CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: ukri research councils

  • UKRI AI Research Labs: What They Mean for Grant Applicants

    UKRI has committed up to £60 million to two new AI research labs, SOFAIR and BOLD, led by UCL and the University of Oxford and funded through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). For grant applicants, the announcement signals a shift toward fundamental, open-source AI research, cross-institution consortium bidding, and a staged, assessment-gated funding model that is likely to shape future UKRI AI calls across all seven research councils.

    UKRI’s AI research labs are strategic, multi-year research centres — the first major investment released under UKRI’s AI Strategic Framework — built to fund high-risk, high-reward fundamental AI research rather than applied product development. The two labs were announced on 23 June 2026, timed to coincide with what would have been Alan Turing’s 114th birthday.

    What are UKRI’s new AI research labs?

    UKRI’s two new labs are the Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab, led by UCL, and the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab, led by the University of Oxford. Both are funded through EPSRC, the UKRI council responsible for engineering and physical sciences, and both work across consortium partners rather than a single institution.

    SOFAIR brings together UCL with the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh to develop next-generation open-source AI architectures that can run on widely available hardware, reducing dependence on a small number of proprietary model providers. It is led by Professor David Barber of UCL. BOLD, led by Associate Professor Jakob Foerster of Oxford, works with UCL and Imperial College London on new learning paradigms — human-centred AI, embodied systems and learning without vast centralised compute.

    Feature SOFAIR Lab BOLD Lab
    Lead institution UCL University of Oxford
    Lead investigator Professor David Barber Associate Professor Jakob Foerster
    Consortium partners Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh UCL, Imperial College London
    Core focus Open-source AI on accessible hardware New learning paradigms, embodied AI
    Initial funding released ~£8 million ~£8 million
    Doctoral training ring-fence £2 million (min. 10 students) £2 million (min. 10 students)

    Why did UKRI double the investment to £60 million?

    UKRI’s original plan committed £40 million to a single AI research lab. The final announcement doubled the number of labs to two and lifted total committed funding to up to £60 million — a signal that the review panel judged the applicant pool strong enough to fund parallel, competing research directions rather than consolidate around one.

    Each lab initially receives around £8 million, with the remainder of its allocation released only after an assessment in autumn 2026. This staged, gated funding model — rather than a single upfront grant — is itself a departure from how UKRI has typically structured large capital-style research investments, and it is a detail every institution bidding into future rounds should note.

    What does this mean for grant applicants?

    For institutions and principal investigators watching UKRI’s AI funding pipeline, four practical signals stand out:

    • Consortium bids are favoured over single-institution proposals. Both labs span three to four universities, reflecting UKRI’s preference for pooled expertise over isolated centres of excellence.
    • Fundamental, “blue-sky” research is explicitly back in favour. EPSRC’s framing prioritises foundational questions — new architectures, new learning algorithms — over applied deployment work, reversing some of the recent emphasis on near-market translation.
    • Doctoral and early-career funding is ring-fenced, not discretionary. Each lab must support a minimum of ten doctoral students from a dedicated £2 million allocation, giving PhD applicants and postdocs a concrete, quantifiable funding route rather than a vague promise of “opportunities.”
    • Continuation funding is now conditional on a mid-point review. Applicants should expect future large AI awards to build in an autumn-style assessment gate before releasing full committed funding, rather than disbursing the full sum at award.

    Open-source commitments and spin-out support are also written into both labs’ remits, so institutions preparing future bids should be ready to demonstrate a route to commercialisation and public dissemination of tooling, not only publication output.

    How does this fit UKRI’s cross-council AI strategy?

    EPSRC administers the SOFAIR and BOLD awards, but the labs sit inside a wider, cross-council AI programme. UKRI comprises seven research councils, and the AI Strategic Framework explicitly positions AI as a cross-cutting priority rather than an EPSRC-only remit. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) — best known for its Hartree Centre, which provides supercomputing and applied AI infrastructure to UK researchers and industry — sits alongside EPSRC as part of that same seven-council structure, underscoring that compute infrastructure and fundamental AI research are being coordinated as complementary strands of one strategy rather than funded in isolation.

    Professor Charlotte Deane, Senior Responsible Owner for the UKRI AI Programme and Executive Chair of EPSRC, described the labs as backing “the bold, high-reward ideas that can shape the future of AI” — language that maps directly onto UKRI’s broader AI strategy documents, which call for regional clusters, sovereign compute capability and closer links between fundamental research councils and applied infrastructure providers such as STFC and the Alan Turing Institute.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is the UKRI AI strategy plan?

    UKRI’s AI strategy sets out a plan to turn the UK’s research strengths into economic advantage by backing fundamental AI research, regional innovation clusters and sovereign AI capability. The SOFAIR and BOLD labs are described as the first major investment released under this framework, with further AI calls expected to follow the same fundamental-research emphasis.

    How much funding did UKRI commit to the new AI labs?

    UKRI committed up to £60 million across the two labs, doubling an original £40 million single-lab plan. Each lab receives an initial tranche of roughly £8 million, with the remaining funds released after an autumn 2026 progress assessment.

    Can researchers outside UCL and Oxford apply for lab funding?

    The two labs are led by UCL and Oxford with named consortium partners, so direct lab leadership is fixed. However, doctoral studentships, postdoctoral posts and collaboration opportunities are expected to open as the labs recruit, and researchers should monitor EPSRC and UKRI funding-opportunity pages for associated calls.

    Which universities lead UKRI’s new AI research labs?

    UCL leads the SOFAIR Lab with Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh as partners; the University of Oxford leads the BOLD Lab with UCL and Imperial College London as partners. Both labs also engage with the Alan Turing Institute and UKRI’s existing AI research hubs.

    Implications and outlook

    For research administrators drafting institutional AI strategies, the SOFAIR and BOLD awards are a useful template for what UKRI now expects from a competitive large-scale AI bid: multi-institution consortia, an explicit open-source or public-good deliverable, a ring-fenced doctoral-training component, and acceptance of a staged funding gate rather than a single lump-sum award.

    The autumn 2026 assessment point is worth diarising directly — it will be the first public test of whether UKRI’s gated model releases the remaining funds smoothly or triggers a public renegotiation, and either outcome will inform how future large AI calls from EPSRC, and potentially jointly with STFC’s compute-infrastructure remit, are structured. Institutions preparing bids for the next round of UKRI AI funding should treat this announcement as the current baseline for what “fundable” fundamental AI research now looks like in the UK.

  • UKRI Funding Buckets Explained for Grant Holders

    UKRI funding buckets are the four categories — curiosity-driven research, strategic government and societal priorities, supporting innovative companies, and a cross-cutting “enabling and strengthening UK R&D” layer — into which UK Research and Innovation now allocates its £38.6 billion 2026–2030 budget. The model replaces council-by-council settlements with outcome-led pots, and it will shape how every future grant call is designed through to the 2030 spending review deadline.

    UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the UK’s largest public funder of research and innovation, distributing money through seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK. From April 2026, UKRI directs the majority of that money through the new bucket structure rather than through traditional per-council budget lines — the biggest change to its allocation model since UKRI was created in 2018.

    What are UKRI’s funding buckets?

    A UKRI funding bucket is one of the strategic investment categories UKRI now uses to allocate its budget, replacing the previous practice of setting a fixed annual budget for each research council individually. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) set out the underlying “three R&D priorities” in its 30 October 2025 spending plans; UKRI applied these to its £38.6 billion allocation in its 17 December 2025 budget explainer.

    UKRI’s own framing names three “priority buckets”:

    • Curiosity-driven, foundational research — applicant-led grants and block grants such as Quality-related (QR) funding to English universities.
    • Strategic government and societal priorities — targeted programmes aligned to the government’s Modern Industrial Strategy sectors and wider missions.
    • Supporting innovative companies — commercialisation, knowledge exchange and business scale-up funding, delivered mainly through Innovate UK.

    A fourth, cross-cutting category — enabling and strengthening UK R&D — funds the infrastructure, talent and institutes underpinning all three priority buckets. UKRI does not brand it a fourth “priority,” but it has its own budget line (Table 9 of the explainer), and sector analysts describe it as functioning as a de facto fourth bucket.

    How much money sits in each bucket?

    UKRI’s 17 December 2025 explainer publishes exact four-year totals for the 2026–27 to 2029–30 spending review (SR) period, broken down by bucket:

    Bucket SR-period total What it funds
    1. Curiosity-driven research £14.5 billion Applicant-led grants (£3.3bn), QR funding to universities (£8.9bn), institutes and open-access infrastructure (£2.3bn)
    2. Strategic government and societal priorities £8.3 billion Industrial Strategy sector programmes (£4.5bn), the R&D Missions Accelerator (£500m), the Edinburgh supercomputer (£750m)
    3. Supporting innovative companies £7.4 billion Innovate UK-led commercialisation, HEIF, the Local Innovation Partnership Fund (£440m)
    4. Enabling and strengthening UK R&D £8.4 billion Institutes (£1.6bn), collective talent/doctoral funding (£3.5bn), infrastructure (£2.1bn)

    Adding all four lines gives UKRI’s full four-year settlement of £38.586 billion, rising from £9.22 billion in 2026–27 to £9.99 billion in 2029–30 — the “near-£10 billion” annual run-rate UKRI and sector commentators now reference for the end of the spending review period.

    Three buckets or four? Why the count matters

    The discrepancy between “three priority buckets” and a widely reported “fourth bucket” is not a labelling quibble — it changes how grant holders should read UKRI’s own communications. UKRI’s explainer text still says “investment in three priority buckets,” yet the same document allocates £8.4 billion to a separate, numbered budget line (bucket four) that funds infrastructure, skills and institutes.

    Wonkhe’s analysis of the settlement described this fourth line plainly: it is “what is basically a fourth bucket.” For grant holders, infrastructure and doctoral/talent funding — underpinning every council’s ability to deliver — now sit in a separately governed pot rather than inside familiar discipline-specific budgets.

    What the restructuring means for grant holders

    For applicants and research-office staff, the bucket model changes both what gets funded and how decisions get made:

    • Fewer council-specific figures. UKRI states “a breakdown by research council is only possible for curiosity-driven research” — buckets two and three report only by Industrial Strategy sector, not by funding council.
    • Leverage expectations. UKRI targets “an average leverage ratio of at least £3 of private investment for every £1 of public investment” across strategic and innovative-company calls — expect this built into co-funding criteria.
    • Cross-council, SRO-led programmes. Buckets two and three are delivered through cross-UKRI programmes, each led by one executive-chair Senior Responsible Owner, so calls increasingly span disciplines under one programme brand.

    Curiosity-driven applicant-led research — most familiar to individual investigators — keeps its existing per-council structure and, per UKRI, sees “increases over the period” for every council. Grant holders in Industrial Strategy-adjacent fields (AI, quantum, life sciences, clean energy) should expect more programmatic, mission-shaped calls; those in curiosity-driven disciplines should expect process continuity, a larger overall pot, and some coherence-driven reallocation, such as the planned phase-out of non-recurrent Research England funds from 2027–28.

    Is UKRI cutting STFC and other councils, or just hiding the numbers?

    Search interest in “STFC cuts” reflects genuine sector anxiety, but the honest answer is that the bucket model makes council-level comparisons largely unverifiable from UKRI’s public explainer alone. The only research-council figure UKRI publishes is for applicant-led research within bucket one: the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) gets £344 million of the £3.3 billion four-year applicant-led total, against £1,170 million for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and £453 million for the Medical Research Council.

    Everything STFC receives through buckets two, three or four — including large-scale infrastructure and international subscriptions, historically a significant share of its budget — is folded into cross-cutting or Industrial Strategy totals with no council attribution. This has drawn direct parliamentary scrutiny: in March 2026, UKRI chief executive Professor Sir Ian Chapman wrote to the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, giving the first detailed comparison of past and future spending under the new model and describing the shift as “not a simple reclassification” but a “fundamental change in how money flows through the organisation.” Committee chair Dame Chi Onwurah said such comparisons are “especially important for understanding what’s changing and for holding UKRI to account — particularly amid reports of research funding cuts.”

    In short: no UKRI document currently states that STFC’s overall funding is being cut, but no UKRI document currently lets anyone outside UKRI verify the opposite either — which is precisely the accountability gap the parliamentary committee is now pressing UKRI to close.

    Common questions about UKRI’s funding buckets

    How many funding buckets does UKRI actually have?

    UKRI names three priority buckets — curiosity-driven research, strategic government and societal priorities, and supporting innovative companies — plus a fourth budget line, enabling and strengthening UK R&D (£8.4 billion), which sector commentators treat as a de facto fourth bucket.

    Which UKRI funding bucket is the largest?

    Curiosity-driven research is the largest bucket at £14.5 billion over the 2026–2030 spending review period, covering applicant-led grants, Quality-related (QR) university funding, and research institutes and infrastructure supporting fundamental discovery.

    What is UKRI’s leverage ratio target for strategic funding?

    UKRI is targeting an average of £3 of private investment for every £1 of public investment across its strategic government and innovative-company buckets, with higher ratios expected specifically for programmes supporting innovative companies.

    Does the new model change how applicant-led grants are assessed?

    No — applicant-led research keeps its existing research-council structure, with every council seeing budget increases over the period; the bucket changes mainly affect strategic and industrial-strategy-linked programmes, not investigator-led applications.

    Outlook: the road to a near-£10bn annual budget

    UKRI’s annual budget rises steadily across the spending review period — from £9.22 billion in 2026–27 to £9.99 billion in 2029–30 — placing it on a trajectory toward, though not quite reaching, £10 billion a year by decade’s end. UKRI has said it will publish a single delivery plan for 2026–27 in spring 2026, and will continue “increasing the coherence of its portfolio within and across buckets” as the model beds in.

    For grant holders, the practical task now is to map pipeline applications onto the new bucket structure, track which Industrial Strategy programmes intersect with their discipline, and watch the parliamentary committee’s scrutiny sessions for council-level detail UKRI’s own explainer does not yet provide. Institutions with dedicated research administration teams are best placed to translate these bucket-level signals into concrete guidance for principal investigators preparing 2026–27 and 2027–28 calls.

  • UKRI Research Councils Explained: Who Funds What

    UKRI research councils are the seven discipline-specific funding bodies — AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC and STFC — that operate inside UK Research and Innovation alongside two non-research-council members, Research England and Innovate UK, making nine councils in total, each with its own funding remit, grant schemes and deadlines.

    UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is the non-departmental public body, sponsored by the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, that brings the UK’s seven discipline-based research councils together with Research England and Innovate UK under one funding umbrella. UKRI was established on 1 April 2018 under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, replacing the previous Research Councils UK coordinating arrangement.

    What is UKRI and why does it have nine councils, not seven?

    UKRI is a single strategic body, but it funds through nine constituent councils, not seven. This distinction trips up many administrators new to the UK system, because “research council” is often used loosely to mean any UKRI member body.

    Strictly, only seven of the nine are research councils: the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Medical Research Council (MRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Research England and Innovate UK complete the nine-council structure but are not classified as research councils — Research England funds and engages with English higher education providers, and Innovate UK is the UK’s national innovation agency for business-led projects. UKRI itself states plainly that it is “made up of seven research councils, Innovate UK and Research England.”

    Which are the seven discipline-specific research councils?

    Each research council funds a defined subject area, runs its own panels and deadlines, and in several cases operates national research facilities. The table below maps each council to its core remit and a representative funding activity.

    Council Acronym Core funding remit Representative activity
    Arts and Humanities Research Council AHRC Arts, humanities, creative and cultural industries Doctoral training partnerships; creative economy programmes
    Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BBSRC Biology, bioscience, food security, agri-tech Institute Strategic Programme grants; responsive-mode research grants
    Economic and Social Research Council ESRC Economics, social sciences, behavioural and human data science Research centres; Large Grants scheme
    Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EPSRC Engineering, physical sciences, mathematics, computer science Programme Grants; Centres for Doctoral Training
    Medical Research Council MRC Human health, medical science, therapeutics Clinical Trials Units; MRC Units and Institutes
    Natural Environment Research Council NERC Environmental science, climate, geosciences, marine and polar research National Capability funding; independent research organisation grants
    Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC Astronomy, particle physics, space science, large-scale facilities Operates Diamond Light Source and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

    The seven councils vary substantially in age and origin. MRC traces its roots to the Medical Research Committee of 1913, making it one of the world’s oldest continuously operating medical research funders. NERC was established under the Science and Technology Act 1965. BBSRC and EPSRC were both formed in 1994, when the former Science and Engineering Research Council split into subject-specific successors. STFC is the youngest, created in 2007 through the merger of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.

    How do Research England and Innovate UK differ from the research councils?

    Research England and Innovate UK sit alongside the seven research councils inside UKRI but fund on a different basis. Research England distributes quality-related (QR) block-grant funding to English universities to sustain their research base, rather than funding individual investigator-led projects through competitive calls in the way the research councils do. Innovate UK, formerly the Technology Strategy Board before its 2014 rebrand, funds business-led innovation and commercialisation rather than academic discovery research.

    A further jurisdictional nuance matters for institutional administrators: Research England funds only higher education providers in England. Equivalent research and knowledge-exchange funding for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is administered separately by the Scottish Funding Council, Medr (the Welsh tertiary education and research body, formerly HEFCW) and the Department for the Economy Northern Ireland respectively — none of which are UKRI councils. Administrators at devolved-nation institutions therefore need to look outside UKRI entirely for their equivalent of Research England funding, a distinction that UKRI’s own council-listing pages do not spell out.

    How do administrators identify the right council for a proposal?

    Most proposals map cleanly to a single council by discipline, but interdisciplinary projects often span two or more remits. UKRI runs its own Funding Finder as a single entry point across all nine councils and cross-council calls, which is the most reliable way to check current opportunities and deadlines rather than relying on an individual council’s page alone.

    • Identify the dominant discipline of the proposal first, then check whether a secondary council co-funds cross-disciplinary calls in that area.
    • Use UKRI’s Funding Finder rather than a single council website, since cross-council and strategic-priority calls are listed centrally.
    • Check facility-access routes (for example, STFC-operated national facilities) separately from standard grant calls, as these often have distinct access panels.
    • For projects based wholly in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, confirm whether the relevant funding stream sits with a UKRI research council or with the devolved funding body instead.

    Since UKRI’s formation in 2018, the previous Research Councils UK collaborative structure has been superseded by UKRI’s own cross-council strategic funds, which administrators should treat as the current mechanism for genuinely interdisciplinary proposals rather than assuming each council operates in isolation.

    UKRI research councils: frequently asked questions

    What are the 7 research councils?

    The seven research councils are AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC and STFC. Each funds a distinct discipline area — from arts and humanities to physics and space science — and operates its own grant schemes, panels and deadlines within the wider nine-council UKRI structure.

    How many councils are there in UKRI?

    UKRI has nine councils in total: the seven discipline-specific research councils plus Research England and Innovate UK. Only the first seven are formally described as research councils; the remaining two fund higher-education block grants and business-led innovation respectively.

    Is the Medical Research Council part of UKRI?

    Yes. The Medical Research Council has operated as one of UKRI’s seven research councils since UKRI’s creation in April 2018. MRC retains its own identity, funding schemes and Units and Institutes, but sits within the wider UKRI structure alongside the other eight councils.

    What research areas does UKRI support?

    UKRI supports research and innovation across all academic disciplines, spanning medical and biological sciences, physics, astronomy, chemistry, engineering, environmental science, economics and the social sciences, and the arts and humanities, plus business-led innovation through Innovate UK and university research capacity through Research England.

    What this means for institutional administrators

    For research administrators new to the UK funding system, the practical takeaway is definitional precision: “UKRI research councils” and “UKRI councils” are not interchangeable. Grant terms, eligibility rules, open-access mandates and reporting requirements can differ by council even where UKRI sets shared overarching policy, so proposal teams should confirm the specific council’s current guidance rather than assuming uniform rules apply across all nine.

    As UKRI continues to run cross-council strategic funds alongside each council’s individual schemes, administrators supporting interdisciplinary bids should expect proposal routing to involve more than one council’s process — and should build that into internal costing and sign-off timelines accordingly.