Our Minds Scholarship 2026 - Funding available for short collaborative student-led vacation projects with focus on Global Health

For 2026, the projects should relate in some tangible way to issues of importance for global health. We recommend that you consider how your ideas would fit with the themes of the Symposium, which are:

• Different Ways of Knowing: Centring non-Western approaches to understanding health and looking towards different sources of wisdom and indigenous knowledges.
• Global Health and Equity: Exploring issues of access, equity, and disparities in global health contexts.
• Emerging Challenges in Global Health: Addressing new and emerging health threats and how they reshape global health dynamics.
• Innovation and Technology in Health: The role of technological innovations in advancing global health goals.
• Environment and Health: Understanding the connection between health and the global environment, including climate change and biodiversity.

A significant portion of each project should be focused on the development of a contribution (in a form to be decided) suitable for the Health is Global Symposium. We are very interested in supporting projects that might involve a collaboration with students in another country (we can help try to make connections if you are interested in this possibility). In addition, you should be willing and able to meet at intervals with other awardees in Edinburgh during the vacation, to generate an interactive environment for co-creating joint activities and outcomes.

See successful projects from the 2025 Our Minds programme

How to express your interest

At this stage, we are inviting you to complete a brief Expression of Interest form before 4 pm on Monday, 2nd February. You can send informal queries to David Price (David.Price@ed.ac.uk) or Tom Pratt (t.pratt@ed.ac.uk) ahead of this date. We will let you know as soon as possible after this date if we would like to see a full application.     

Preparing a full application

Based on your initial Expression of Interest, we may invite you to submit a full application. 

If we invite a full application, you will need to identify potential supervisor(s) among the staff at the University of Edinburgh to get their support and discuss ideas. The supervisors need to be willing and able to give you any help you might need with the project, for example with logistics or getting ethical approval (if your project needs it). It will be important for you to establish the practicalities of what you propose, for example, if access to university facilities such as archives or collections or workshops is required, or if you need specialised training. You will need to do this before you complete a full application.   
 

What we are offering

We will be offering each of up to ten people the opportunity to work on their idea by providing an 8 week Taxable Scholarship of £4000. 

Note: If you are a PhD student, you would need to suspend your PhD studies and PhD Scholarship to carry out an Our Minds project.