RS Macdonald Seedcorn Fund

Background and remit

The RS Macdonald Seedcorn Fund has been created following awards from the RS Macdonald Trust, which were received in 2017, 2019, 2023 and 2025. The Trust recently updated their strategy, and now state their priorities for their Medical Research funding stream as follows:

We will provide grant funding into academic research which is Scotland-led and which relates to neurological conditions (exclusions listed on page 5 also apply here) and visual impairment

Please note that the exclusions mentioned mean that the Trust will no longer “assess or award to applications relating to those neuropsychiatric illnesses traditionally treated through psychiatric services (e.g. Schizophrenia, Depression, OCD, ASN (as a standalone ‘category’) or for Covid-, Fatigue- and Cancer-related illness”.

You can read more about the Trust’s strategy using this link: https://www.rsmacdonald.com/2025/06/30/our-strategy-2025-29/ 

The new strategy re-affirms the Trust’s commitment to supporting early-career researchers, pledging to “invest in early career researchers in order to help grow the pool of talent working within our areas of interest [and] new ideas and innovative approaches that have the potential to leverage additional funds and lead to breakthroughs.”

The R S Macdonald Seedcorn Fund is appropriate for clinical and human proposals, as well as fundamental research, as long as the research question addresses the broad aims of the Trust outlined above.

Funding available

This is the 2025 call for applications, and there will be another call in 2026, subject to satisfactory reporting from the first round of awards. The budget to be disbursed in 2025 is £75,000.

This year, in contrast to previous years, different amounts of funding will be available to applicants at different career stages:

• Postdocs other researchers (including clinicians) who are not yet independent and are based in someone else’s group will be able to apply for up to £5,000.
• Early-career Principal Investigators / Group Leaders will be able to apply for up to £10,000. 
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Eligibility criteria and priorities for funding

To be eligible for an award from the Edinburgh Neuroscience R S MacDonald Seedcorn Fund:

• You must be working as a postdoc, clinical equivalent or Principal Investigator at the University of Edinburgh. Clinical staff should have an honorary contract with the University.
• Your proposed project must clearly align with the R S Macdonald Charitable Trust’s remit, as described above.

Applications will be prioritised if they make a compelling case that, if successful, the project would:

• Support an early career researcher in obtaining important preliminary data or key experience that will help them take their next career step, or consolidate a newly attained position; and/or
• Support a researcher with additional support needs, e.g. returning from a career break, caring responsibilities; and/or
• Foster new collaboration between life course areas, research fields or methodologies; and/for
• Be likely to lead to substantive future funding

Application process

Please download and complete the application form (link below). Email it, together with a recent CV, to Edinburgh.Neuroscience@ed.ac.uk no later than 5pm on Friday 17 October 2025. Late applications will not be accepted.

Your CV can be in any format, but it should include a list of up to 5 research outputs; these can be research papers or other outputs such as software, patents etc.  Note that we are aware that applicants to this scheme will be at different career stages so are not expecting all applicants to have five outputs; this is simply an upper limit.

When listing outputs, please explain for each one why it is an important one. For publications, please include the title, year of publication, the list of authors and the DOI but not the journal in which it was published. 

If you have any questions about any aspect of the application process, please do not hesitate to contact us at Edinburgh.Neuroscience@ed.ac.uk. 

Review process

After the deadline date, the applications will be sent to members of the reviewing panel, who are as follows:

• Professors Cathy Abbott and Malcolm Macleod (Edinburgh Neuroscience Co-Directors)
• Dr Edward Silson (School of Philosophy, Language Sciences and Psychology)
• Prof James Boardman (Institute for Regeneration and Repair)
• Prof Mike Cousin (Institute for Neuroscience and Cardiovascular Research; INCR)
• Dr Andy Stanfield (INCR)
• Dr Alfredo Gonzalez-Sulser (INCR)
• Dr Neshika Samarasekera (INCR)
• Dr Bhuvaneish Thangaraj Selvaraj (INCR)
• Dr Sam Booker (INCR)
• Dr Kat Bowles (INCR)
• Dr Beth York (INCR)
• Dr Danai Katsanevaki (INCR)

This year, we will be using a Bayesian approach to combining the scores of the assessment panel, identifying three groups of applications:

• those which are clearly above the threshold for funding given the funds available;
• those clearly below that threshold
• those which could be funded if there are sufficient funds.

Within this final group, funding will be allocated via a lottery system using weighted randomisation in order to ensure the funding is distributed evenly across our main research areas. Applicants within this group who are not awarded funds will be told that their proposal was considered to have reached the quality threshold for funding, were sufficient funds available.

The panel will meet on 12 November 2025, and a representative of the R S Macdonald Seedcorn Trust will attend the meeting. All applicants will be informed of the outcome of their application shortly after the meeting has concluded. 

We are committed to making the experience of applying for this Seedcorn fund a useful one for all applicants, whether their applications are funded or not. All reviewers will be asked to provide feedback for all applications they review, and this will be provided to the applicants alongside the notification of outcome.

Award management and reporting commitments

Each awardee will be provided with an award letter stating the terms and conditions of the award. Chief among these are:

1. Any funds awarded must be spent within one year of the date of the award letter, or they will be reclaimed without warning.
2. The R S Macdonald Charitable Trust has a keen interest in the projects that they fund and their outcomes. A condition of receiving the funding from them is that we will provide an interim report (~1 year after award) and a final report (~2 years after award) from each project that was funded. Acceptance of the award constitutes agreement to providing these reports when requested.