My winning proposal: Small charities in focus

Building a research programme with small project grants from a specialist vision charity

Top tips:

• Take care when approaching a specialist funder in your field for the first time; if you succeed then a highly fruitful relationship could develop over the course of your career
• Sketch out how one large programme could actually be run as a series of smaller grants
• The advice of previous grantees is particularly valuable with smaller charities
• Have as much of the application ready and clear in your head as possible at the preliminary application stage

Majlinda Lako is a professor of stem cell sciences at Newcastle University. While she has won grants from a number of funders, the Macular Society, a small UK charity which funds research into macular disease, a group of age-related genetic conditions that can lead to sight loss, is a particularly important funder for her research. She is currently working on a project partly funded by the most recent grant.