British Academy APEX Awards 2027: Up to £200,000 for Established UK Researchers to Pursue Genuinely Interdisciplinary Projects Across the Sciences, Engineering, and Humanities

British Academy APEX Awards 2027: Up to £200,000 for Established UK Researchers to Pursue Genuinely Interdisciplinary Projects Across the Sciences, Engineering, and Humanities

Some of the most interesting research questions sit in the gaps between disciplines — where a historian’s reading of evidence meets an engineer’s model, or where a materials scientist’s problem turns out to hinge on a question about human behaviour. Those questions are notoriously hard to fund. Conventional grant schemes are organised around single subject areas, and a proposal that straddles two or three of them often falls between the cracks, judged as “not quite” fitting any one panel’s remit. The APEX Awards exist precisely to fund the work that would otherwise slip through.

APEX stands for Academies Partnership in Supporting Excellence in Cross-disciplinary research. It is a joint scheme run by three of the UK’s national academies — the British Academy (for the humanities and social sciences), the Royal Society (for the natural sciences), and the Royal Academy of Engineering (for engineering) — with support from the Leverhulme Trust. The awards give established, independent researchers up to £200,000 over as long as 24 months to pursue genuinely interdisciplinary, curiosity-driven projects that benefit wider society. For the 2027 round, the application deadline is 8 September 2026 at 15:00 BST.

This guide explains what the award covers, who is eligible, how the interdisciplinary requirement really works, how to apply through the Royal Society’s Flexi-Grant system, and how to build a proposal that convinces reviewers your collaboration is the real thing rather than two projects stapled together.

Key Details at a Glance

Note that award values, caps, and exact eligibility wording can be refined each round. Always confirm the current figures against the official scheme guidance notes before you build your budget or start writing.

What the Award Offers

An APEX Award is a substantial, flexible research grant. Up to £200,000 can be spent over a period of up to two years, and the money is designed to be used where interdisciplinary projects actually need it:

• Staff costs for the lead applicant and the co-applicant(s). This is the heart of the award — it buys the people time that genuine collaboration demands.
• Associated research costs — consumables, fieldwork, data, equipment, travel, and similar — capped at no more than 25% of the total award value. The scheme is deliberately weighted toward people rather than kit.
• Public engagement, with the option to request up to £10,000 to communicate the research to non-academic audiences. This sits inside the £200,000 ceiling rather than on top of it.

Beyond the cash, the value of an APEX Award is reputational and structural. It carries the joint imprimatur of three national academies, it explicitly rewards the kind of boundary-crossing that many career structures penalise, and it gives you a formal, funded reason to build a serious partnership with a collaborator from another field. For an established researcher, that combination — money, prestige, and a mandate to work across silos — is unusual and worth a lot.

The Interdisciplinary Requirement — the Heart of the Scheme

The single most important thing to understand about APEX is that interdisciplinarity is not a bonus feature; it is the eligibility gate. The scheme is built to support “outstanding interdisciplinary research which is unlikely to be supported through conventional funding programmes,” with a particular emphasis on collaboration at the boundary between science, engineering, and the social sciences and humanities.

In practice, this means two things:

1. Your project must span the remit of more than one of the three academies. The remits are:
   • British Academy — any discipline within the humanities and social sciences.
   • Royal Society — the natural sciences, broadly defined to include mathematics, computer science, materials, environmental, medical, and engineering sciences, but excluding clinical medicine.
   • Royal Academy of Engineering — any engineering discipline, defined in the broadest sense (including computer science and materials).
2. You must collaborate with a co-applicant from a different discipline. You may include up to two co-applicants with complementary expertise, and where the project spans the remit, at least one co-applicant must fall under a different academy’s remit than the lead applicant.

Reviewers are looking for genuine integration across disciplines — a project where the two fields are load-bearing, each shaping the questions and methods of the other. A proposal that reads as a social-science study with an engineering appendix, or a physics project that gestures vaguely at “ethical implications,” will struggle. The strongest applications describe a question that neither discipline could answer alone.

Who Should Apply

APEX is aimed at established independent researchers — not early-career postdocs. If you are looking for an early-career route at the British Academy, the separate British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships scheme is the relevant one; APEX is a different animal aimed at a later career stage.

To be eligible as a lead applicant you should be:

• An exceptional researcher with an excellent track record and a proven ability to lead collaborative work.
• Based at a UK university or a UK not-for-profit research organisation.
• Holding a permanent or fixed-term position that covers the full duration of the award.
• In a role with teaching and/or administrative duties from which you can be released so that you have the time the project requires.

Co-applicants should hold appropriate positions at UK institutions and bring complementary expertise from a different discipline. The co-applicant can be based at the same institution as you or at a different UK university — co-location is not required, but a real intellectual partnership is.

This is a good fit if you are a mid-career or senior academic with an established research identity in one field who has a serious, specific reason to work with someone in another. It is a poor fit if you are looking for seed funding to explore whether a collaboration might work; APEX expects you to arrive with a well-formed joint project and a partner already on board.

The Application Process, Step by Step

Applications are submitted through the Royal Society’s Flexi-Grant system, the shared grants platform used across the three academies for this scheme. The broad shape of the process is:

1. Read the current scheme guidance notes and FAQs on the British Academy website. These documents contain the authoritative, round-specific rules on eligibility, costs, and assessment criteria. Do this before anything else — the details below are a summary, not a substitute.
2. Confirm your eligibility and your co-applicant’s. Check the position requirements, the host-institution rules, and — critically — that your project genuinely spans more than one academy remit.
3. Register or log in to Flexi-Grant and start the application well ahead of the deadline. Institutional approval routes can add days at the end.
4. Draft the case for support, making the interdisciplinary integration explicit, and prepare the budget so that research costs stay within the 25% cap and any public engagement request stays within the £10,000 (and overall £200,000) limits.
5. Route the application through your institution’s research office for approval and submission ahead of the deadline.
6. Submit before 15:00 BST on 8 September 2026. Late applications are not accepted, and systems are busiest in the final hours.

After submission, applications go through peer review and assessment against the scheme’s criteria, with decisions communicated in the months following. Awards in a typical round are expected to start in the autumn or winter following the deadline and can run for up to 24 months from there.

Required Materials and How to Prepare Them

While the exact fields are set out in Flexi-Grant and the guidance notes, an APEX application will typically require:

• A case for support / research proposal describing the questions, methods, interdisciplinary integration, and expected outcomes.
• A detailed budget and justification, respecting the 25% research-costs cap and the public engagement limit.
• CVs and track-record information for the lead applicant and co-applicant(s), demonstrating you are established, independent researchers.
• A public engagement plan, if you are requesting those funds.
• Institutional approval from each host organisation’s research office.

Preparation strategy: start the partnership long before you start the paperwork. The most convincing proposals grow out of conversations that have already happened — a shared reading, a pilot exchange of data, a jointly noticed problem. Write the proposal so that a reviewer from either academy can follow it: define terms from the other discipline, avoid jargon that only your own field uses, and make the “why now, why us, why together” argument unmistakable. Build the budget around people time, since that is what the scheme prioritises, and be realistic about what 24 months can deliver.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Treating interdisciplinarity as a label rather than a design principle. If the two disciplines are not both essential to the question, the proposal will not compete.
• Applying at the wrong career stage. APEX is for established researchers; early-career applicants should look at postdoctoral schemes instead.
• Missing the remit-spanning requirement. Make sure your project genuinely falls within more than one academy’s remit, and that at least one co-applicant sits under a different remit from you.
• Blowing the cost caps. Research costs must be no more than 25% of the total, and public engagement funds sit inside the £200,000 maximum, not on top of it.
• Leaving institutional approval to the last minute. Research-office sign-off takes time; a technically excellent application can still miss the 15:00 BST deadline.
• Writing for only one audience. Reviewers come from across the three academies, so a proposal legible only to your home discipline is a real risk.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the 2027-round deadline? 8 September 2026 at 15:00 BST. Confirm the exact date and time on the official page, as rounds can shift.

How much can I request? Up to £200,000, held for up to 24 months, inclusive of any public engagement funds of up to £10,000.

Can international researchers apply? The lead applicant and co-applicant(s) must be based at UK universities or UK not-for-profit research organisations and hold appropriate positions there. Your nationality is not the constraint; your UK host institution and eligible position are.

Do I need a co-applicant from another discipline? Yes. Genuine cross-disciplinary collaboration is central, and where the project spans academy remits, at least one co-applicant must fall under a different remit than the lead.

Is this the same as the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship? No. That is a separate early-career scheme. APEX is aimed at established independent researchers and is jointly run with the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Where do I submit? Through the Royal Society’s Flexi-Grant system, following the process in the official scheme guidance notes.

Timeline and Next Steps

With a deadline of 8 September 2026, the sensible working-back timeline is: settle your co-applicant and research question by early summer; read the current guidance notes and FAQs; draft the case for support and budget through July and August; and get everything through your institution’s research office with time to spare before the 15:00 BST cut-off. Awards in a typical round begin the following autumn or winter and can run up to 24 months.

If you are an established UK researcher with a serious idea that no single-discipline panel would quite know what to do with, APEX is one of the few schemes designed to say yes to exactly that. Start with the official page below, download the scheme guidance notes, and confirm every figure and rule for the current round before you build your application.

Official Links

• APEX Awards — The British Academy: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/apex-awards/
• APEX Awards scheme guidance notes and FAQs are linked from the official page above.
• The scheme is also described on the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering websites, which host the shared Flexi-Grant application system.

Always treat the official British Academy page and its scheme guidance notes as the authoritative source for deadlines, amounts, eligibility, and application requirements; the details in this guide are a summary to help you decide whether to apply and how to prepare.