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Successful ECR Catalyst Grant Projects awarded Mental Health & Wellbeing Catalyst funding

13 January 2025

We’re excited to announce nine successful ECR Catalyst Grant Projects awarded by UCL Grand Challenges

catalyst grants

The UCL’s Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing (GC MHW) has awarded nine catalyst grants, each up to £10,000, to support cutting-edge research and innovation that crosses disciplinary boundaries and focuses on bringing discovery to practice. These projects represent impactful catalytic work that enable interdisciplinary connections, trial new approaches, and prepare for large-scale research bids.

Panel co-chairs of UCL Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing, Professor Jonathan Roiser (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) and Dr Liza Griffin (The Bartlett Development Planning Unit), expressed their excitement about the new projects:

“As co-chairs of UCL Grand Challenge of Mental Health & Wellbeing's funding call aimed at early and mid-career researchers, we were pleased to receive a large number of applications, and the review panel was greatly impressed by the quality and variety of proposals. We are delighted to be able to award nine innovative and ambitious projects, led by early and mid-career researchers. These projects have strong cross-faculty representation to foster meaningful institutional collaborations, with many of them involving co-production approaches to enable the development of impactful work with communities. We look forward to seeing the outcomes of these projects, which will help to provide much-needed knowledge and solutions to support good mental health, to create transformational and beneficial real-world impacts.”

The review panel awarded total funding of around £200k to the following projects:

Co-designing a trauma-informed research framework through community-led co-design workshops
£9,660.00
Dr Maryam Bandukda, Faculty of Engineering
Professor Catherine Holloway, Faculty of Engineering

Endometriosis, mental health and wellbeing: a co-production approach integrating healthcare data and patients’ lived experiences through a novel and interdisciplinary collaboration, to improve understanding and inform solutions.
£9,230.00
Dr Isobel Braithwaite, Faculty of Population Health Sciences
Dr Sarah Beale, Faculty of Population Health Sciences

SPIKE: Development of Social Phobia Intervention for Key Cybersecurity Exploit Mitigation
£9,107.48
Dr Martin Dechant, Faculty of Brain Sciences
Dr Bettina Moltrecht, UCL Institute of Education

Co-creating digital bibliotherapy: designing effective and inclusive wellbeing interventions
£9,989.00
Dr Laura Dietz, Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Professor Sam Duncan, UCL Institute of Education

Held by the Mother Goddess: Working with Non-Binary Spiritual Leaders to Provide Early Mental Health Care and Referral for LGBTQ+ people in Hanoi, Vietnam
£10,000.00
Dr Lu Gram, Faculty of Population Health Sciences
Professor Joanna Cook, Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences

Digital Innovation in Body Dysmorphic Disorder Therapy: Improving Access and Understanding Mechanisms of Change.
£9,250.00
Dr Elizabeth Hogg, Faculty of Brain Sciences
Dr Georgina Krebs, Faculty of Brain Sciences

The Biopsychosocial-Economic Impact of Workplace Racism on Black Professionals: A Mixed Methods Investigation
£10,000.00
Mr Anthony Isiwele, UCL Institute of Education
Dr Funmi Adewole Elliott, Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Mental health inequalities between gender minority and cisgender emerging and young adults: Creation of a UK-based dataset
£9,959.90
Ms Merle Schlief, Faculty of Brain Sciences
Dr Gemma Lewis, Faculty of Brain Sciences

AMASS: Improving Access to Mental health and support services for South Asian adult Survivors of Sexual violence in the UK
£10,000
Ms Shivangi Talwar, Faculty of Brain Sciences
Dr Harpreet Sihre, Faculty of Population Health Sciences