NHMRC-ARC Dementia Research Development Fellowships

The Australian Research Council (ARC) in partnership with the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) will deliver the Australian Government’s $200 million ‘Boosting Dementia Research’ initiative.

Below is a joint message from the ARC, NHMRC and the NHMRC National Institute for Dementia Research. 

We are writing to you to provide further information about the joint NHMRC-ARC Dementia Research Development Fellowships to which we hope you are encouraging a broad group of talented, emerging researchers to apply.

The NHMRC National Institute for Dementia Research (NNIDR) has the brief from the Government to ‘change the game’ in dementia research in Australia. The intent of the new NNIDR joint dementia fellowships is to boost the workforce with the most flexible and ‘gettable’ human resource in the research workforce, namely ‘new’ researchers’, that is those awarded PhDs in the last four (4) years. This group are also more likely to stay in the field once they are embedded in teams.

This joint scheme has been allocated up to $46 million out of the $200 million Boosting Dementia Research Initiative in the 2014–15 Federal Budget. Large scale funding is needed because these fellowships are targeting all disciplines, health, social, basic science and medical dementia research as well as the wide range of talented scientists in cognate fields who can shift into dementia research teams. We intend to broaden the skills base and deepen the available pool of talented researchers to facilitate more innovative and intensive research on dementia.

The intention is to get new researchers linked with dementia research teams and into their current research plans, so they can bring new resources in with them (up to $250 000 research support). The longer term expectation is that these groups will become more successful in gaining grants locally and internationally and so produce sustainable growth in Australian dementia research.

The new researchers, supervisors and research plans in applications will be judged at NHMRC-ARC current excellence rankings. They are therefore expected to be competitive in future Australian and international research grant rounds as members of strong teams.

For your information the first initiative of the NNIDR, the Dementia Research Collaborative Team Grants currently under review will provide large scale funding (up to $32.5 million) in this year for the successful mid-career and senior researchers who are collaborating in strong, successful teams. Support continues to be available for people at various career stages through all the existing NHMRC and ARC schemes.

Finally we are seeking your support for this bold new initiative to grow the dementia research workforce. You and your teams are potential supervisors and promoters of these opportunities in your group, University or Institute and beyond. We would be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Please address them to: dementia.fellowships@nhmrc.gov.au.