Lab Visit Grants

Funding of up to £2,000 is available to support collaborative visits to UK and international laboratories.

Foster collaboration and develop essential biochemistry techniques with our brand new Lab Visit Grants! Available to Postgraduate, Early Career, Full and Emeritus members, these grants support laboratory visits within the UK or overseas to undertake training, educate partners on new advances, or analyse results.

Offered as an expansion of our General Travel Grants scheme, we are now offering funding of up to £2,000 to contribute towards travel and accommodation costs. Applications are welcomed for lower amounts of funding as well.

Please note that this would not affect your eligibility to apply for a General Travel Grant or Online Attendance Grant, provided you do not exceed a maximum of £3,000 in total funding within a 2-year period.

Eligibility

To be eligible to apply:

Applicants need to have been a member for at least 12 months prior to the deadline on the closing date of the round applied to. If you are not a member, join today. Members that have joined as multiyear members are eligible to apply for a Lab Visit Grant after six months of membership has elapsed.
Applicants must not have received one of the following Society grants in the 2 years before the closing date of the round applied to: Lab Visit Grant or Travel Award for Skills and Knowledge Exchange.
Applicants must not exceed a maximum of £3,000 in funding in a 2-year period across General Travel Grants, Online Attendance Grants, and Lab Visit Grants.
Applicants need to provide a summary of the intended work to be undertaken during the visit.

Application guidelines

Applications will be assessed according to three main criteria:

1. Benefit to career gained from attendance

Applicants should try to include answers to the following key points in their application:

How will attending this lab visit further your career? Give details of whether the aim is to form collaborations or further knowledge in an area that is not currently being pursued.
Are there any other achievements and/or outputs that are relevant?

2. Financial need for support

This refers to the applicants current funding available for travel. Key points that should be incorporated in the application include:

Details of the applicants provision for travel in their research grant or PhD programme.
Why funds are being sort from the Society and why the level of support is being requested.
The applicant is encouraged to apply for other funding to help support the lab visit and give details of this so that the committee may see that the applicant will be able to participate if only partial support is provided by the Lab Visit Grant fund.

3. Letter of Support from Supervisor or Head of Department and Host Lab

A strong letter of support will demonstrate the following:

Case for financial need and the justification for the amount requested.
Promise of the applicant
What the benefit of attending this lab visit would be to the applicants career.

Application deadlines

Applications are considered seven times a year, the deadlines for which are:

1 January for visits after 1 February
1 March for visits after 1 April
1 May for visits after 1 June
1 June for visits after 1 July
1 July for visits after 1 August
1 September for visits after 1 October
1 November for visits after 1 December

Please note we aim to send round the outcome of applications three to four weeks after the deadline of the round that has been applied to.

Hear from a previous awardee!

"This grant allowed me to spend a week with the Geri lab, who are developing cutting-edge tools to perform proximity proteomics at super-resolution spatial scales (as low as 2 nm!). Whilst there, the team showed me how to generate the photocatalysts and diazirine probes, conjugate catalysts to antibodies, perform blue light proximity reactions with their custom designed photoreactor (giving me tips on how to build my own!), perform streptavidin enrichment and on-bead tryptic digestion using their automated robotic platform, followed by analysis of MS-data using their custom written analytical pipeline. I was able to generate data that I included in a recent grant application that, if funded, will allow me to start my own lab.

I also had the opportunity and privilege to see their ongoing work, which could be of huge interest to my future research interests, as well as share my own research with the team. Jacob and the team were fantastic hosts, and I plan to return in a few months to scale up my interaction with them, applying their technologies to assessing which cells within human blood interact with immune checkpoint antibodies with varying efficacy."

Jonathan Worboys, University of Manchester