of research in driving good nursing practice and really making a difference to her patients’ lives” Flora researches mental health…
In our latest guest blog we hear from Jasmin Laing who is a PhD student evaluating a newly designed CBT intervention to treat PTSD and depression in health and social care workers. She recently had the opportunity to attend the NIHR doctoral training camp. Here is what she thought of it. NIHR Doctoral Research Training…
If you were following our Twitter feed last week, you’ll know that our coordinator Bea was out at BABCP – the annual conference of CBT practitioners. It was fantastic to see there’s a real emphasis on the importance of research in the psychological professions generally (that really made our little Incubator hearts sing!). BABCP was…
Funding is the bread and butter of research and landing a big grant can set you up for several years of support. However, not all grants offered for mental health research are multi-year ones with thousands, or hundreds of thousands if you are lucky, of pounds on offer. Does that mean they are not worth…
Following a recent article by Dr Eleanor Chatburn on engaging with research as a clinician, two allied health professionals (AHPs) working at Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV) have provided an overview of their own research journeys to-date. Ask an AHP! We all know allied health professionals (AHPs) play a vital role…
The cross-ARC series of three webinars coming up in May, June and July looks at mental health in the context of some of the most topical themes of our times. In each webinar you’ll hear from the mental health researchers themselves talking about their work and what it means. Each webinar is a fantastic opportunity…
Are you a nurse or AHP researcher working on writing up a paper to submit to an academic journal? The 3-day Oxford Academic Paper Writing Retreat is currently open to researchers in the Oxford area. This Academic Paper Writing Retreat is sponsored by the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre , Oxford cognitive health Clinical Research…
The PhD Programme in Mental Health Research for Health Professionals, based at King’s College London and funded by the Wellcome Trust is now open for applications. The closing date is 1 December 2022. Watch Professors Matthew Hotopf, Sandrine Thuret and Alan Simpson from King’s College London talk about the Programme in this video by The…
Aspiring nurse researchers can now access a selection of doctoral level theses, all of which have been completed by mental health nurses. The new resource is intended to be a guide to research at a doctoral level. It has been developed by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in collaboration with the RCN Mental Health…
Bea Shelley
Shivani Joshi
MHR Editor