Funding & Support

We provide advice and support to our researchers, innovators and the organization at large throughout the entire project life cycle to maximize chances of success, both in securing strategic funding and in smoothly executing the awarded projects.

Support throughout the entire project life cycle

Our support ranges from project ideation, grant applications and proposal development to post-award support and valorization.

The key is to build relationships with (inter)national, private and public funders and external partners who have an interest in collaborating with UMC Utrecht and our researchers.

The Funding & Support team of the UMC Utrecht, is part of the Research Office (RO) within the Direction Strategy & Policy.

Our support consists of:

Full cycle grant support
Tooling & Support
Funding Academy Utrecht University & UMC Utrecht
Knowledge-sharing

Full cycle grant support

Researchers at UMC Utrecht can call on the team for support with:

The identification of the most promising funding opportunities (national, international, personal grants, prizes & awards) for their research idea and career;
The preparation of competitive Dutch, EC Horizon Europe (HEU) and other international grant applications, feedback on the design of the proposals and tips & tricks for increasing the chances of success;
Financing external support services through “Horizon Europe proposal development grants”;
Courses on writing successful applications for national, Horizon Europe and international grant schemes;
Making contact with potential participants in a national and HEU consortia (partner search) and giving advice on the best composition of a consortium;
Advising on the project management structure and setting up the project management logistics;
Providing professional and dedicated project management (and dissemination) support during the life-time of an awarded HEU or (large scale) Dutch research and innovation project;
The strategy, governance and policy for research and innovation funding & support;
Collaborating with the legal & finance departments on funding & support.

Tooling & Support

The UMC Utrecht invests and co-develops innovative tooling to support researchers in finding funding opportunities and improve their grant applications. This includes amongst others:

An active collaboration with Impacter.eu for improving the funding applications. Impacter uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing to compare a text to our existing corpus of successful and unsuccessful proposals.
Access to the Research Connect funding database which contains the most recent and elaborate information on national and international funding opportunities.
Smart AI solutions that are specifically developed to produce fast and personalised funding advice for UMC Utrecht researchers based on their publication records.

Funding Academy Utrecht University & UMC Utrecht

Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht together provide extensive support to their researchers via the Research Funding Academy. Diverse activities and tools are provided, like the annual Research Funding Days in June, online search services for personal research funding opportunities, Research Data Management Support, writing courses and personal funding workshops.

Go to Research Funding Academy

Research Management networks

We’re an active member of various consultative bodies and associations and we have an active role in, for example, the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centers (NFU) and various Horizon Europe sounding board groups of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO.nl).

We network, gain and share knowledge on Research Management within the whole organisation, the Research Support Offices of the other faculties of the Utrecht University, the Association for Research Managers and Administrators in the Netherlands (ARMA-NL) and the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA).