Round-up: 2024 Early Career Grants Programme awardees
In this blog, RSTMH Grants Manager Greta Holmes looks at the awardees of the 2024 Early Career Grants Programme, including where in the world they are based and their research areas.
The RSTMH Early Career Grants Programme class is now confirmed, and awardees have commenced their research projects, so we wanted to share with you some information about this cohort.
299 early career researchers and professionals around the world have successfully received funding, from a total of 2,828 applications. This is fantastic news and compares with 252 grants distributed in the 2023 cohort and just 16 in 2018.
We are delighted to have increased the number of awardees again, as it means more early career professionals are able to evaluate interesting research questions and carry out their first research projects. Through their year-long projects they will learn new skills, have new experiences and grow their networks. For some, the projects will also enable them to identify the next stage of their career, to have their work implemented or disseminated, and to start new collaborations.
We look forward to seeing how many applications come in this year, as we work towards opening for submissions in 2025.
Thank you to our donors
The growth in awards for 2024 is once again due to the incredible support received from our donor partners. The Department of Health and Social Care via the National Institute for Health Research are funding 239 grants, The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) are funding 50 grants, and the following partners are all funding 2 grants each: International Alliance for the control of Scabies (IACS); Journal of Comparative Pathology Educational Trust (JCPET); London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition. RSTMH are also directly funding a further 4 grants, which have been awarded to applicants who are members of RSTMH.
Thank you to our Global Assessors
As in all years, we are only able to deliver such a large and growing Programme due to the hard work and dedication of our voluntary Global Assessors. This network of over 93 specialists in all areas of Tropical Medicine and Global Health, based in more than 20 countries, maintains the high quality of our Programme. They use their experience and skills to carry out detailed assessments of the projects being put forward along with the applicants themselves, ensuring we have high quality projects to support.
We would like to thank them for their time and dedication in collectively carrying out over 5,000 assessments in 2024, which is another record year for RSTMH.
In celebrating these awardees and their projects we wanted to share some more detailed analysis including the gender split, thematic areas, countries where research will be carried out and where our researchers are based.
Gender split
As you can see here, our grants are being provided to a group which is 54% male, and 46% female.
We know firsthand from other areas of work that it is difficult to support and recognise the success of females and males equally in our field of work, so we’re pleased that we are at almost equal levels.
Nationality and research location of awardees
Our cohort of 2024 Grant awardees are from 37 countries, compared to 30 in 2023. Of these, around 85% are from Africa, 13% from Asia, and 1% each from the following regions: Middle East, Americas, Europe. The country with the highest number of recipients is Uganda, at 71, followed by Nigeria at 53.
The research location of the studies being funded is equally broad, mapping closely the nationality of our awardees, as shown above, with only a few awardees conducting research outside of their country of origin.
Please be aware that the maps used here are Mercator Projections, and do not accurately reflect country sizes. Countries further away from the equator are inflated in size.
Research areas
As part of their application form, awardees were asked to pick a main focus area for their study, which has enabled us to classify the projects across 57 areas of global health. We accept this is a very simplified view of the studies which often involve multiple disease areas or topics, and which describe their focus in different ways.
Here you can see those topic areas which are the focus of at least 10 studies; the most popular topic for 2024 is HIV (27) followed by Schistosomiasis (19), Mental health (18) and Cancer (16). We are pleased to see a doubling in the number of projects focusing on mental health compared to 2023, alongside an increasing focus on non-communicable diseases. More research areas covered can be seen below.
Roles of awardees
One of the goals of our Early Career Grants Programme is to ensure we are providing grants to a broad range of early career professionals working in roles across the health community. When we asked our awardees to classify their roles, it included a total of over 200 different descriptions. These range from students at undergraduate, post graduate and PHD levels, researchers, lecturers, policy officers, nurses, veterinary and social scientists and many other roles. Along with encouraging applications from across sectors, we want our Programme to broaden the profile of individuals who have the opportunity to deliver their first research project. We know that the big global health challenges require a broad range of skills and abilities, and we are confident that our awardees will be helping future leaders and innovators in global health take their first steps in research and practice.
Similarly, we want our grants to be received by professionals working in all areas of health settings, and we can see here the breakdown for this cohort. Similarly to 2023’s cohort, the vast majority of 2024 awardees are from academic settings, as we might expect for research grants. However, we are again delighted to see a number of awardees based in hospitals, NGOs, local government ministries and also industry. We continue to have big ambitions for the Programme to ensure the range of people given the chance to try research in global health is as broad as possible, to ensure the pipeline across the world is strengthened.
We wish all of our awardees the very best of luck with their projects and we hope this opportunity brings new skills, experiences and networks, alongside tangible outcomes such as scientific publications and presentations. Whatever the results of their projects, whether they are expected or not, we hope this helps them to determine the next steps in their careers and look forward to supporting them over the next 12 months while they deliver their projects.