The Wellcome Trust has announced a new Investigator Awards scheme which seeks to support established academics to carry out long-term, ambitious and visionary research in the area of biomedical science and the medical humanities. Interestingly, they’re emphasising the flexibility of the awards and the lack of detail required at application stage on the budget and methodology. The focus is instead upon the vision of the researcher and scale of ambition in the research programme:

Funding will be flexible in both length and scale. Awards of up to £425 000 per year for up to seven years will be made depending on the experience, ambition and vision of the researcher, and the resources required to realise this vision. The Awards will be made to researchers at two levels – New Investigators and Senior Investigators – depending on their career stage.

At the point of application, researchers will no longer be expected to provide a detailed methodological description of how their work will be carried out or a line-by-line budget. The application form will ask researchers to outline their research vision, their approach to answering their key research questions and the approximate costs needed.

The first round will open in October 2010. For further details please see the Wellcome Trust website.