NERC announcement

Changes to NERC Standard Grants: More funding and less bureaucracy!  The devil is always in the detail, and some impacts will be better understood through a pilot, but some interesting changes to the Discovery Science portfolio were recently communicated by NERC.

The changes, summarised in the attached slide, include:

• Uplift of Discovery Science budget of £15m per annum
• Replace the existing Standard grant scheme with two schemes focused on supporting outstanding researchers to pursue curiosity-driven, ambitious research.
  • Building on their early pilot, a refined ‘Pushing the Frontiers’ scheme will fully replace the Standard grant, with support up to £1m per project to enable ambitious research, likely to change the future scientific landscape of a discipline. This scheme will be demand managed, include a 5 page research proposal and have two rounds per annum.
  • They will pilot a new scheme, ‘Exploring the Frontiers’, with investment up to £100k per project to support the dynamic exploration of ambitious research in a more focussed and sharper manner than Pushing the Frontiers. The awards will support shorter duration research projects, but with a similar ambition to change understanding as ‘Pushing the Frontiers’. This scheme will have a much reduced application process, no demand management and one annual call.
• There will be additional investment in the Large grant scheme such that they will fund at least one further proposal per annum.
• The Urgency scheme proposal limit will be increased from £65k to £100k per proposal.
• The paperwork required will be reduced and NERC will start publishing details of this change over the next few months.

Detail is currently thin but we anticipate an announcement from NERC in the near future as they will develop, communicate, and hold two townhall meetings in January and February 2022. So if you’re thinking of applying to NERC in the near future, please see the attached, and look out for further announcements.  Any questions of course, please Victoria.Bainbridge@ncl.ac.uk.