Promoting the UK’s strengths in innovation and technology – at Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency
Are you a UK-based health and life sciences expert? Would you be interested in helping to assess funding applications for business-led innovation projects? If so – read on!
Innovate UK’s Health and Life Sciences sector team
The Health and Life Sciences sector team at Innovate UK runs a number of different competition schemes, including the Biomedical Catalyst and the Health and Life Sciences competition, as well as occasional SBRI calls.
The Biomedical Catalyst funds projects which tackle ‘any solution to a healthcare challenge’. This means that we need assessors with expertise not just in biomedical sciences related to development of medicines and vaccines, but also in technologies used to design, develop and test medical devices and digital healthcare applications.
Health and Life Sciences competitions embrace our priority areas within health, agriculture & food, and bioscience:
- Precision medicine, advanced (cell and gene) therapies and preclinical technologies
- improving agricultural productivity and enhancing food quality
- Bioscience enabling technologies that underpin new products and services across the bioeconomy
More details of our priority areas can be found on pages 15-17 of our 2016-17 delivery plan.
New assessors required for Innovate UK competitions
Applications for these competitions are peer reviewed by independent external assessors to ensure we support the best UK innovation. We are looking to recruit new UK-based assessors who have held senior positions in clinical, academic or industrial areas, and in particular those that have experience in more than one of these areas. Our assessor group is made available for the Biomedical Catalyst, the two Health and Life Sciences competitions we run each year, the Open programme (which receives applications with a Health and Life Sciences focus) and, where applicable, SBRI calls.
Assessors receive a small remuneration for each application they review. An experienced assessor tends to take 1-2 hours to review an application. We therefore limit the number of applications to ensure that an assessor can be confident to complete assessment within the allotted time frame. We match applications to assessors based on the subject area of the application and the expertise of the assessors – this does mean that we cannot guarantee in advance that assessors will receive a particular number of applications to assess because this will depend on the applications we receive for any particular competition.
How to get in touch for more details
If you believe you have the relevant expertise and experience in the areas covered by the Health and Life Sciences sector team at Innovate UK and you are interested in finding out more about becoming an assessor, please contact the team at the email address: hls@innovateuk.gov.uk
Further details about Innovate UK can be found here with a page dedicated to Health and Life Sciences here.
For information on any specific competitions, click here.