Opportunity status:
Open
Funders:
Funding type:
Grant
Maximum award:
£2,000,000
Publication date:
1 May 2026
Opening date:
1 May 2026 9:00am UK time
Closing date:
Open - no closing date
Apply for funding to support excellent new investigator-led research across the breadth of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) scientific remit.
You must be based at a UK research organisation eligible for BBSRC funding.
This scheme is designed to assist newly employed university lecturers, researchers (at a level equivalent to lecturer) in research council institutes, and fellows (at a level equivalent to lecturer) to secure their first major element of research support funding.
The full economic cost (FEC) of your project can be up to £2 million. Funding is available for up to five years. BBSRC will fund 80% of the FEC.
This opportunity is open to organisations with standard eligibility. .
Who is eligible to apply
Researchers who have been project co-leads (previously co-investigators) on successful grant applications are eligible to apply for a new investigator award.
You must not have received, or currently be in receipt of, competitively obtained research or support funding from any source as a project lead (previously principal investigator) where such funding includes or included research and innovation associate (previously postdoctoral research assistant) staff support costs. This includes grants associated with fellowships. If, however, research and innovation associate support has been provided by an institution as part of an internal support agreement or as part of the applicants start up package, this must be declared but would not render the applicant ineligible.
Other grant funding requests where the results are not known at the time of submission, but which are subsequently successful, will also come under this category and therefore details of such requests must be given in the application and their outcome notified to BBSRC immediately they become known.
You may submit only one new investigator application to this BBSRC funding opportunity at a time. You must wait until a decision has been provided on an already submitted new investigator application, before applying with another application as a project lead.
The project lead should be the intellectual leader of the proposed project. Expertise across multiple disciplines may be an important aspect of a project and one which facilitates career development into a new field. Therefore, project co-leads are permitted, but only when they bring expertise to the project which is outside the project lead’s own skill set. Project co-leads may also satisfy the eligibility requirements for the new investigator scheme.
The information provided here is a summary of the core eligibility requirements but is not comprehensive, please see the full before applying.
Who is not eligible to apply
Organisations based overseas and business-based applicants are not eligible to apply. Overseas and business-based collaborators can be added as project partners on an application, please see for more information.
If you are applying via the IPA or LINK scheme, please include details of industry partner in the ‘Project partners’ section.
Resubmissions
We will not accept uninvited resubmissions of projects that have been submitted to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) or any other funder.