Department of Research and Innovation Hosts a SAMRC Grants and Scholarships Engagement

The University of Zululand’s Research and Innovation (RI) office hosted a South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC ) Grants and Scholarships Engagement for academics and postgraduate students in the health sciences.

The SAMRC’S mandate is to better the health and standard of life of South Africans and this needs to be realised throughout research, development and technology transfer. Its administration support services are to conduct research, facilitate innovation, develop research capacity and fund research.

This session aimed to discuss scholarships and funding that are good for UNIZULU postgraduate students, post jobs and researchers. It was also intended to encourage and show students on how to apply and its importance.

Dr Marlon Cerf opened the session by giving the background, vision and the structure of SAMRC. He indicated that the SAMRC focuses more on masters and doctoral researchers and funds these students for five years. The SAMRC conducts research mainly through intermural units which is through university departments. He also stated that the SAMRC program has an innovation entity and the research capacity development for the scholarships.

Research capacity development for health or science South African researchers within the division of the research capacity and development, they have two funding streams which is the grants and scholarships. Dr Lindokuhle Ndlandla, the project manager of postgraduate/scholarships programs, discussed grants portfolio with six programs such as the Research Capacity Development  initiative program, Mid-career scientist program,  In house SAMRC Intermural Postdoctoral Fellowship program (for students that have completed their PhD and want to be trained), SAMRC division program, Postdoctoral Career Development program, SARMC early Investigators program which focuses on students with a PhD and have gone through their postdoctoral or training in bio-chemistry and those students can get employed by universities as lecturers. This SARMC early Investigators program also tries to make students independent researchers, help them strengthen their leadership skills, increase their research outputs, gain research management, and get an opportunity to supervise masters and PhD students.

Furthermore, Dr Ndlandla explained the five SAMRC scholarships programs. The popular one which is the Bongani Manyosi scholarship which is dedicated to health professionals, as it matches the scholarship value to what the student would be getting if they were working and it also to builds a transformational health research academic path line, the Clinician researcher program which is for researchers with a medical degree, SAMRC Internship Scholarship program which has been used a lot to fund students from UNIZULU and Researcher development program.

SAMRC’s priority grant programs include National Health Research proprieties, other National priorities such as National Department of Health ( NDoH) ,Department of Science and Innovation( DSI); and National Development Plan; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), National Think Tanks and Strategic partner priorities.

-Sinenhlanhla Ngcongo