Flexible Talent Mobility Accounts

Type of funding: Funding for training activities, placements and exchanges

Through this opportunity, BBSRC will commit a minimum of £3 million over three years to support training activities, placements and exchanges for bioscience research staff from and to universities, BBSRC institutes, businesses, policy, or other settings, in the UK and overseas.

What it can fund:
The activities should aim to establish or further develop partnerships between academic, business, public sector and third sector organisations. Examples include exchanges between academic institutions and businesses, public sector and third sector organisations, interdisciplinary academia to academia exchanges, international placements and exchanges, placements and exchanges with policymakers, shorter placements e.g. day releases, longer placements or secondments (up to six months max), technology transfer and knowledge exchange development opportunities.

Funds can be used to cover the direct costs of mobility activities, for example, travel, accommodation, reasonable subsistence, training, consumables, salary. Funding can also be used to support secondary activities which are associated with the primary mobility activities, (for example, hosting conferences for those involved in the placements and exchanges to share your knowledge with your wider network.

Please note that the design of this year´s FTMA round is significantly different to previous ones. Here are the most relevant changes:

BBSRC are running this funding opportunity on the new UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Funding Service (TFS). You cannot apply on the Joint Electronic Submissions (Je-S) system.

They will fund longer and larger awards, with an estimated full economic cost (FEC) of around £375,000 over three years.

Applications must focus on one of the six priority areas defined by BBSRC and commit at least 70% of the FEC of the award to activities related to the chosen priority area.

Applicants shall highlight the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) aspects of their proposal and include activities for supporting the Early Career Researcher (ECR) and Research and Technical Professional (RTP) communities.

Please note that BBSRC will host an informative webinar session on the 20th of September at 10:00 am to present the funding opportunity and address any questions that you may have. You can register to attend the webinar on this link:
https://ukri.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RN_v3_WxQ6yer3fArcrzPA (passcode: 621053).
This webinar will be made available on the UKR Funding Finder page.

If you have any further questions about this funding opportunity, please address them to support@funding-service.ukri.org.

Deadline: 28/11/2023

Eligibility criteria:

Applications must be from partnerships or consortia of eligible ROs with an interest in the bioscience research. These must consist of a minimum of two partners. There is no maximum limit on the number of partners. An eligible RO cannot be in multiple FTMA partnerships for this funding opportunity and therefore must only submit one application.

The partnership shall have a lead partner, who will be in charge of submitting the application. Only the lead partner’s project lead will be able to access the application site.

Mobility placements and exchanges can be delivered with collaborators from organisations such as businesses, academia, the public sector and the third sector to support international and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. These collaborators are not considered partners on the grant.

Those eligible to benefit from FTMAs are any research staff, or supporting staff, working within the biosciences or pursuing an FTMA activity within the biosciences, including but not limited to postdoctoral researchers, research technical professionals (including technicians), academic research staff, knowledge exchange and commercialisation professionals, professional enabling staff, staff from non-academic organisations.
This extends to international and UK staff.

Students (including undergraduate, masters or PhD) are not eligible to benefit from FTMAs.

Further information can be found here.