The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the largest of the seven UK Research Councils, announced last month that it is signposting a number of key research topics and themes to support new activity in what it calls “emerging or strategically important areas”.

You can view the full list of signposted areas on the EPSRC website. It includes synthetic biology, the physics/life sciences interface and nanoscience applications.

EPSRC have stated that signposted topics are given priority within their responsive mode funding scheme. What does this mean in practice? Proposals submitted to the standard responsive scheme will be reviewed as usual, but they are then ranked in competition only with other “signposted” proposals. In essence this means that bids which address a EPSRC priority area have a higher likelihood of appearing on a funding shortlist than an equally strong bid for a non-priority area.

Of course, if the work is deemed by reviewers to be non-fundable, then it won’t be funded. But addressing a signposted research topic should increase the likelihood of funding in the standard responsive mode scheme.

This kind of approach is not unique to EPSRC. The European Research Council uses a similar method to prioritise interdisciplinary applications to the Starting and Advanced Investigator Grants schemes within FP7. In that case a proportion of the overall budget is set aside for proposals flagged as interdisciplinary in nature.