Training Grant: Health Research Training Platform (2024/2025)

The specific objectives of this funding opportunity are to:

1. Support the development of structured, openly available, diverse, inclusive and sustainable training and mentoring platforms that build Canadian capacity in areas of health research, health issues, scientific opportunities and critical gaps by:
   • Supporting the engagement of diverse trainees and early career researchers (ECRs) in collaborative research across institutions, disciplines, jurisdictions and sectors;
   • Incorporating diverse training approaches, including experiential training opportunities;
   • Including diverse and inclusive paradigms of research training and mentoring (e.g., Indigenous ways of knowing and community-based research) in a meaningful and culturally safe manner; and
   • Implementing recruitment, training, and mentorship strategies to attract trainees and ECRs from a diversity of population groups and communities, including those who have been historically excluded, by embedding and applying equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) best practices in these strategies.
2. Support the development of skills that increase the likelihood of employability and career prospects of diverse trainees and ECRs across sectors, by integrating training on:
   • Approaches to advance rigorous, responsible, and impactful research (e.g., EDI considerations and analysis – including sex- and gender-based analysis, embedding inclusive patient and persons with lived or living experience (PWLE) engagement in all stages of research, knowledge mobilization, research data management, research involving Indigenous Peoples, ethics, unconscious bias);
   • Grant/proposal writing, budgeting, and peer review;
   • Professional development skills (including transferrable skills, such as communication, analytical thinking, problem solving, project management, leadership, etc.);
   • Applying knowledge mobilization strategies (e.g., priority-setting and co-production, dissemination and communication, evidence synthesis, implementation of high-quality evidence, embedded research, etc.) and advancing knowledge mobilization science (e.g., implementation science, embedded research, evaluation of KM strategies) and,
   • Diverse career options and opportunities available across the different sectors (academia, private/for profit, public, and not-for-profit).