Behavioural Research UK Announces First Commissioning Fund Awardees

Ten research teams were successful in applying as part of a £1.3 million investment in building behavioural research capability across the UK.

The BR-UK Commissioning Fund supports two types of awards: 

  • Accelerator projects, aimed at early-career researchers and providing up to £50,000 (full economic cost), intended to generate proof-of-concept data that can be used to secure further funding; and 
  • Project proposals, up to £300,000, for research that builds on existing data, theories or methods to advance the field.

The call for applications was opened in June 2025 with intention to fund notices shared in December 2025. Competition for the fund was intense. The Accelerator scheme attracted 44 applications, from which 11 projects were initially selected (one was later withdrawn due to unforeseen circumstances). The Project scheme drew 83 expressions of interest; 11 applicants were invited to submit a full proposal following blind peer review, and three were selected for funding after a further round of peer review. Today we are pleased to announce seven of the ten projects which have accepted their awards and are underway.

Together, the projects span a wide range of real-world challenges - from household energy use and food safety to diabetic eye screening, AI in the workplace, behavioural intervention design, pest management and trustworthy financial advice - reflecting BR-UK's ambition to grow behavioural science capability and evidence across diverse policy and practice areas.

Further details on each award, including full project descriptions, are available on the BR-UK website. 

NB: The three remaining projects will be announced in due course.

Research Projects

  • Jake Barnes, University of Oxford. Pathways to flexibility: Understanding household energy demand pathways through knowledge integration and data triangulation (Research Proposal),  £301,402, starting 1 May 2026
  • Issam Damaj, Cardiff Metropolitan University. Smart Hygiene Intelligence: Co-Designing and Scaling Behavioural AI Tools for Improving Food Safety (Research Proposal), £176,738, starting 15 March 2026

Accelerator Projects

  • Charlotte Wahlich, City St George's, University of London. Improving Understanding and Acceptance of AI in Diabetic Eye Screening: Co-developing Educational Interventions for Patients Living with Diabetes and Healthcare Professionals (Accelerator), £50,091, starting 1 May 2026
  • Shiyan Zhang, Lancaster University. Synthetic Organisations in Practice: Investigating the Behavioural Impacts of AI-Personae Systems on Knowledge Work (Accelerator), £50,750, starting 1 April 2026
  • Max Maier, University of Warwick. Understanding the Heterogeneity of Behavioural Interventions Through Mixture Modelling (Accelerator),  £49,971, starting 5 February 2026
  • Oluseye Oludoye, Teesside University. Seeing is Believing: Behavioural Profiling and AI Previews to Build Trust in Pest Management Tools (Accelerator), £47,524, starting 1 May 2026
  • Yulu Pi, University of Warwick. Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Behavioural Science for Fair and Trustworthy Large Language Model (LLM)-Driven Financial Advice (Accelerator), £49,247, starting 2 February 2026

Second Funding Call

We are currently accepting applications to a second round of funding. In this round, we are interested on applications centred on behavioural research focused on the environment and sustainability that can address one of the following themes: 

  1. Integration of knowledge across types of data, academic disciplines and sectors, involving methods that: triangulate different types of data; improve integration of knowledge across disciplinary ‘silos’; and advance how behaviours are measured.
  2. Explaining variations in effectiveness of behavioural interventions across contexts (e.g. types of populations, settings and behaviours). This will enable the accurate generalisation of research findings to specific contexts. 

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