Image: Christine Cheung
The funder promoting cross-border, cross-discipline collaboration
The Human Frontier Science Program is an international organisation dedicated to boosting collaboration on basic research into fundamental biological problems.
The HFSP offers two types of research grant: early career and programme (for teams of between two and four members). Previously known as young investigator grants, the early career grants are for researchers within five years of obtaining an independent position in academia, who finished their PhDs no more than 10 years ago.
Researchers in all EU member states, Switzerland and the UK can apply. The deadline for letters of intent is 30 March and applicants must obtain a letter of intent ID number by 21 March.
Christine Cheung, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, won a young investigator grant in 2019. She explains how her grant enabled an international, interdisciplinary collaboration to get off the ground.
What does your project involve?
My own research programme is in vascular disease biology, trying to address the basic mechanisms of endothelial dysfunction. For the HFSP, the project has a different flavour. The HFSP supports work with investigators from other continents because it wants to fund research that would otherwise not be supported by local or national public funding.
It values that creativity and that convergence of different disciplines, so this project is not just a continuation of our own research programme.
My co-principal investigator is from a developmental biology background and this project looks into how the intertwined relationship of blood vessels and brain development inform and guide each other during our lives. We use mice and human pluripotent stem cells as our experimental models.
Why is this research important?
There’s a concept called foetal reprogramming that suggests that even in disease, or when the tissue is stressed or vulnerable to trauma, blood vessels can kick-start regeneration so the cells enter a foetus-like programme. They go back in their development and reactivate to help the tissue rebuild.
By understanding the early beginnings of the brain and blood vessel development, it may inform other mechanisms that interplay during disease as well as regeneration and offer some insights for tissue regeneration.
What is the grant’s duration and size?
Young investigator grants usually run for three years, but we have a one-year extension because of the pandemic. It finishes at the end of this year. In total, we won US$750,000 (€690,400).
Would the project be difficult to fund without the HFSP?
In Singapore, our public funding cannot be used outside the country. It’s very hard to run an international collaboration where all the principals can be funded appropriately to do the research programme together. This is where the HFSP has been very valuable. My collaborator and I knew each other beforehand, but this grant facilitated our working together.
Without it, we would still try to collaborate, but we would probably only be able to run a pilot project because of funding restrictions.
Have you applied before?
I applied once and failed, several years ago. Then in 2019, we tried again but I went in with no expectations. For a winning proposal, maybe one ingredient is to adopt an exciting or emerging technology. Whether you are the developer of a new platform or not, you should be bold enough to leverage new technology. That’s what we did with this application.
Did you mould your research to fit the grant requirements?
In terms of the research scope they’re broad, as long as it’s in life science or biomedicine. We didn’t feel constrained. What’s important is that the research is interdisciplinary; they want to see novelty and creativity.
How long did it take you to put together your proposal?
The initial conceptualisation stage was around four months. There were two stages: the letter of intent and the full proposal. The letter of intent is a shorter format; they use that to shortlist candidates for the full proposal. With the letter of intent, they look at the scientific merits of the project and the idea itself—whether it is a novel idea and whether it adheres to the criteria.
If you are shortlisted, you have to write something longer and more detailed with your methodology, your implementation plan.
What advice do you have for future applicants?
Be proactive. We need to develop our networks and hone our skills—the more applications we make, the better we get. The pandemic has really slowed down networking, so maybe it’s time to start again. Go to conferences, build a network, meet other investigators. Because there are many opportunities, and the opportunities lie with the people who have the will to succeed together.
Would you apply again?
Yes. When this project has finished, we want to go for one of the programme grants but we are still deliberating whether it should be an extension of this current proposal. We could go in as a brand-new proposal because the science has evolved in the three years since we won this grant.
This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com