Investigator Grants provide the highest-performing researchers at all career stages with consolidated funding for their salary (if required) and a significant research support package.
In this way, the Chief Investigator has flexibility to pursue important new research directions as they arise, adjust their resources accordingly, and to form collaborations as needed, rather than being restricted to the scope of a specific research project.
Investigator Grants support:
- research across the 4 pillars of health and medical research:
- biomedical
- clinical
- public health
- health services research
- all career stages:
- early career researchers
- mid-career researchers
- established researchers
- researchers with clinical responsibilities (such as clinicians, public health and allied health practitioners)
- full-time and part-time researchers.
Investigator Grants aim to:
- allow flexibility for investigators to pursue important new research directions as they arise and to form collaborations as needed
- foster innovative and creative research
- create opportunities for researchers at all career stages to establish their own research programs
- reduce application and peer review burden on researchers.
Working towards gender equity in Investigator Grants
The Investigator Grant scheme continues to set the standard for gender equity by implementing special measures under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 to address systemic disadvantage faced by female and non-binary applicants. This includes using structural priority funding for women at the Emerging Leadership levels of the scheme (EL1 and EL2) to the extent necessary to achieve gender equity targets, and awarding equal numbers of grants by gender at the Leadership level (L1, L2 and L3 combined).
This approach is expected to address gender disparities for women by:
- maintaining a strong pipeline of female researchers in the early and mid-career stages
- ensuring that women continue to be funded at later career stages in sufficient numbers to be visible
- making it attractive to recruit, retain and support women so that they may achieve the level of success that makes intervention unnecessary.
Funding support
Investigator Grants may be funded by or in conjunction with other organisations. These grants offer opportunities to researchers whose work is particularly relevant to the priorities and research interests of the partner organisations.
Information on how organisations and individuals can support NHMRC to fund health and medical research is available at Working together to support health and medical research.