CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: UK research funding

  • Inside ARIA: How It Funds Differently to UKRI

    The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is a UK non-departmental public body that funds high-risk, high-reward science through Programme Directors who design and run their own funding programmes, rather than through the peer-reviewed competitive grant calls used by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). ARIA also holds a statutory exemption from Freedom of Information requests, a governance carve-out no UKRI council shares.

    ARIA is a British executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), established on 26 January 2023 under the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022. It operates independently of UKRI, with its own statutory ten-year mandate to fund research that is “risky, uncertain and speculative in nature.”

    What is ARIA and who runs it?

    ARIA was proposed by Dominic Cummings as a UK equivalent to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and it received Royal Assent as the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022. It launched with an initial £800 million in government funding, and the June 2025 Spending Review committed a further minimum of £1 billion over the 2025–2029 period.

    ARIA is small by design. Its FY2024/25 annual report and accounts record just 53 employees and a £27.6 million annual budget. Dr Kathleen Fisher became ARIA’s CEO in February 2026, succeeding founding CEO Ilan Gur, who announced his departure in June 2025. Matt Clifford CBE remains Chair. The board also includes the Government Chief Scientific Adviser and advisors such as Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.

    How does ARIA’s Programme Director model actually work?

    Rather than issuing standing competitive calls, ARIA gives named Programme Directors — senior scientists and engineers hired for fixed terms — the authority to define an “opportunity space” and then build and fund a multi-year programme inside it. This is the single biggest structural difference from UKRI’s council-based, panel-reviewed system.

    ARIA’s own published model breaks funding into four channels:

    • Opportunity spaces — broad areas judged highly consequential, under-explored, and ready for new investment.
    • Programmes — multi-year, multi-institution R&D efforts built inside an opportunity space by a Programme Director.
    • Opportunity seeds — smaller, less structured awards to individuals or teams pursuing aligned but unprogrammed ideas.
    • Activation Partners — non-profit and commercial partners who supply entrepreneurial talent and capital to help funded research reach deployment.

    ARIA’s first cohort of eight Programme Directors joined in October 2023, with a second cohort of eight following in April 2025. Notable live programmes include Forecasting Tipping Points (a 27-team, £81 million climate-monitoring effort led by Sarah Bohndiek and Gemma Bale), Scaling Compute (targeting a 1,000-fold reduction in AI compute costs, led by Suraj Bramhavar), and a £50 million outdoor solar geoengineering research programme.

    Funding terms are also structurally different. ARIA does not retain intellectual property rights over funded work, generally does not require match funding, and does not take equity itself, though it caps the equity that funded organisations can hold in spinouts.

    ARIA vs UKRI: how the two funding models compare

    UKRI remains the UK’s primary public research funder, distributing a combined budget of several billion pounds a year across seven research councils, Innovate UK and Research England through competitive, peer-reviewed calls. ARIA is built to complement, not replace, that system by taking on the speculative, early-stage bets UKRI’s accountability structures are not designed to absorb.

    Dimension UKRI ARIA
    Funding decision-maker Peer-review panels, per council Individual Programme Directors
    Primary mechanism Competitive, published grant calls Programme Director-defined “opportunity spaces”
    Risk tolerance Assessed feasibility, incremental risk Statutory mandate to fund “risky, uncertain and speculative” work
    IP treatment Varies by scheme ARIA does not retain IP rights
    FOI status Subject to Freedom of Information Act 2000 Statutorily exempt from FOI requests
    Legal basis Higher Education and Research Act 2017 Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022

    Institutions engaging with ARIA also encounter a different bidding rhythm: rather than responding to fixed annual calls, Creators (ARIA’s term for funded teams, ranging from individual PhD researchers to large organisations) are often recruited directly into a Programme Director’s opportunity space, or apply to time-limited programme-specific calls announced on a rolling basis.

    Why is ARIA exempt from FOI, and what does that mean for accountability?

    The Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022 gave ARIA a statutory exemption from the Freedom of Information Act 2000, a provision Cummings pushed for on the grounds that FOI slows fast, high-risk decision-making. Labour MPs, including Dawn Butler, later attempted to repeal the exemption in Parliament; the attempt was defeated, and the exemption stands.

    The exemption does not remove all scrutiny: ARIA still publishes annual reports and accounts, and its executives have appeared before the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, where CEO Ilan Gur confirmed in September 2025 evidence that UKRI’s Economic and Social Research Council has no authority to halt ARIA’s projects. In May 2026, this reduced-transparency model drew scrutiny after The Guardian reported that ARIA had allocated roughly £23 million to nine US-based technology companies and £29.4 million to three US venture capital groups, prompting economist Cecilia Rikap to question whether public money was expanding US tech-sector capacity rather than UK capability — a debate that reduced FOI visibility makes harder for outside researchers to independently audit.

    What does this mean for institutions bidding into ARIA’s 2026 calls?

    For research administrators and institutional leaders, the practical implication is a fundamentally different due-diligence process. Where UKRI bids are built around published assessment criteria and reviewer panels, ARIA engagement typically starts with a relationship to a specific Programme Director’s opportunity space, and success depends on fit with that programme’s technical thesis rather than a scored proposal against generic criteria.

    Institutions should also budget for ARIA’s lighter contractual overhead — no mandatory match funding and no IP retention lowers the administrative burden compared with many UKRI schemes — while recognising that ARIA’s rolling, programme-specific calls require closer, more continuous horizon-scanning of ARIA’s opportunity spaces than the UKRI funding calendar demands. With a confirmed minimum £1 billion available over 2025–2029 and an expanding programme slate under incoming CEO Kathleen Fisher, ARIA calls are likely to grow in frequency and disciplinary breadth through 2026.

    Answer-first Q&A

    Is ARIA a government agency?

    ARIA is an executive non-departmental public body, not a government department. It is sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and funded through Parliament, but the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022 gives it statutory independence from day-to-day ministerial direction over individual funding decisions.

    Is ARIA part of UKRI?

    No. ARIA is a separate legal body from UK Research and Innovation, created by its own Act of Parliament rather than sitting inside UKRI’s research-council structure. The two organisations are designed to be complementary, with ARIA funding higher-risk work that UKRI’s peer-review processes are not structured to support.

    Who is the CEO of ARIA?

    Dr Kathleen Fisher has been ARIA’s CEO since February 2026, after being named CEO Elect in November 2025. She succeeded founding CEO Ilan Gur, a former ARPA-E Programme Director who announced his departure in June 2025. Matt Clifford CBE has chaired ARIA’s board since 2022.

    Is there a UK version of NASA?

    Not via ARIA. ARIA is modelled on DARPA, the US Department of Defense’s high-risk research agency, not NASA, the US space agency. The UK’s space activities sit instead with the UK Space Agency, a separate executive agency also sponsored by DSIT.

    Looking ahead

    ARIA’s structural bet — Programme Director autonomy, reduced FOI accountability, and tolerance for failed projects — is now backed by a confirmed £1 billion funding floor through 2029, making it a permanent rather than experimental feature of the UK funding landscape. For institutions and research administration teams weighing whether to pursue an ARIA opportunity space or a UKRI call, the choice increasingly comes down to risk appetite and governance tolerance rather than funding availability alone.

  • UKRI’s New Funding Model Explained: What Research Administrators Need to Know for 2026

    UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is in the middle of the most significant overhaul of its application and grants-management infrastructure in a generation. The UKRI new funding model consolidates the disparate systems that research offices have used for years — most notably the ageing Je-S (Joint Electronic Submission) system — into a single, browser-based UKRI Funding Service, alongside a redesigned Funding Finder for discovering live opportunities. For institutions managing a share of UKRI’s more than £8 billion in annual research and innovation funding, this is not a cosmetic IT upgrade. It changes how proposals are drafted, how organisational data is captured, and how compliance is monitored across the grant lifecycle.

    For research administrators, the practical stakes are high. Application routes, data fields, and reporting obligations that have been stable — if clunky — for over a decade are being replaced council by council, scheme by scheme. Getting institutional processes aligned to the new platform, and doing so with consistent metadata practices, is now a live operational priority heading into the 2026 cycle.

    What the UKRI New Funding Model Actually Changes

    At its core, the transition moves application and post-award activity away from Je-S and onto the UKRI Funding Service, a modern, cloud-based platform intended to serve all seven research councils, Research England, and Innovate UK from a common front end. UKRI has been rolling this out incrementally: rather than a single cutover date, individual funding opportunities and schemes have migrated in phases, meaning many research offices are currently operating a hybrid environment — some calls still routed through Je-S, others exclusively through the new service.

    Alongside the application platform itself, UKRI has overhauled UKRI Funding Finder, the public search tool researchers and administrators use to identify open and forthcoming calls. The redesigned finder is intended to reduce the friction of tracking opportunities across nine constituent councils with historically inconsistent naming conventions, deadlines, and eligibility criteria. Institutions that previously relied on manually curated spreadsheets or council-specific alerts to track UKRI funding opportunities are being encouraged to migrate to the centralised finder and its associated notification tools.

    The stated ambition behind the wider UKRI funding portal consolidation is simplification: fewer bespoke application forms, a common set of reusable organisational and project data, and — eventually — a single sign-on and case-tracking experience regardless of which council is funding the work. UKRI has also continued to update its standard UKRI terms and conditions for research grants, clarifying obligations around data management, open access compliance, and financial reporting as part of the same modernisation effort.

    Why This Is a Governance-Standards Issue, Not Just an IT Migration

    Research offices tend to experience system migrations as a training and helpdesk problem. That framing understates what is actually at stake. Every time a funder changes its application architecture, it also changes — implicitly or explicitly — the data model institutions must feed into it: how principal investigators are identified, how organisational affiliations are recorded, how costings and terms are structured, and how outputs and outcomes are reported back.

    This is precisely the territory that research information management standards exist to govern. Persistent identifiers such as ORCID for individual researchers and the Research Organization Registry (ROR) for institutions reduce the ambiguity that free-text name fields introduce into any funder’s database — ambiguity that becomes costly when a research office has to reconcile its internal systems (CRIS, HR, finance) against a funder’s records at renewal, reporting, or audit time. Where a new platform like the UKRI Funding Service standardises identifier capture at the point of application, it materially reduces downstream reconciliation work for research offices — provided institutions actually populate those fields consistently rather than treating them as optional.

    The same logic applies to reporting metadata more broadly. Bodies such as DataCite and CrossRef have spent over a decade demonstrating that consistent, machine-readable metadata at the point of creation is far cheaper than retrospective clean-up. A funder-level platform consolidation is an opportunity to embed that discipline institutionally — or, if handled poorly, an opportunity to multiply inconsistency across an even larger data set.

    Practical Steps for Institutional Research Offices

    Ahead of further rollout through 2026, research offices should treat the transition as a data-governance exercise as much as a systems one:

    • Audit current Je-S versus Funding Service coverage. Maintain an internal register of which schemes and councils have migrated, since guidance and support arrangements differ between the two systems during the transition period.
    • Standardise identifier capture now. Ensure ORCID iDs are mandatory in internal proposal-approval workflows for all named investigators, and confirm the institution’s ROR identifier is used consistently wherever organisational affiliation is recorded, rather than relying on free-text institution names.
    • Re-brief costing and contracts teams on updated terms and conditions. Changes to UKRI’s standard grant terms and conditions can affect audit obligations, data-sharing requirements, and financial reporting deadlines; contracts staff should not assume prior guidance still applies unchanged.
    • Update internal training materials and templates. Application forms, checklists, and costing templates built around Je-S field structures may no longer map cleanly onto the Funding Service’s data model.
    • Assign ownership for Funding Finder monitoring. As legacy alert mechanisms are retired, someone in the research office should own migration to the new finder’s notification tools to avoid missed deadlines during the changeover.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    The immediate operational burden of the UKRI new funding model falls on research offices, not on principal investigators. Administrators are the ones reconciling which schemes sit on which platform, retraining academic staff on new interfaces, and absorbing the ambiguity of a multi-year, phased rollout rather than a single clean cutover. That burden is real, but it is also time-limited and manageable with the right internal governance discipline.

    The larger, more durable implication is about data quality. Institutions that use this transition as a forcing function to standardise identifier use, tidy internal CRIS records, and align local metadata practices with the fields the Funding Service expects will find themselves with cleaner, more defensible data for REF-related reporting, funder audits, and institutional benchmarking well beyond this migration. Those that treat it purely as a login-page change will likely recreate today’s reconciliation headaches inside tomorrow’s system.

    For sector bodies such as ARMA, NCURA, and EARMA, the consolidation also strengthens the case for shared guidance on identifier practice and metadata hygiene across UK and international funders — reducing the risk that every major funder’s platform change becomes a bespoke crisis for research offices to absorb alone.

    Looking Ahead

    UKRI’s platform consolidation will continue in phases through 2026 and beyond, and further schemes are expected to move from Je-S onto the Funding Service as confidence in the new platform grows. Research offices that get ahead of the transition — auditing coverage, enforcing identifier discipline, and refreshing internal guidance on the current terms and conditions — will be better placed to absorb whatever comes next, whether that is further UKRI consolidation or similar modernisation efforts from other national funders following the same trajectory.