NUS (National Cohorts Office)

Menu
Menu

Funding Opportunities

The National Cohorts Office maintains administrative oversight of the Strategic Cohorts Funding. Periodic requests for proposals will be made.

Open Calls

None currently.

Closed Calls

NCO 2025 Request for Proposals (RFP) (22 April 2025 – 25 June 2025)

The objectives of the 2025 RFP were to:

  1. Maximise utility, value and impact of existing population cohorts by uplifting to FAIR principles;
  2. Support existing population cohorts to prepare their data and processes to enable linkage and secondary use; and
  3. Enrich and generate new insights from use cases through data linkage of existing population cohorts with other datasets on TRUST (Trusted Research and Real World Utilisation and Sharing Tech).

The funded cohorts are Panel on Health and Ageing of Singaporean Elderly (PHASE), Transitions in Health, Employment, Social Engagement and Inter-generational Transfers in Singapore Study (THE SIGNS Study), The PopulatION HEalth and Eye Disease PRofile in Elderly Singaporeans (PIONEER) study, Health@NUS (2020), Health@NUS (2025), Healthy Campus Initiative (HCI), BALANCE Study, SingHEART, Singapore Life Panel (SLP), Singapore Translational Cancer Consortium (STCC) and Understanding Tumour Predisposition in Asia (UTOPIA). Find out more about the cohorts here.

2022 Strategic Cohorts Request for Proposals (RFP) (21 September 2022 – 2 November 2022)

The objectives of the 2022 RFP were to:

  1. Provide funding to selected existing cohorts deemed strategic to Singapore.
  2. Maintain strategic cohorts as research infrastructure to drive innovation and capacity building.
  3. Contribute towards a collaborative research ecosystem guided by international best practices.
  4. Generate new data and new services through collaborations to maximise value, data utility and demonstrate health impact.

The 2022 RFP took a multi-phase approach divided into competitive and collaborative phases:

  • The first phase was competitive and open to local publicly-funded institutions. Teams submitted a 5-page Letter of Intent (LOI) showcasing the significance, utility, collaboration and data sharing potential of the cohorts. They were shortlisted based on their synergy with the other shortlisted applicants and their potential contribution to the data ecosystem. 
  • The second phase was collaborative and for shortlisted Strategic Cohorts only. They were invited to a collaborative workshop to identify areas of synergy to develop common infrastructure for research, which they translated into a collaborative full proposal to establish a national platform and joint governance for data sharing and research that would be made available to the wider research community.
  • The Selection Panel comprised international experts and local representatives.

The funded Strategic Cohorts are Singapore Chinese Health Study (SCHS), Singapore Epidemiology of Eye Diseases (SEED), SG100K, and Singapore Longitudinal Ageing Studies-Yishun Study (SLAS-YS). Read about the Singapore Strategic Cohort Consortium (SSCC) here.