Where funding becomes a career — and a career becomes a breakthrough
One of our primary priorities is supporting promising early-career researchers, enabling them to establish themselves and compete for larger grants. Here's what that support has made possible.
Typical length of PhD funding we've provided to a single researcher.
New genomic risk regions identified in work led by a former grantee.
Research participants now analysed in studies co-led by a researcher we backed.
Bespoke gene panels to global skin-genetics studies
During his PhD, Jake developed computational methods to improve the genetic diagnosis of individuals with rare monogenic diseases — transforming free-text clinical descriptions into machine-readable phenotypic profiles to create "bespoke virtual gene panels" that made genomic interpretation markedly more efficient.
That rigorous bioinformatics and statistical training launched a career in the genomics of inflammatory skin disease. He led an international GWAS meta-analysis identifying 29 genomic regions linked to severe acne, then joined the BIOMAP European consortium showing how polygenic risk scores predict severe outcomes in psoriasis.
Today he is a Research Fellow in the Skin Genetics Consortium, co-leading genome-wide analyses across more than 5 million participants for over 100 skin traits.
"The support of The Generation Trust during my PhD enabled me to develop the technical expertise and clinical perspective necessary to become a leader in human genetics."
A studentship that helped attract world-class talent
Support from The Generation Trust for a PhD studentship was key to attracting Dr Alan Hodgkinson — one of four MRC-funded computational biology fellows on a major high-performance-computing award — to the Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics at King's.
Aminah Ali began her PhD in 2016 and became an expert in the genetic underpinnings of post-transcriptional processes in human mitochondria. A skilled genome analyst, she presented at the international ASHG conference and published in high-impact journals, attracting interest from the global research community and sparking new collaborations for the group.
She passed her thesis viva in 2021, with her corrected thesis now available in the King's research archive.
"The Department is very appreciative of all of this funding from The Generation Trust."
Your support launches the researchers of tomorrow
Give an early-career scientist the funding — and the confidence — to make their breakthrough.