NIHR Global Health Research Professorship

Career development award to help strengthen research leadership for global health researchers from the UK and Official Development Assistance (ODA) eligible countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. 

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Global Health Research Professorship Programme is the NIHR’s flagship career development award for outstanding Global Health researchers. It intended to accelerate career development through research funding that promotes effective translation of research. The programme is financed via Official Development Assistance (ODA) funding and is designed to support research and strengthen research capacity to help protect, detect and respond to global health security threats and challenges, improving the ability of health systems to protect the health of the poorest and most vulnerable in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. 

The thematic focus of the NIHR’s Global Health programme is on Global Health security threats and challenges. This covers the following focus areas:

• Vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for infectious diseases that have the potential to cause epidemics or pandemics. This includes applied research to evaluate innovations, and social, behavioural and implementation research to ensure that innovations are effectively adopted and scaled.
• Pandemic preparedness, including research to inform policy and operational decisions, evaluate countermeasures, strengthen health systems and workforce resilience, and address social and behavioural dimensions.
• Anti-microbial resistance (AMR) with a particular interest in interventions that can be demonstrated to reduce the burden of AMR. This includes:
  • Later-stage trials and social, behaviour and implementation research to scale innovative AMR interventions.
  • Applied clinical and systems research to reduce unnecessary antimicrobial exposure and optimise antimicrobial use.
• Infectious diseases of poverty: infectious diseases which disproportionately affect disadvantaged populations such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and certain neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), particularly those of parasitic, vector-borne, or bacterial origin.
• Breaking the cycle between malnutrition (undernutrition) and infection.  

Within these areas, applications that include research seeking to improve maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health are particularly welcome.

The programme supports applications in the following categories:

• Later-stage and applied research to develop and evaluate (including in clinical trials) innovations to address global health security threats and infectious diseases of poverty: Research on solution focused innovations from vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments to public health and social measures and other novel approaches.
• Health systems research: Research which strengthens health systems to enable them to prepare for, detect, prevent and respond to global health security threats and challenges, and infectious diseases of poverty (eg, research looking at the ability of health systems to protect the health of vulnerable groups and poorest populations, including in times of epidemics and pandemics); as well as research that improves surveillance systems (eg, research that develops new surveillance methods or tests approaches to strengthening existing systems).
• Implementation research: Social, behavioural and implementation research to ensure that innovations, such as new vaccines, public health campaigns, vaccine delivery strategies, and novel approaches to tackling AMR or disease outbreaks, are effectively adopted and scaled.
• Multidisciplinary research: Multidisciplinary research that includes the elements needed to ensure that findings can be scaled to have regional or broader impact, including social science, health systems research and economics, where relevant.