Mental Health Award: Understanding how anxiety- and trauma-related problems develop, persist and resolve

This award will fund researchers to investigate the causal mechanisms through which brain, body and environment interact over time in the development, persistence and resolution of anxiety- and trauma-related disorders. Knowing more about these mechanisms will help us find better ways to identify these problems and intervene at an early stage.

Wellcome’s mental health strategic aim is to drive a transformative change in our ability to intervene as early as possible in the course of anxiety, depression and psychosis, in ways that reflect the priorities and needs of people who experience these problems.

This call will fund research that advances scientific understanding of the causal mechanisms through which brain, body and environment interact over time in the development, persistence and resolution of anxiety- and trauma-related disorders.

We encourage applicants to review all the information on this page. You can also watch this webinar with our Mental Health team as they explain the call and its part in our Mental Health strategy.

What we are looking for

Applications must focus on the causal mechanisms underlying the development, persistence and/or resolution of anxiety-related problems. Proposals do not need to focus on all three stages; they can focus on just one, two or three.

Who can apply

You can apply to this call if you are a team of researchers:

• from any relevant discipline (we consider a broad range of disciplines to be relevant to mental health science, including but not limited to those listed in our mental health funding remit)
• from an eligible organisation
• based anywhere in the world (apart from mainland China).

We encourage applications from:

• diverse and interdisciplinary teams, with collaborations covering multiple areas of expertise (for example, biological, psychological and social)
• researchers at any stage of their career, including early career researchers and/or those who are new to the field of mental health science.

Although we encourage applications from diverse and interdisciplinary teams, this is not required. Each application should include the necessary team expertise and organisational support to answer the proposed research question(s). The contribution of each coapplicant (and collaborator, if applicable) to the project should be justified. Teams may want to consider involving people with lived experience of mental health problems in the project team, as lead applicants, coapplicants and/or collaborators.

When research occurs in more than one location, applications must include coapplicants based in each country where the research will take place. If the proposed research is planned to take place only in a low- or middle-income country, the lead applicant must be affiliated with an eligible organisation based in that country. For all collaborations, we expect applicants to demonstrate how they will approach ethical and equitable partnerships, including how this will be approached in partnerships between low- and middle-income country researchers and high-income country researchers.

Each application can only have one named lead applicant, who would be accountable for the delivery of grant activities, the financial management of the award and compliance with Wellcome’s grant conditions in the event of a successful application. The management of the project locally is at the discretion of the applicants and could include co-leads to ensure equity, where justified (for example, across high-income and low- and middle-income countries).