DBT Wellcome Trust grantsmanship workshop series

As a first exercise, the CRU planned and initiated the grantsmanship workshop series to foster interest and enthusiasm among the faculty, scientists, and residents to apply for the prestigious research fellowships of the DBT Wellcome Trust.

1.1. The first sensitization workshop was conducted on 6 Nov 2019 at the Dr Ramalingaswami Board Room, AIIMS. The Director, AIIMS, Dr Randeep Guleria, chaired the session; Dr. Shahid Jameel, CEO of Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance and Prof. Usha Menon from the Clinical Trials Unit, Medical Research Council, UCL London joined as speakers. About 200 participants ranging from faculty, scientists, research staff, and PhD and postgraduate students from various disciplines participated in the activity.

1.2. The second Grantsmanship Workshop was planned for aspirants for concept proposal for the Wellcome Trust/ DBT India Alliance Clinical and Public Health Fellowships. A total of 38 faculty members and two (02) senior residents submitted the concept notes to the research section, which were reviewed by three of the lead mentors. Of these, 23 were selected for the mentoring workshop held on 15-16 Jan 2020. There were four lead mentors (Dr Usha Menon, UCL, London; Dr Shinjini Bhatnagar, THSTI; Dr Madhulika Kabra, AIIMS and Dr V Sreenivas, AIIMS) and 2-3 in-house subject experts for each proposal.

1.3. The third workshop of Grantsmanship Workshop series was held online (Zoom) on 27-28, Apr 2020, for the 17 proposals that cleared Stage-I and were invited for full/detailed proposal submission by India Alliance. Of the 17 final proposals submitted, 11 were reviewed by the lead mentors and subject experts besides online mentoring and remaining took help from the mentors by electronic methods.

1.4. Of the 18 concept notes submitted, 17 cleared Stage-I and all the 17 candidates submitted full/detailed proposal for the stage-II evaluation of the India Alliance for Clinical and Public health Fellowships in April 2020.