Wellcome Commits £155 Million to 14 Doctoral Programmes for Clinician Researchers

Twelve lead institutions will share Wellcome's £155 million round for healthcare-professional researchers, on themes from cancer and AI to multiple long-term conditions.

Wellcome has recently committed £155 million to 14 new doctoral training programmes in 12 institutions for healthcare professionals across the United Kingdom. The funder said the round is designed to reverse a decade-long decline in the number of research-active clinicians in the United Kingdom, and to address what Ben Murton, head of early career and career development researchers at Wellcome, called the "cliff edge" faced by researchers returning to clinical practice after their doctorate.

Each programme will run five cohorts and recruit across the professions, including doctors, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, vets, dentists and allied health professionals, with the first intakes from autumn 2027.

Image Source: Wellcome Funding

About Wellcome and the scheme

Wellcome was established under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur who died in 1936, and is based in London. It is among the world's largest charitable funders of biomedical research, with annual expenditure of about £1.9 billion in 2024/25.

The new round sits inside Wellcome's Doctoral Programmes for Healthcare Professionals scheme, which opened in November 2025 with a call for programmes averaging £12 million each. Wellcome had expected to fund about 12 programmes; it funded 14. Part of the funding is earmarked for career transitions and progression after the doctorate, rather than for the doctorate itself.

The 14 funded programmes

The 14 programmes go to 12 leading institutions. The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (2026 ARWU #201-300) and Queen Mary University of London (2026 ARWU #201-300) lead two each, four of the 14 between them. Behind them the field is level, with ten institutions leading one apiece: the Institute of Cancer Research, The University of Manchester (2026 ARWU #51), Cardiff University (2026 ARWU #201-300), Queen's University Belfast (2026 ARWU #201-300), the University of Leicester (2026 ARWU #301-400), the University of Nottingham (2026 ARWU #101-150), the University of Glasgow (2026 ARWU #151-200), City St George's, University of London (2026 ARWU #601-700), the University of Liverpool (2026 ARWU #151-200) and the University of Oxford (2026 ARWU #7).

Grouped by lead-institution location, nine are in England (four in London), with one each in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Wellcome's own news article does not name the programmes. The roster below comes from the funder's press release of 28 August 2026, and has not yet been mirrored in Wellcome's funded-grants database.