Dementia funding will support the development of early career researchers

As part of our commitment to addressing the most pressing health and care issues facing our local populations, we are offering three career development awards for dementia research.

The funding forms part of the national NIHR initiative to support promising early career researchers in dementia and to build up their number and skills across the NIHR family. The ARC funding, provided by NIHR in collaboration with Alzheimer’s Society, is supporting a cohort of post-doctoral health and care researchers toward independence, developing their skills to establish their own research projects, programmes and ultimately groups.

Career development awards

We are offering career development awards for the following projects:

1. Developing community-based system for the identification and management of at-risk and early symptomatic individuals, targeting diverse and deprived areas, involving Community Health and Wellbeing Workers (CHWW) that will include e-based modules for memory assessment and health promotion, and to also alert GPs, through direct digital submission to GP records.

2. Developing a large- scale community-based dementia prevention programme (the Imperial BRC-eFINGER PRINT) that will capture clinical, lifestyle and cognitive data of cognitively healthy elderly individuals and provide a mulit-domain lifestyle intervention through bespoke e-based tools, for secondary personalised prevention of dementia.

3. Leveraging the wealth of cognitive, lifestyle, genomic, imaging, as well as state-of art fluid biomarker data of a unique prospective longitudinal, industry and Gate’s funded study conducted at Imperial since 2013, to evaluate risk factors, develop prediction models and markers of risk, and early translation of research findings to community based prevention of dementia.

Closely linked projects

Benedict Hayhoe, Deputy Theme Lead for Digital Health and Multimorbidity and Mental Health themes said:

"This is a fantastic opportunity for three talented individuals to work together to develop their skills and experience in the field of dementia supported by the extensive research facilities available at Imperial College. We are excited to be able to offer three closely-linked projects based on well established research programmes in dementia prediction and prevention and community-based care, and are extremely grateful to the NIHR and the Alzheimer’s Society for developing and supporting this initiative.’

How to apply

For more information and to apply contact: Lefkos Middleton l.middleton@imperial.ac.uk or Benedict Hayhoe b.hayhoe@imperial.ac.uk