Endocrine Abstracts

Obtaining research independence and running your own research group can seem very far away at the end of your PhD and during your early postdoctoral career. However, starter grants are an invaluable resource to help you down this path, allowing you to develop and strengthen your research career, pursue independent strands of research, improve your ability to write grants and make you more competitive to obtain more substantial funding.

Starter grants are available from a number of schemes for both clinical and non-clinical researchers, from local and national funding bodies. These grants are primarily designed to allow you to generate pilot data for further fellowship applications but these grants also provide invaluable experience of planning projects, managing budgets and staff and delivering to deadlines. Starter grants generally provide modest budgets, as such projects should be designed appropriately to best acquire the key data required to make your future applications more competitive and prove that you are developing an independent niche from your current or previous supervisors.

Applications for starter grants should not be overly ambitious as the work should be deliverable over a relatively short time frame to allow incorporation into future grant applications. Outputs from the research performed under these grants are not expected to be high impact papers but more show the potential for high impact publications once more substantial funding is obtained. In addition, pilot data is vital to prove to reviewers that your proposal is feasible and that you are the right person in the ideal environment to be a success.

Those who obtain starter grants are more likely to be successful at obtaining fellowships and some schemes provide additional support such as mentoring and networking events which can be invaluable for your development.