FYI.

The Nuffield Foundation has announced the latest round of its Research Development and Analysis Fund (Outline Stage), with a deadline of 14 March 2022. Please note that the scheme has now introduced an annual call for larger, strategic, interdisciplinary projects.

Nuffield’s Funding Priorities

The Foundation prioritises rigorous and impartial research, development, and analysis projects that:

• Identify and explain the social and economic determinants of opportunity and risk across the life span, focusing in particular on early childhood adversity, transitions from adolescence to young adulthood, and social and economic well-being in adulthood and later life.
• Improve well-being for society as a whole, while ameliorating negative distributional outcomes and the greatest harms.
• Support the development of workable evidence-based solutions for policy and practice over the medium term.

The Foundation is committed to improving the design and operation of social policy, especially in those domains that they have always identified as underpinning a well-functioning society: Education, Welfare and Justice.

Please see the Guide to Applicants for further details, but priorities within each domain are as follows:

• Education:  Early years education and childcare; Skills; Teaching quality; Young people’s pathways; Educational disadvantage
• Welfare: Family dynamics and labour market outcomes; Social and economic welfare in later life; Geographical inequalities; Social and economic analysis to inform public debate
• Justice: Family and youth justice; Decision-making; Participation and rights

In general, the Foundation awards grants to projects focused on the UK context. However, applications from UK-based organisations to carry out collaborative projects involving overseas partners (and/or exploiting data relating to other countries) are permitted  where findings are likely to benefit the UK.

Standard Research, Development and Analysis grants

Research, Development and Analysis (RDA) grants normally range in size from £15,000 up to £750,000, with most lying between £50,000 and £300,000.

The Foundation supports a wide range of project types, including:

• Reviews and synthesis
• Data collection and/or analysis, whether descriptive or designed to understand causality, or both
• Pre-trial development work
• Comparison or controlled trials or evaluations
• Research translation

The Foundation occasionally makes smaller grants for work costing less than £15,000. There are options for assessing such applications on a quicker timetable than the standard one – potential applicants are asked to contact Nuffield to discuss such applications.

Larger strategic projects

In a change from previous funding calls, the Foundation has announced that it will also fund larger strategic projects as part of the RDA funding process. It welcome applications between £750,000 and £3 million for more strategic projects that take an interdisciplinary approach to addressing the most significant themes and developments that will shape the UK public policy and agenda and wider society over the next decade and beyond.

Applications at this level must also bring a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach to addressing the questions they examine, including proposals for working collaboratively across research, policy and practice. As with all the work support by Nuffield, they must be connected in some way to at least one of the three core domains, but it is likely they will cut across more than one of these three areas or extend beyond them, engaging with other social policy fields.

Whilst the call for standard RDA grants has deadlines in March and September, grants over £750,000 can only be submitted for the March date.

FYI.

On May 5-6, 2022 over 500 leading behavioral scientists, policymakers, executives, and press will join Eric Johnson, Ayelet Fishbach, John List, Ellen Peters, representatives of governments and behavioral units from U.S.A. Canada, U.K., Australia, South Africa and many others to gather for the 2022 BSPA Online Conference.

All of the programming uniquely fit for digital will be hosted online with live streaming and interactive sessions from 11am-5pm (EST) on May 5th and 6th.

BSPA seeks proposals by February 7, 2022 for short (TED talk style) presentations highlighting research in five thematic areas in which behavioral scientists could have significant influence on policy. These areas are based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and include:

AREA 1: POVERTY AND WELLBEING [SDG-1 NO POVERTY, SDG-4 QUALITY EDUCATION, AND SDG-8 DECENT WORK AND ECONOMIC GROWTH]

AREA 2: DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION [SDG-5 GENDER EQUALITY AND SDG-10 REDUCED INEQUALITIES] 

AREA 3: GLOBAL HEALTH [SDG-3 GOOD HEALTH AND WELLBEING, SDG-2 ZERO HUNGER AND SDG-56 CLEAN WATER AND SANITATION] 

AREA 4: ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY [SDG-13 CLIMATE ACTION, SDG-7 AFFORDABLE AND CLEAN ENERGY, SDG-11 SUSTAINABLE CITIES AND COMMUNITIES] 

AREA 5: ORGANIZATIONAL AND MANAGERIAL BEHAVIORS, STRATEGY AND LEADERSHIP, JUSTICE [SDG-16 PEACE, JUSTICE AND STRONG INSTITUTIONS] 

Each short presentation session is designed to inform and influence academics, policy makers, and managers.  Presentations may demonstrate recent key research findings (potentially from multiple papers) with meaningful implications for policy and practice and need not present new work-in-progress. These presentations should not be highly technical. Click here to learn more and to submit: LINK

Conference Organizers: Craig Fox (UCLA), Suzanne Shu (Cornell University), Sim Sitkin (Duke University), and Dilip Soman (University of Toronto)

This opportunity is aimed at researchers who do not already hold a permanent academic position – please share with your early career networks and recent PhD graduates.

The Independent Social Research Foundation wishes to support recent PhD graduates in their effort to turn their doctoral thesis into a publishable book.

Researchers may apply from across the social sciences and the humanities. The awards are intended to provide a research stipend (to cover living costs plus reasonable research expenses) for a period of up to twelve months.

Eligibility

Scholars from within Europe are eligible to apply. Candidates must have been awarded their PhD and should be within three years of PhD award at the time of application (although career breaks may be taken into account), and should not already hold a permanent position within academia. The awards are intended as providing a stipend to allow applicants full or partial support for the conversion of their PhD thesis into a book and relief from non-academic work (including domestic care) for a period of up to one year.

The award period must begin no later than the end of December 2023, and awardees would be expected – by the end of the award period – to have produced a manuscript for submission to publishers.

A final publication contract need not be in place at the time of application. However, applicants should have developed a specific publication plan, and describe any of their preliminary inquiries to publishers.

The awards – of up to €34,000 (or GBP equivalent) – are intended to provide a stipend to allow applicants full or partial relief from non-academic duties, for a period of up to one year; alternatively, the award may be sought by those who wish to be bought-out from a non-academic employment contract (in whole or partially), with the prior consent of their current employer.

For more information – including guidance on eligible research – and to apply, please visit https://www.isrf.org/funding-opportunities/grant-competitions/fbg1/

Closing date for applications is 6pm CET on 4th February 2022.

FYI. The Jacobs Foundation invites applications for its Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship. These support early and mid-career researchers whose work is dedicated to improving the learning and development of children and youth worldwide. The relevant disciplines include, but are not limited to, educational sciences, psychology, economics, sociology, family studies, media studies, political sciences, linguistics, neurosciences and medical sciences.

Particularly encouraged to apply are scholars who seek to combine multiple levels of analysis and engage in interdisciplinary work. A special focus lies on work to understand and embrace variability in learning; promote the generation, transfer, and practical application of evidence on human learning and development or increase the capacity to scale up effective education policies and practices.

The Jacobs Foundation is especially interested in the following questions:

·         How do variations in individuals and contextual factors influence learning and development and learning outcomes?

·         How can we design for learner variability at scale to enable all children to reach their potential as learners and in life?

·         How can we produce interventions that reduce growing inequalities in children’s learning and overcome disparities in the impacts of digital technologies?

·         How can we address the role of data to help learners and teachers make informed decisions about their learning and teaching?

Young scholars who have obtained their PhD within the past 10 years are eligible to apply. Applicants must be employed at a university or other research institutions anywhere in the world.

Up to 12 fellowships are available, worth CHF 150,000 each over three years. These may be used for research activities and to partially cover salaries.

Closing date: 16 January 2022, 23.59 CET.