I am delighted to receive this Award. I think the NIHR funds and disseminates some of the leading health and care research in the UK (and the world). As part of the Award I'll continue to work with the NIHR on funding boards and helping to train future research leaders. I hope to use the funding associated with the Award to help people on short term contracts in ScHARR to develop their careers.
Professor Alicia O'Cathain
School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR)
National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) are the UK’s largest funders for health and care research and work in partnership with the NHS, universities, local government and other research funders. The senior Investigator role will involve helping to guide research capacity development and enhancing the career paths of NIHR researchers, through mentoring and supporting the NIHR Future-Focused Leadership Programme as a guest faculty member.
Professor Alicia O’Cathain is Director of the Medical Care Research Unit (MCRU) at the University and her research area focuses on developing and evaluating health and social care services. She said: “I am delighted to be recognised by this successful and extremely useful organisation. The NIHR senior investigator award signals that my research has an impact in the real world, I work with the public and patients to address questions that are useful to them, I publish high quality journal articles to disseminate my research, and I train future research leaders.”
As part of the new appointment Alicia will receive a discretionary award of £20,000 per year for four years to fund activities that support her research. Having begun her career as a Research Associate and then Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, Alicia is keen to use the award to support early career researchers on short term contracts.
She said: “In ScHARR the majority of our staff are on externally funded short-term contracts, I came up through this route and became a professor after years of short term contracts lasting between two days and five years, I finally recieved a permanent Chair in 2010.
“I intend to use the grant award to support some of ScHARR's early career researchers and professional services staff on short term contracts, by plugging gaps in their contracts to allow them to progress their careers. I will also help researchers to take short amounts of time out to write research proposals for funding or peer-reviewed journal articles. I am Director of the Medical Care Research Unit in ScHARR and will use these funds to further the careers of the superb staff within this unit.”