British Academy Small Research Grant, Conference and Policy Workshop Proposal

The Wellcome Trust is putting £3.97 million into a new funding scheme run by the British Academy, designed to support humanities and social science researchers working on health and wellbeing. This matters because health research is overwhelmingly dominated by biomedical and clinical science. The humanities and social sciences—fields like history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy—ask different questions: how do cultural beliefs shape attitudes to vaccination? What makes a healthcare system feel fair to patients? How do economic inequalities become health inequalities? These questions are rarely answered in a lab, yet they are central to how health policies actually work in the real world. The gap is that researchers in these fields often struggle to secure funding for projects that do not fit traditional medical research frameworks. If the scheme succeeds, it could shift how funders and policymakers think about health. The £2.76 million for small grants, £1.12 million for conferences, and £84,000 for policy workshops will allow academics at all career stages to build evidence on the social and cultural dimensions of health. Over the long term, this could lead to more effective public health interventions, better-designed healthcare services, and policies that account for the human realities of illness and care—things that quietly shape how well any medical advance actually works in practice.