Clinical Distinguished Investigator

Purpose

The project must be a 5-year project, and it must be anchored at a Danish university, hospital or other non-profit research institution. 

Eligibility

• Applicants must be a medical doctor, specialist physician and should have a Ph.D. or a dr. med. degree.
• Applicants must be clinical professors. Applications can, in rare circumstances, be accepted from applicants who have been evaluated and found to be professor-qualified but are not yet in a clinical professor position.
• Applicants must remain associated with clinical work / have clinical responsibilities throughout the entire 5-year grant period, and it is expected that the applicant will spend between 20-50% of their time in the clinic, while 50-80% time can be spent on research.
• A Clinical Distinguished Investigator grant cannot be used to cover substitute replacementsalary for neither clinical nor teaching obligations of the applicant, as the continued commitment of the applicant to both is considered of great importance. 
• Applicants must have institutional support from the heads of both the clinical department and the department where the research is to be performed (hosting and support letters must be uploaded to the application, please see section 3.6).  
• ‘Clinical Distinguished Investigator’ grants are individual grants at the disposal of the applicant. If the applied project involves collaboration, the collaboration and the nature of the collaboration should be described in the project description, but the applicant must be the clear driver of the project (it is not possible to have or register co-applicants for specific this call).  
• An applicant may only submit one application to the NNF ‘Research Leader Programme 2025’ within all NNFs funding areas. If you submit more than one, the first application submitted will be evaluated, while subsequent applications will be administratively rejected.

• Applications from Master students, Ph.D. students and postdocs will not be taken into consideration 

Research Field 

The overall goal is to support medical research with relevance to patients and human health. The research fields could be within, but are not limited to: Patients and disease related research, translational and clinical research, research in: disease mechanisms; treatment methods; disease trajectories, epidemiology; diagnostic methods; public health and family medicine, intervention studies, register-based research, proof-of concept studies, pilot projects, initial clinical trials and clinical testing, biomedicine etc. 

Funding 

Each grant runs over 5 years and can be up to DKK 11 million in total over the 5 years. Approximately DKK 2.2 million per budget year can be allocated to project related expenses.  

Up to two Clinical Distinguished Investigator Grants will be awarded. 

Application process 

The application must be completed and submitted using the foundation’s electronic application system, using the link “Send application”. Link is found at the top of the page and will be visible when the call opens. 

It is very important, that the applicant carefully reads the guideline, before initiating the application process. This document contains the complete call as well as detailed instructions for the application process.