NHMRC announces $375m in Investigator Grants, gender equity scheme

The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has announced the outcomes of this year’s Investigator Grants, with more than $375 million awarded to support 225 emerging and established leaders in health and medical research across Australia to tackle our greatest health challenges.

The Investigator Grant scheme is NHMRC’s largest funding scheme and a major investment in Australia’s health and medical research workforce. The grants provide a five-year fellowship to support outstanding researchers at all career stages, across the four pillars of health and medical research: biomedical, clinical, public health and health services. The scheme aims to allow flexibility for researchers to pursue important new research directions, form collaborations and foster innovative and creative research.

Among the recipients of the latest funding is Professor Dianna Magliano OAM, from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, who will use her Investigator Grant to understand trends in the burden, risks and complications of diabetes in Australia. Her research will also investigate which interventions are most effective in managing patients with diabetes.

Other recipients of Investigator Grants in this round include:

• Dr Nicola Waddell (QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute), who receives a $2.3 million grant for research to identify mutations in a range of tumour cell types to determine how a tumour develops and how it can be treated to kill the cancer.
• Professor Edward Holmes (University of Sydney), who helped map the COVID-19 virus genome in early 2020 and now receives more than $3.9 million to transform our understanding of the disease threat posed by using bioinformatics and metagenomics to rapidly identify viruses of potential public health impact.
• Dr Graham Gee (Murdoch Children's Research Institute), who will use his grant of over $1.5 million for research on how to support healing and recovery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
   

Furthermore, from 2023, the NHMRC will award equal numbers of Investigator Grants to women and men in a new intervention to address gender inequities in research funding. Previous interventions to address gender inequities in grant funding have helped to achieve gender targets but relatively few women apply at the senior levels of the scheme, reflecting the many barriers that lead to their attrition from the research workforce.

The new initiative will see NHMRC introduce a special measure under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and set targets to fund an equal number of Leadership grants for women and men in the Investigator Grant scheme. For the first time, non-binary researchers will also be explicitly included in this and other measures to foster gender equity in NHMRC funding, recognising the systemic disadvantage that they experience.

“Despite good progress, gender inequities persist across the health and medical research sector,” said NHMRC CEO Professor Anne Kelso AO. “Disparities in funding of women and men in NHMRC’s flagship Investigator Grant scheme have highlighted the barriers that many women face as they seek to advance their research careers.

“An Investigator Grant can make all the difference to a researcher’s career. This is one of the reasons that gender equity in this scheme is so important if we are to build a diverse research sector.

“The changes announced today will provide more encouragement and opportunities for women and non-binary researchers to apply for, and win, these significant grants. With this support, we look forward to seeing better gender diversity at the most senior levels of Australian health and medical research in the years ahead.”

Full details of the Investigator Grant recipients are available here.

Image credit: iStock.com/Atstock Productions

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