NIHR Pre-doctoral Local Authority Fellowship Scheme Round 2
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NIHR has announced the launch of the second annual NIHR Pre-doctoral Local Authority Fellowship (PLAF) competition.
The PLAF scheme has been designed to support the academic ambitions of individuals wishing to develop as health and/or social care researchers whilst remaining employed, or at least engaged, within local authorities or local authority supporting services.
Following successful pilots of the PLAF and Doctoral Local Authority Fellowship (DLAF) competitions in 2021, the NIHR Academy secured Department of Health and Social Care funding that, through its developing Local Authority Academic Fellowship (LAAF) Programme, will continue to support local authorities and local authority supporting services to become more research active.
A growing body of evidence indicates that research active organisations deliver better services and outputs than those that are not. The LAAF Programme will increase the capacity for local authority settings to generate and support research by offering research training fellowships to individuals who intend to build careers within them.
The LAAF Programme will again invite applications for PLAFs and DLAFs in 2022, and may also offer complementary post-doctoral funding opportunities in the future. By offering this tiered suite of similarly focussed funding opportunities to individuals embedded within local authority settings, the LAAF programme will contribute to the development of a credible ‘practitioner academic’ career pathway within local authorities and local authority supporting services.
The NIHR Pre-doctoral Local Authority Fellowship (PLAF) scheme supports the academic ambitions of individuals wishing to develop as health and/or social care researchers whilst remaining employed, or at least engaged, within local authorities or local authority supporting services.
This fully funded pre-doctoral fellowship will enable awardees to retain their existing employment contracts and salaries, whilst protecting their time to prepare an application for a PhD fellowship and undertake a fully funded programme of relevant Masters level training.
With the exception of doctors and dentists, who can already access equivalent dedicated funding opportunities, this award is available to individuals of any profession or background.
Applicants must, however, be employed by:
This initiative represents an exciting opportunity for a wide range of individuals, but especially for those without professional social worker or clinician status.
Eligible clinicians and social workers are welcome to apply for support from this scheme or from the other existing NIHR Academy administered schemes that cater for their own professional groups, but cannot apply to both concurrently.
Further details are set out on the NIHR’s website at
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/funding/nihr-pre-doctoral-local-authority-fellowship-scheme-round-2/26235