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Criteria, Eligibility & Exclusions

Note:

The following information is not exhaustive. Please consult the Guidelines and Notes for more complete information about the Scheme’s criteria, elibilibity and exclusions. They can be downloaded from the How to Apply section of the Fellowship Scheme’s web pages.

Criteria

The Trustees’ underlying aim in developing the New Career Development Scheme is the promotion of new social science research capacity through the exposure of Fellows to research skills or a new body of knowledge that they would not otherwise easily acquire. The Foundation wishes to support partnerships, projects and career development additional to those that would take place anyway, or that could be developed through normal (joint) applications to other funders.

The total budget for any application must not exceed £170k.

Eligibility

Aspiring Fellows must have been successfully examined for a PhD – including any viva – before applying for a Fellowship and have no more than five years experience since their PhD award (defined as the date of their institution’s confirmation of their award and the closing date for outline applications).

There are no upper or lower age limits for applicants. The main criterion is the ‘newness’ of the research career. However, Fellows must have sufficient time at the end of the Fellowship to pursue an independent research career, as one of the Scheme’s aims is to promote active research capacity.

Applicants should normally be based in the UK at the time of application. The Fellowship Scheme is aimed at academics who will make a contribution specifically to social science research in the UK. All applicants will need to show that they will be pursuing a career in the UK.

A Fellowship cannot be used simply to extend an existing short-term contract or a research assistantship on an existing project. Applicants may be in research or teaching posts, whether these are short-term or permanent positions. However, the Fellowship Committee will only consider applications from people in permanent employment and with a number of years of post-PhD work already behind them if the partnership being developed could not take place in any other way.

During the Fellowship, both partners must be based in institutions in Britain or Northern Ireland. This may be within a university department, or within a research team or centre in a university, or at an independent research centre.

Exclusions

The Scheme is not open to applicants who will pursue a permanent career in the US or other non-European countries.

We do not accept resubmissions from earlier rounds.

The New Career Fellow should not be seen as a research assistant and partnerships with former PhD supervisors will not be allowed.

The Fellowship is intended to allow promising newer researchers the opportunity to work on a research project for up to three years largely free of teaching and administrative responsibilities.

Last Updated Tue, 27 May 2008