Directors' Fund
**Call open: deadline 1600 GMT on 1st September 2025**
The VALIDATE Network aims to accelerate the development of efficacious vaccines for three groups of complex intracellular pathogens that cause diseases significant to low and middle-income countries (LMICs): Mycobacteria, Leishmania spp, and Burkholderia pseudomallei. VALIDATE also aims to support and facilitate Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and career progression amongst its members, build capacity in our research field, and engage the public around vaccine research and careers in STEMM.
The Directors’ Fund
To support these aims, we are holding a Directors’ Fund call. This call offers small grants (up to £5,000) for innovative activities that will lead to interesting outcomes and benefits relevant to VALIDATE’s remit and in the VALIDATE field, for example to your research, your career or professional development, capacity building, engaging with the general public, or other relevant outcomes.
The activity you propose could be:
- Running an outreach event about vaccines for school kids or the general public
- Creating public engagement materials (e.g. leaflet, brochure, website, computer game)
- Hosting a meeting with new collaborators in the VALIDATE network, to work together towards a grant application
- Running a training workshop at your institute
- Hosting/giving a public talk
- Working with a museum to create an exhibit
- Hosting a key speaker at your institute or for an event or course you are coordinating
- Working with an advocacy specialist to create an advocacy plan/programme/documents to impact policy
- Key consumables for add-on assays that would enhance analyses you are already doing and lead to additional knowledge from samples you have collected
- Any other innovative activity within remit
The proposed activity must fall within the VALIDATE remit, focusing on at least one of VALIDATE’s priority pathogens (any aspect of research that will accelerate development of efficacious vaccines for these pathogens is eligible, including biological, physical and social sciences, and humanities).
Lead applicants must be a member of VALIDATE. We particularly welcome applications from researchers based in LMICs. Submitted applications will be reviewed by the VALIDATE Management Team.
All awardees will be expected to provide a short report following the completion of their activity, for inclusion in VALIDATE outcomes and publicity.
Please see the further details about this award and how to apply in the call guidance document below. Please submit your application form (also below) and associated documents using the Directors’ Fund Submission Portal found below, before the call deadline . Do contact the VALIDATE Team at VALIDATE@ndm.ox.ac.uk with any queries about this call, the application form or the application process.
Application Documents
List of LMICs (all countries listed on this document count as 'LMIC', excluding China & India)
https://airtable.com/embed/appu2AvFEUDgfAUwK/pagJ8SF8Ck4lCJcbM/form
