Funding

FRCF Standard Protocol for Reviewing Research Proposals

This document describes the standard protocol for reviewing research proposals submitted to the Furlong Research Charitable Foundation.

In order to successfully budget for each financial year (1 April – 31 March) and thereafter, there shall be three calls for proposals per financial year.

The calls are open to academics in the UK research organisations.

Each call invites proposals addressing important issues related to orthopaedics and musculoskeletal research.

No individual project shall receive more than 10% of the total annual budget.

There should be a limit on the amount of funding allocated to any given organisation.

The process for each call will be as follow:

Expression of Interest

1. The Expression of Interest (EoI): normally a 1-2 pages outlining a summary of the research proposal, name of academic supervisor(s), type of study stream i.e. PhD, Post-Doc, Clinical Fellowship, MD, etc., duration and total cost of running the project.

2. The management committee of the FRCF shall determine those EoIs within the remit to submit a full proposal.

Full Proposal

3. The full proposal should consist of detailed information about the research proposal including:

• Title of the project
• Goal of the study (research aims, objectives and deliverables)
• Background to investigation (relevant literature and work already conducted by the applicant related to the topic of research interest)
• Plan of investigation (Materials & Methods, research timetable)
• Existing facilities:

• Scientific, technical and clinical expertise support
• Laboratory space available for research project
• Access or availability to existing equipment
• Additional funding (obtained or applied for) from other research grant awarding bodies

• Possible beneficial outcome:

• Principal applicant: summaries the educational outcome which you expect to achieve in terms of knowledge, research skills and techniques. Explain why this field of research is relevant to your professional development and career
• Clinical outcomes

• Cost breakdown of the project (please note FRCF does not pay toward overheads/full economic costing)
• Declaration of interest/commercial interest
• CV of the applicants
• Two references
• The full application should be no more than 5 pages if possible

4. The full proposal (blinded) is sent to at least two external reviewers. Those proposals approved by the external reviewers will be forwarded to the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) of the FRCF.

5. The SAC then convenes and views the full proposals and the opinions of the external reviewers. The SAC ranks those approved proposals and provides recommendation to the Trustees of the FRCF.

6. The board of Trustees agrees the funding for successful applicants, subject to terms and conditions of FRCF contract.

Key Dates (2010 – 2011):

Important Notes:

1. The principal investigator (or the respective institute) is obliged to agree to the terms and conditions of FRCF standard contract and return a signed copy of the contract, no later than 3 months after the recommendation stage. Contracts received after this period will not be approved for funding and subsequently, the proposals will be treated as void.
2. Call 1 is for PhD and MD proposals only (to accommodate for September/October start. As a guideline, for a typical 3-year PhD project, we are able to fund £20K per year.
3. Call 2 and 3 are for Clinical and Post-Doc Fellowships only.

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