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Wellcome Discovery Awards provide long-term flexible funding for established researchers and teams pursuing bold, creative research into human life, health and wellbeing. There is no fixed minimum or maximum award; the average Discovery Award is 3,500,000 pounds sterling and applications above 5,000,000 pounds are subject to additional scrutiny.
Awards run up to eight years, with an average of seven, and may be shorter for some disciplines or longer if held part-time. There are no set deadlines and applications are accepted year-round, with shortlisting occurring twice annually in April and November and interviews held twice yearly in March and July.
AI, machine learning, computational and data science approaches are explicitly within scope as part of multidisciplinary research that supports significant shifts in understanding and generates new knowledge, which covers machine learning for drug discovery, AI-driven clinical diagnostics, computational genomics and data science for health equity.
The scheme's defining characteristic is its time horizon and flexibility rather than its size: at roughly 500,000 pounds per year over seven years it is not an exceptionally large annual budget, but the length and the latitude to change research direction mid-award make it suited to programmes that cannot be specified in advance, which is a good match for AI-driven research where methods turn over rapidly.
Applications are made on the Wellcome Funding platform, submitted to the administering organisation for approval, then pass an eligibility check and shortlisting review, external expert written review if shortlisted, an interview panel, and a final decision by the Discovery Research Decision Board. No deadline is recorded because the scheme is rolling.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: The lead applicant must be an established researcher with international standing, experience leading innovative research, and a track record of managing and training others. This is a seniority-gated scheme and the bar is explicitly international reputation, so mid-career researchers without that standing should look to Wellcome's Early Career or Career Development Awards instead. The lead applicant must hold a permanent, open-ended or long-term rolling contract, or a guaranteed position, at the point of application, which excludes researchers on fixed-term fellowships regardless of their scientific record. The lead applicant must be based at an eligible organisation in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, or a low- or middle-income country excluding India and mainland China; the LMIC eligibility is a genuine and significant route that distinguishes Wellcome from most comparable funders, though the India and mainland China exclusions are firm. Team applications are allowed with two to eight members, and co-applicants may be based anywhere except mainland China, which permits international collaboration including with US institutions even though the lead must be UK, Ireland or an eligible LMIC. A researcher cannot hold multiple lead applicant positions simultaneously across Early Career, Career Development or Discovery Awards. Substantively, the proposal must target human life, health and wellbeing and must support a significant shift in understanding and generate new knowledge; AI, machine learning, computational and data science methods are in scope as part of multidisciplinary research rather than as standalone methodological development, so a proposal framed primarily as advancing machine learning technique is a weaker fit than one where the method enables a biological or health insight. There are no set deadlines; shortlisting occurs in April and November and interviews in March and July, so applicants should work backwards from the relevant shortlisting round. Applications are submitted via the Wellcome Funding platform with administering-organisation approval. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows wellcome publishes no fixed minimum or maximum for Discovery Awards, which makes the average the only reliable anchor: the average Discovery Award is 3,500,000 pounds sterling and applications above 5,000,000 pounds are subject to additional scrutiny. Converted at approximate rates, amount_min is recorded as 4,700,000 US dollars reflecting the 3.5 million pound average and amount_max as 6,700,000 US dollars reflecting the 5 million pound additional-scrutiny threshold; applicants should work in sterling and treat these conversions as indicative only. The duration is what makes this scheme structurally unusual and it dominates cost planning: awards run up to eight years with an average of seven, which is roughly twice the horizon of a standard research grant and longer if held part-time. A seven-year award at 3.5 million pounds is approximately 500,000 pounds per year, which in a UK university supports a small team of perhaps three to five postdoctoral and technical staff with consumables, not a large centre. The real planning question is therefore not how much but over what horizon: the scheme funds a sustained research programme with the flexibility to change direction, and Wellcome expects the proposal to describe a direction of travel rather than a fixed sequence of experiments. For AI and computational work this is favourable, since method lifecycles are short and an eight-year commitment that locks in a specific architecture would be obsolete by mid-term; budgets should preserve headroom for compute and methods that do not yet exist. Compute is the one line item likely to grow unpredictably over seven years and should be costed with explicit escalation. There are no set deadlines, with shortlisting twice annually in April and November and interviews in March and July. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
Wellcome Discovery Awards for Established Researchers Including AI Machine Learning and Computational Approaches to Human Life Health and Wellbeing is funded by Wellcome Trust. Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.
Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.
The STEM Next AI Innovation Challenge, run by the STEM Next Opportunity Fund with the Panasonic Foundation, awards prizes of 1,000 to 5,000 US dollars to out-of-school-time programs whose high school youth teams use AI to research a local or global issue, explore ideas and strengthen a proposed solution. Ten prizes are available: two first-place awards of 5,000 dollars, three second-place awards of 3,000 dollars and five third-place awards of 1,000 dollars, paid to the program site rather than to students. Each team submits an AI Research and Development Snapshot of up to eleven slides on the provided template and a youth-created pitch video of up to five minutes; AI may assist with scripting or captions but cannot generate the whole video or a synthetic presenter. Teams must show at least one test, feedback or iteration step, though a finished prototype is not required and no prior AI or coding experience is needed. Judging is scored out of 100, weighted toward Innovation and Impact (30) and AI Collaboration and Strategy (30), with Career Connected Learning Alignment and Presentation at 20 each. Sites may enter up to five teams but can win only one prize, the adult educator who submits must complete a survey, and prize funds cannot be used for lobbying. Programs sign up to receive a toolkit, and entries close on 19 November 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern.
Mozilla Foundation's Human-Scale AI call funds bespoke, fit-for-purpose AI technology designed at the scale of the problem it is meant to solve, as an alternative to resource-hungry, centralized AI. Priorities include lower resource use, privacy and decentralized power. Projects must already be deployed with their users, even if only at small scale or as an early pilot, and must have a charitable purpose. Selected projects receive $300,000 and 12 months of support starting April 2027. Strong projects may receive up to $200,000 more over two additional years, for a potential maximum of $500,000. The call is open globally, applications must be in English, and the deadline is November 20, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. PST.
Cities Deliver is a 50 million US dollar joint open call from The Rockefeller Foundation and the OpenAI Foundation, administered through RF Catalytic Capital, funding deployments of frontier artificial intelligence that measurably improve the delivery of public services in cities. Individual grants run from 500,000 to 2,000,000 US dollars over a 24-month period, with half the award disbursed upfront and the remaining half released on achievement of documented mid-term milestones, a structure that favours applicants who can specify verifiable service-delivery metrics at proposal stage. The call names four priority domains: public health, economic mobility, environmental resilience and civic engagement. Two eligibility conditions do most of the screening work and should be addressed before investing effort in an application. First, the lead applicant must be a nonprofit, which the funders define broadly to include university labs and fiscally sponsored organisations, or a public benefit corporation; ordinary for-profit companies cannot lead. Second, the proposal must carry a committed city government partner, meaning a municipal counterparty that has agreed in writing to host or adopt the work rather than merely endorse it, which makes early municipal relationship-building the critical path for most teams. Projects must also contain a meaningful frontier AI component rather than conventional analytics, and voting and election-related projects are explicitly excluded from scope. The call is global. The initial application deadline is 29 November 2026, with the window for submitting clarifying questions to the programme team closing earlier on 31 October 2026.
The Gates Foundation and Wellcome Leap each committed $50 million over three years to halve stillbirth rates, announced October 12, 2026 in Berlin. The money flows through Wellcome Leap's milestone-gated MARFA and CORFA contracts, not grant agreements, and the paperwork is the real deadline.
Read articleDiscovery Awards went always-open on September 23, 2026. Five weeks later, lead applicants outside the UK and three LMIC regions lose eligibility. The rolling system also turns one old rule into a trap.
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