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ActiveUK Research and Innovation (UKRI) · 2026

UKRI Enabling AI Adoption Across Science and Engineering for Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials, Quantum, Medical Research and Fusion

Quick Facts

Agency: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
Funding: Projects may request up to 250,000 pounds at full economic cost, with UKRI funding 80 percent, so the maximum UKRI cash contribution is 200,000 pounds and the host organisation covers the balance. Converted at roughly 1.31 US dollars to the pound, amount_min is set at about 262,000 US dollars for the UKRI-funded portion and amount_max at about 327,500 US dollars for the full economic cost ceiling. The total fund is 5,000,000 pounds, roughly 6.6 million US dollars, which at the maximum award size supports on the order of twenty short projects. There is no published minimum. The 12-month duration paired with this ceiling makes clear that UKRI is buying exploratory pilots and new cross-disciplinary partnerships rather than full research programmes, so budgets weighted toward a single postdoctoral researcher plus compute and travel fit the instrument better than large consortium overheads.
Deadline: December 1, 2026 (69 days remaining)
Status: Active
Eligibility: Applicants must be based at UK research organisations eligible for UKRI funding and must satisfy standard UKRI organisational and individual eligibility rules. International researchers may only participate as project co-leads and only under specific existing UKRI cooperation agreements, so overseas partners cannot be the route into the fund. Proposals must target at least one of the five named domains: engineering biology, advanced materials, quantum technologies, medical research, or fusion energy. The assessment turns on the pairing of AI and domain expertise, and a proposal must explicitly justify why AI collaboration is necessary for the stated research challenge rather than merely useful, so teams should name the domain bottleneck first and the AI method second. Projects run up to 12 months with a fixed start date of 26 April 2027, meaning recruitment and access arrangements must be settled in advance because there is no room to absorb a hiring delay inside a one-year award. The host organisation must cover 20 percent of full economic cost. Applications are submitted through the UKRI Funding Service by 1 December 2026 at 4:00pm UK time; institutional internal deadlines will be earlier.

About This Grant

UKRI has opened a 5,000,000 pound cross-council call to accelerate the adoption of AI methods inside five priority science and engineering domains: engineering biology, advanced materials, quantum technologies, medical research, and fusion energy. The instrument is deliberately small and fast.

Awards are capped at 250,000 pounds full economic cost over up to 12 months with a fixed start date of 26 April 2027, and the central requirement is that a proposal bring together genuine AI expertise with genuine domain expertise rather than either community working alone.

Applicants must demonstrate how AI could be applied to address important research challenges in their domain and, critically, explain why an AI collaboration is necessary for that specific challenge, which is a direct filter against proposals that apply a standard model to a dataset and call it adoption.

The call opened on 29 September 2026 and closes 1 December 2026 at 4:00pm UK time, with an information webinar held on 14 October 2026. Because the funding is short-duration seed money aimed at building new partnerships, it suits teams that have identified a domain bottleneck and a credible AI collaborator but have no existing joint track record to point to.

View Original RFP

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Eligibility Requirements

Applicants must be based at UK research organisations eligible for UKRI funding and must satisfy standard UKRI organisational and individual eligibility rules. International researchers may only participate as project co-leads and only under specific existing UKRI cooperation agreements, so overseas partners cannot be the route into the fund. Proposals must target at least one of the five named domains: engineering biology, advanced materials, quantum technologies, medical research, or fusion energy. The assessment turns on the pairing of AI and domain expertise, and a proposal must explicitly justify why AI collaboration is necessary for the stated research challenge rather than merely useful, so teams should name the domain bottleneck first and the AI method second. Projects run up to 12 months with a fixed start date of 26 April 2027, meaning recruitment and access arrangements must be settled in advance because there is no room to absorb a hiring delay inside a one-year award. The host organisation must cover 20 percent of full economic cost. Applications are submitted through the UKRI Funding Service by 1 December 2026 at 4:00pm UK time
institutional internal deadlines will be earlier.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who can apply for UKRI Enabling AI Adoption Across Science and Engineering for Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials, Quantum, Medical Research and Fusion?

According to the current listing, eligibility includes: Applicants must be based at UK research organisations eligible for UKRI funding and must satisfy standard UKRI organisational and individual eligibility rules. International researchers may only participate as project co-leads and only under specific existing UKRI cooperation agreements, so overseas partners cannot be the route into the fund. Proposals must target at least one of the five named domains: engineering biology, advanced materials, quantum technologies, medical research, or fusion energy. The assessment turns on the pairing of AI and domain expertise, and a proposal must explicitly justify why AI collaboration is necessary for the stated research challenge rather than merely useful, so teams should name the domain bottleneck first and the AI method second. Projects run up to 12 months with a fixed start date of 26 April 2027, meaning recruitment and access arrangements must be settled in advance because there is no room to absorb a hiring delay inside a one-year award. The host organisation must cover 20 percent of full economic cost. Applications are submitted through the UKRI Funding Service by 1 December 2026 at 4:00pm UK time; institutional internal deadlines will be earlier. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.

How much funding does UKRI Enabling AI Adoption Across Science and Engineering for Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials, Quantum, Medical Research and Fusion offer?

The current listing shows projects may request up to 250,000 pounds at full economic cost, with UKRI funding 80 percent, so the maximum UKRI cash contribution is 200,000 pounds and the host organisation covers the balance. Converted at roughly 1.31 US dollars to the pound, amount_min is set at about 262,000 US dollars for the UKRI-funded portion and amount_max at about 327,500 US dollars for the full economic cost ceiling. The total fund is 5,000,000 pounds, roughly 6.6 million US dollars, which at the maximum award size supports on the order of twenty short projects. There is no published minimum. The 12-month duration paired with this ceiling makes clear that UKRI is buying exploratory pilots and new cross-disciplinary partnerships rather than full research programmes, so budgets weighted toward a single postdoctoral researcher plus compute and travel fit the instrument better than large consortium overheads. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.

When is the deadline for UKRI Enabling AI Adoption Across Science and Engineering for Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials, Quantum, Medical Research and Fusion?

Applications for UKRI Enabling AI Adoption Across Science and Engineering for Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials, Quantum, Medical Research and Fusion are due December 1, 2026. Build your timeline backwards from this date to cover registrations, approvals, and final submission checks.

Who funds UKRI Enabling AI Adoption Across Science and Engineering for Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials, Quantum, Medical Research and Fusion?

UKRI Enabling AI Adoption Across Science and Engineering for Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials, Quantum, Medical Research and Fusion is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.

How do I apply for UKRI Enabling AI Adoption Across Science and Engineering for Engineering Biology, Advanced Materials, Quantum, Medical Research and Fusion?

Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.

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UKRI EPSRC Next Generation Artificial Intelligence: Explainable AI for Output Reasoning, Mechanistic Interpretability and Uncertainty Quantification

EPSRC has opened the explainable AI strand of its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence programme, a 12,050,000 pound call for speculative, high-risk fundamental research that makes AI systems explainable rather than merely accurate. The call names five research directions: output reasoning, where the system articulates why it produced a given output; mechanistic interpretability, which seeks to understand the internal computations of a model; process examination, which audits how a decision was reached; imposed explainability, which builds explanation into architecture by construction rather than recovering it after the fact; and uncertainty quantification, which characterises what a model does not know. The framing is unusually explicit that incremental improvement is not fundable: applications must demonstrate potential for transformative outcomes, and EPSRC uses the phrase speculative and high-risk fundamental research with the potential to deliver high reward. Awards run up to 24 months with a fixed project start of 1 February 2027, and the maximum request is 602,500 pounds at full economic cost with UKRI funding 80 percent. Early and mid-career researchers are particularly welcomed, and joint leadership is permitted with a designated administrative lead. The deadline is 20 October 2026 at 4:00pm UK time, with an information webinar having been held on 8 September 2026.

Each project may request up to 602,500 pounds at full economic cost, of which UKRI pays 80 percent, equating to a maximum UKRI contribution of 482,000 pounds and leaving the host organisation to cover the remaining 20 percent. At roughly 1.31 US dollars to the pound that is about 790,000 US dollars of total project cost and about 632,000 US dollars of actual UKRI cash, which is why amount_min is set to the UKRI-funded portion and amount_max to the full economic cost ceiling. The total fund is 12,050,000 pounds, roughly 15.8 million US dollars, so at the maximum award size the call supports on the order of twenty projects. UKRI does not publish a floor and explicitly welcomes smaller requests, so a well-argued 200,000 pound project is not disadvantaged by size alone. The 20 percent institutional contribution is a real budgeting constraint that catches applicants who plan to the headline number rather than to the UKRI contribution.Deadline: Oct 20, 2026

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