To support scientific and technological breakthroughs, ARIA Programme Directors can award funding to small but highly ambitious projects, “opportunity seeds”, to support ambitious research aligned to their opportunity spaces.
For opportunity seed projects ARIA’s Programme Directors are looking for bold ideas that could change the conversation about what is possible or valuable and provide steps towards new capabilities. If you have an important idea you’re obsessed with, but you don’t currently have the resources or support to take it forward, we’d like to hear from you. Ideas could come from anywhere, so we welcome proposals from individuals and teams who are early in their career or who have atypical backgrounds. We care more about your idea and your intrinsic motivation than we do about your CV.
Engineering Ecosystem Resilience funding call
Programme Director Yannick Wurm’s opportunity space, ‘Engineering Ecosystem Resilience’, asks: “How can we become as precise and purposeful in our interactions with living systems as we are when we build buildings or software, so we can make ecosystems resilient and reverse biodiversity decline?” We’re looking to fund high potential proposals with up to £500,000 each. We initially expect to fund around 10 opportunity seeds in this space.
We provide funding between £10,000 to £500,000 per project, inclusive of VAT (where applicable) and all associated costs (both direct and indirect). There is no minimum length for a proposed project; the maximum length is three years.
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ARIA welcome proposals from across the R&D ecosystem, including individuals (including those not affiliated with an organisation), universities (including proposals from students, postdocs and staff), research institutions, small, medium and large companies, charities and public sector research organisations.
If you are an overseas applicant you should note that our primary focus will be on funding those who are based in the UK or those willing to conduct the majority (> 50%) of the project from the UK. In exceptional circumstances, funding can be awarded outside the UK if we believe the proposed project can significantly benefit the UK.
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Within the scope outlined in this section and our evaluation criteria, we’re interested in what you really want to do. The guidance below is to help you assess whether your idea aligns with this funding call.
In scope:
- Ideas that sit within the ‘Engineering Ecosystem Resilience’ opportunity space. By this, we mean your proposal should show how your idea either aligns with or challenges the assumptions of the Summary, Beliefs, or Observations in the opportunity space.
- Ideas that range from early stage curiosity-driven research through to translational and close-to-commercial science and technology.
Out of scope:
- Ideas that target Yannick’s goal of Accelerating Adaptation, as described in his programme thesis. By this we mean ideas which fit squarely within the programme.
- Ideas that are likely to happen without ARIA support, for example, through other funding mechanisms.
- Commercial products.
Examples of ideas we consider in scope:
- Detection, containment or control of invasive or pest species or their impacts.
- New approaches for measuring or modelling biodiversity/resilience/vulnerabilities/interactions.
- Understanding impacts of different Miyawaki micro-forest or green wall strategies.
- Reduce methane emissions from riverbed bacteria by creating tools that maintain dissolved oxygen levels.
- AI-enabled real-time sensing for adaptive rapid-response management.
Examples of ideas that would be out of scope:
- Developing a squirrel pox vaccine for red squirrels
- Agricultural plants or animals
- Improving renewable energy or greenhouse gas technologies