Wellbeing of Women

Our Research Advisory Committee

The Research Advisory Committee

The Research Advisory Committee (RAC) plays a vital part in the process of choosing which projects fund.

The peer review process that Wellbeing of Women employs was awarded a 'Certificate of Best Practice in Medical Health Peer Review by the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC).

You can find out more about how to apply for grants, grants recently awarded and the published research papers in our Research section of the website.

The work of the Research Advisory Committee is coordinated by our Research Grants Manager.

Once the grant round has opened the applications are received at the Wellbeing office and logged by the Research Grants Manager. Each is then sent to the Chairman of the Research Advisory Committee (RAC) who allocates two members of the RAC to each application. These two members both assess the application and recommend at least 3 external assessors, with the relevant expertise, who could also review the application. External assessors cannot be people named on any other grant application made to Wellbeing in the same round, or from the same institution as the applicants or be in any other way conflicted. It often takes many attempts to find external assessors who are expert in the topic of the application, not conflicted and prepared to undertake the review! (For 100 applications we have probably approached 7-800 people).

The Research Manager at WoW processes the resulting review comments and scores, along with the “scores” of the RAC members looking after the project. This work of peer review and correlation takes from September to January. In January all Project Grant applications along with anonymised reviewers comments and scores are sent to each member of the RAC plus the Director of WoW for the RAC meeting in late January.

A very similar process is run for the Training Grants round that closes in February for awards in June/July each year.

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