The prestigious Wellcome Career Development Awards Scheme provides funding for mid-career researchers from any discipline who have the potential to be international research leaders.
The awards are intended to help scientists develop their research capabilities, drive innovative programmes of work and deliver significant shifts in understanding related to human life, health and wellbeing.
Dr Sumana Sharma’s research will focus on a type of white blood cell called T cells and the receptors on their surface that influence their activity during an immune response. Her research aims to provide insights that will help generate 'designer' T cells with optimized properties, improving their effectiveness in cancer immunotherapy.
T cells are a key component in the immune response. They have inhibitory receptors on their surface that can suppress their activation signals and prevent excessive immune responses. This mechanism that can be exploited by cancer cells, so blocking these inhibitory receptors has emerged as a powerful immunotherapy strategy, now used in 12% of cancer treatments.
However, despite their therapeutic potential, understanding of these receptors remains limited. This is likely due to their vast number—around 60—with diverse expression patterns and functions. Dr Sharma's research will investigate why there are so many different receptors, how they vary and which offer the best therapeutic targets.
Sumana’s Top Tips for Applying to the Scheme:
- Start early and brainstorm as many ideas as possible before refining them. Seek feedback from a diverse range of people to help shape and improve your proposal.
- Focus not just on the research outline, but also on your academic journey—what has led you to write this application now? What makes you uniquely suited to carry out this project?
- Everything counts! It’s not just the papers—consider the mentoring you've done, the committees you've served on, and every experience that prepares you to lead a group. Funders value all these contributions.
- Interviews can be unpredictable, so prepare a variety of responses. I found it helpful to categorize them by theme and develop short (30-second to 1-minute) core answers for each.
- Don’t hesitate to ask for help—there are plenty of resources available. Look at successful applications, talk to peers at a similar stage, and learn what they focused on. You’ll find your angle soon enough!