The objectives of the evaluation were to: assess the extent to which the original objectives of the initiatives were met and the extent to which they contributed to the Government's EQUAL initiative; identify any strengths, gaps and weaknesses in the research funded; review the quality of science and level of outputs of individual grants; consider the added value of funding this area of research as initiatives; and advise on future action.

The Panel based their findings on Principal Investigators' final reports and responses to questionnaire surveys.

To obtain the pdf of the report go the BBSRC website at:

http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/organisation/policies/reviews/funded_science/0801_sage_era.html

 

These grants are available to holders of MRC research grants, new investigator research grants and senior fellowships, who wish to promote and enhance collaboration between themselves and other researchers working in complementary scientific areas. Awards may last between two and five years and provide funding at a rate of 80 per cent of full economic costs to cover:

• shared activities, such as shared research infrastructure (equipment or staff) and seminars and workshops;
• indirect costs or overheads on staff salaries awarded through the scheme.

http://www.mrc.ac.uk/ApplyingforaGrant/AvailableGrants/CollaborationGrants/index.htm

These grants are available to holders of MRC research grants, new investigator research grants and senior fellowships, who wish to promote and enhance collaboration between themselves and other researchers working in complementary scientific areas. Awards may last between two and five years and provide funding at a rate of 80 per cent of full economic costs to cover:

• shared activities, such as shared research infrastructure (equipment or staff) and seminars and workshops;
• indirect costs or overheads on staff salaries awarded through the scheme.

For further information see: http://www.mrc.ac.uk/ApplyingforaGrant/AvailableGrants/CollaborationGrants/index.htm

 

This workshop will take place on 22/01/2008 10.00-15.00 at The IET, 2 Savoy Place, London, WC2. Places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis. To book a place email: tina.chignoli@helptheaged.org.uk. 

Further information can be found on the BBSRC website at: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/funding/opportunities/2007/ageing_bladder_bowel.html 

The Theme of Nutrition in Older People is a superb starting point for what I hope will be many NDA Sand-Pit activities.

For many older people life in the home centres very much on producing meals and working in the kitchen, for themselves, and for visitors. What older people eat, ensuring good nutrition and so on should have a strong appeal to those with a biological perspective, their contribution to this area will be vital, just as the sociology and psychology which accompanies being able to rustle up a pot of tea and a home baked cake for visitors should appeal to social scientists. Kitchen design and (un)packaging of products are just two starting points for the design and engineering buffs, and the health and medical issues in this area are legion for those who take a medical viewpoint. And, the Sand-Pit is looking for participants to bring together their perspectives - a super opportunity to integrate a great deal of scientific expertise.

Nutrition and Life in the Kitchen - offers one of the best areas for the interdisciplinary working which is critical to achieving research which can have a meaningful impact on the quality of life of many older people. So please look at the details and apply for a place on what I can assure you will be the experience of a lifetime (I know, first hand, as Director of the EPSRC Taking Care to The Patient/ Mobile and Distributed Health Care Sand-Pit in 2006).

Hopefully if this Sand-Pit goes well we will be able to persuade NDA to have another one, on Life in the Bathroom (which is the main determinant of the quality of life of many older people).

Don't delay - apply and get selected!

The objectives of LINK are to:

• provide a framework for collaborative research programmes and projects in key areas of science, technology and engineering;
• enable and accelerate the commercial exploitation of science and technology, leading to new products, processes, systems and services;
• promote a close interaction between industry and the research base so that nationally supported programmes of basic research are influenced by awareness of the needs of industry;
• use the research base more effectively and to increase UK industrial competitiveness;
• stimulate industry to increase its own investment in R&D.

Under LINK, industry and academia collaborate on discrete projects within defined, managed programmes, 50% of project direct costs being met by the industrial partner(s) and the remainder by one or more government sponsors (i.e departments and/or research councils).

The MRC set up its LINK Programme Integrated Approaches to Healthy Ageing with the following scientific objectives:

• to improve understanding of molecular, cellular, physiological, immunological, psychologicaland social mechanisms contributing significantly to healthy ageing, or to cognitive decline and neurodegeneration, or to decline in physiological function;
• to develop integrated and deliverable biological, psychological and sociological approaches to support healthy ageing and independent living;
• to develop new, effective, rationally-based approaches to prevention, management and rehabilitation in disorders of major clinical and health service burden in the elderly – with an emphasis on effectiveness within defined systems of care.

To date, the programme has supported 9 projects covering such areas as: Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disease, new generation anti-microbials and periodontal disease, and urinary incontinence. The programme is open to applications – which may be made at any time. The MRC particularly wishes to encourage proposals involving small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) working together with partners in the universities and other parts of the science base.

While scientific merit is a key criterion, other factors are taken into account in assessing proposals, such as the project’s degree of innovation and its potential for commercial exploitation. It is essential for the project partners to enter into a collaboration agreement which covers such things as ownership and responsibilities in respect of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) before a LINK award can be confirmed. Successful LINK proposals specify realistic goals (including milestones), and set out appropriate arrangements for the joint management of the project by both partners.

Further information is available via the MRC WWW pages (http://www.mrc.ac.uk).

The MRC would be pleased to advise potential applicants in developing proposals for the Programme.

1.0 How we came to be:

SPARC has only been running since 1st January 2005 but it's genesis dates back to the beginning of the BBSRC-Experimental Research on Ageing (ERA) Initiative. The ERA committee, on which I served, were fortunate enough to receive several exciting ageing research proposals from groups whose background was chemistry rather than biology and genetics. Although most of these were of a suitable standard for support several factors made their proposals less competitive than those from core life scientists. Personally, I find the hardest part of committee service is having more good grants than you have cash and hoping that something good eventually comes out of the rejections. After this panel, the good thing which came out was that the case of the alpha-rated but unfunded "chemists" made the ERA committee conscious that researchers with new expertise were keen to enter biological gerontology. Simultaneously, Professor Peter Lansley (the Director of the EPSRC's EQUAL programme) realised that the design and engineering community stood to benefit profoundly from the input of "BBSRC's" scientists. This led to a series of contact meetings through 2003 between BBSRC and EPSRC staff and researchers. These meetings had several outcomes; among which were the joint BBSRC-RSC Chemistry of Ageing workshops and the inclusion of ageing as a priority area under the BBSRC-SCIBS special initiative. However the chief result was the joint funding by BBSRC and EPSRC of a unique activity designed to build capacity at the interface between the two councils and run jointly by myself and Peter. This activity became SPARC because CAPNET or AGECAP or SPANC didn't really strike me as a good thing to put on my email, signature file for three or four years.

2.0 What we are supposed to achieve

SPARC is, in essence, a single large research council grant with one goal and three themes - workshops, awards and advocacy for ageing research. It's goal is to increase the capacity of the UK to conduct ageing research over the next three to five years. This increase in capacity will be measured by increased numbers of grant applications, outputs and awards. SPARC will try to increase capacity through a combination of networking events (both national and international) and small grants. The meeting programme was inspired by (and directly followed on from) the networking activities of EQUAL. Among biologists our nearest equivalent would have been the outstanding work undertaken some years ago by AgeNet. I always enjoyed the one-day meetings this organisation ran (a flavour of which is still available on www.agenet.ac.uk) and made many new contacts. However, I always felt that what AgeNet lacked was seed-corn money to help its community develop their research programmes. Accordingly we were able to persuade BBSRC and EPSRC that for SPARC to succeed it needed to have a grant awarding component. In essence SPARC "grants" are subcontracts from the main grant which are awarded through a competitive process. Prior to writing the case for support for SPARC we consulted widely among the ageing research community about the types of support we should be able to subcontract to successful applicants (a number of Lifespan readers may well remember being cold called by me and asked "if you had £60,000 with no strings attached what would you spend it on?"). This consultation gave rise to the high degree of flexibility we allow in SPARC funding (basically applicants can ask for anything other than their own salary). Strong institutional support for the applicant (understood in the widest terms) was also made a key criterion of whether or not the application was successful. In addition, the BBSRC agreed that SPARC award holders would be eligible for BBSRC international funding schemes (normally only open to BBSRC grant holders).

Research Council representatives and an independent Chair (Mrs Elizabeth Mills OBE). We also made sure there was representation from younger researchers on the awards panel (since we were trying primarily to attract "newcomers" to ageing research and I seemed to be the wild young man of the committee at the tender age of 38!).

3.0 How to apply for SPARC funding

SPARC Call1 allowed applicants to request up to £60,000 over up to 18 months. Call2 has a slightly lower ceiling of £40,000 and a shorter duration (12 months maximum). SPARC Call2 is being handled under a modified version of Full Economic Costing (FEC). This is because the network was awarded in the transitional phase from standard overheads to FEC and thus the Directors' were simply given a fixed sum to cover likely FEC costs rather than a formulaic award based on the system as it now exists. Thus it has now been agreed with the research councils that under FEC SPARC will pay up to £40,000 of directly incurred costs and no more than £20,000 of allocated costs. SPARC will not be able to support indirect costs at all.

Successful awards should combine scientific excellence with a clear potential to build the capacity of the UK to conduct ageing research in the future. Support is available for any ageing-related project within the general remits of EPSRC & BBSRC (and anything in between) provided a good case can be made for why SPARC support is the best route to fund the work in question. In Call2 we would especially like to receive projects in the areas of:

• Nutrition
• Immunosenescence
• Neurodegeneration
• Sensory decline in ageing
• Computational and Mathematical Modelling applied to Ageing
• Assistive Technology
• Frailty in the Home
• Meeting Aspirations and Supporting Lifestyles
• Age Discrimination in Housing and Neighbourhood Design
• New tools for ageing research
• Chemical analysis of ageing tissue
• Intervention in ageing processes

Since the awards are small we have tried to make the application process relatively quick. We require only basic data about the applicant, a skeleton budget (we request full budgets from successful applicants because this keeps the paperwork down for everybody else) and no more than two sides of text detailing the scientific proposal. An important difference between a SPARC application and a regular research council JES-1 is the requirement to justify why the work proposed should be funded by SPARC (known as our "triage criteria") and a statement detailing the institutional support for the project, the impact of the project on the applicant's development and what the work will mean for the field as a whole (our "capacity building" measure). Applicants may nominate two referees who they wish to review their grant and we guarantee to contact at least one of them. By the same token applicants may also specify referees they DO NOT wish to receive the application (though we do like to know why). SPARC applications are made electronically by uploading a .pdf file of the form to a secure sector of our website. We held a request for feedback after the first call for applications so that we could review our processes and found that almost 100% of respondents felt the system worked well.

4.0 So what happens when we receive your form?

All the applications are collated and distributed among the panel members at a triage meeting in which grants are read exclusively for remit (not for science or capacity). In Call1 we received approximately 85 applications of which about 66 were within remit. Applications which fail triage are returned to the applicant with a research council approved suggestion of the appropriate council and funding instrument for the work proposed. This is to stop grants "bouncing" between BBSRC and EPSRC. Grants which pass triage are sent out to a set of referees nominated by the applicant, the Directors and two members of the award panel (known as the Introducing Members). This can be as many as 10 potential referees and we aim to get at least three full sets of comments for every application. In Call1, 96% of applications had at least this number and the majority had more. We are informed that this is better than the average performance of the research councils and some charities (but our grants are much shorter, so one would hope that would be the case!).

After the referees comments are in, the Introducing Members give a preliminary score out of 10 for the capacity building and scientific excellence aspects of the application (thus an application can score a maximum of 20). These provisional scores are discussed by the full awards committee and are almost always modified. Applications must score at least 7.0 in both capacity building and scientific excellence to be considered suitable for funding. In Call1 about 25 applications met these criteria (although there were also some which scored highly on capacity and poorly on science and vice versa). Applications are then funded starting at 20 and moving down until we run out of money. In Call1 we were able to support 13 applications in this way. Rather than send out reams of referees comments we supply brief feedback to unsuccessful applicants trying to indicate the key points which need to be improved for the application to gain an award. Sometimes there are no bad points, in which case we tell you we simply didn't have the money.

Considered from a strategic point of view, one of the most useful aspects of SPARC has been it's ability to draw any unhypothecated funds available within host departments into the ageing area in a way that is very visible to the research councils. In Call1 we dispersed approximately £450,000. This money attracted another £250,000 in direct institutional support for our SPARC award holders (promises of equipment, contingent fellowships, PhD studentships, extra consumables, etc. etc.). Thus, SPARC gives potential applicants a useful political tool to lever extra support out of their departments and (in these RAE conscious times) rewards Heads of Department for supporting ageing researchers compared to the other disciplines under their wing. Whether this novel funding instrument actually raises capacity remains to be seen. I have very high hopes that outstanding work will come out of the programme.

Remember, if you have any questions please contact me or Peter Lansley.

Good luck!