Opportunity status:
Open
Funders:
Funding type:
Grant
Maximum award:
£2,000,000
Publication date:
24 April 2025
Opening date:
24 April 2025 9:00am UK time
Closing date:
24 September 2025 4:00pm UK time
Apply for funding to support excellent new investigator-led research across the breadth of Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) scientific remit.
This scheme is designed primarily 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.
To lead a project, you must be based at an eligible organisation. .
Check if you are. Please note, individuals based at an international research organisation are not eligible to be a member of the core team as they are not. International collaborators can be added as project partners on an application, please see for more information.
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 each BBSRC grant round, and you may not submit another type of grant application as a project lead to the same grant round. Researchers may be awarded only one research grant under the new investigator scheme.
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.
See full .
Resubmissions
We will not accept uninvited resubmissions of projects that have been submitted to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) or any other funder.