Dunhill Medical Trust
Data-driven landscape analysis of UK ageing research funding
Dunhill Medical Trust (DMT) is dedicated to funding research to improve the health and wellbeing of older people. They contracted me to identify ageing grants within an openly available dataset of health research grants in the UK to assist in a mapping exercise of the ageing research funding landscape.
Due to the difficulty of clearly defining what constitutes “ageing research”, this project required a combination of traditional search methods and innovative AI techniques. In this work, I:
• Co-developed alongside the DMT team a broad search string to retrieve ageing research grants from the open dataset, ensuring a broad coverage of the field.
• Developed an automated system using a large language model to scan through the grants retrieved by the search string, reducing the false positive rate. This system achieved high agreement with expert manual classification done by the DMT team.
• Performed various analyses on the curated subset of ageing-related grants to identify key funders, organisations, and areas of work within the field.
• Utilised AI to categorise grants against DMT's strategic priorities, providing insights into how the broader research community's efforts align with DMT's focus areas.
The results of this analysis provided DMT with a data-driven overview of the ageing research funding landscape in the UK, as a starting point to inform their strategic planning and identify potential gaps and opportunities in the field.
This project showcased the power of combining open data sources with advanced data analyses to speed up what could be very time-consuming work. The high agreement rate between the automated system and expert classifications underscores the potential of AI in streamlining research analysis processes.
"This project underscores both the strengths and limitations of AI in analysing large datasets. It highlights the critical importance of high-quality data and the iterative nature of the process." — Pedro Jacob, Grants Officer, Dunhill Medical Trust
Personally, I would like to thank the DMT team for their active input and high level of engagement during the project – it is wonderful working with clients who are highly invested in the results of a project, and show it during the course of the work.