I have a Senior Clinical Investigator Fellowship

The Senior Clinical Investigator Fellowship allows postdoctoral clinicians to temporarily reduce their clinical duties to focus on research, giving them the opportunity to build a career in translational biomedical research. This web page provides practical and administrative information specifically for FWO’s senior clinical fellows.

As senior clinical fellow, you are required to report on your research activities at two moments:

• Interim report: Approximately two years after the start of your fellowship, you must submit an interim report with an overview of the research activities carried out so far.
• Ex post report: Shortly after the end of your fellowship, you must provide a final report to the FWO. In this report, you describe the research results achieved.

The scientific experts of the jury Clinical Fellowships will assess the content of the report. Please be aware of the potentially serious consequences if your report is rejected for administrative or substantive reasons. This may imply that your fellowship funding is discontinued or that you are (temporarily) prohibited to submit new funding applications to the FWO. Therefore, ensure your report is complete and submitted on time, according to the guidelines.

A reporting template will be provided in your e-portal, shortly after the start of the fellowship. You will automatically receive a message with all practical details and instructions for completing and submitting the report. Make sure to begin the reporting process early, since some of the information in your report will be automatically retrieved from external databases like FRIS. This can lead to delays while your data is transferred and updated between systems.

Note: When you wish to renew your fellowship, the report from the previous term is a mandatory part of the evaluation procedure. You complete the report via the e-portal and add a PDF version to your renewal application.

For more information on the FWO reporting procedure, please visit this page .

All information about research results arising from the fellowship must be submitted to the Flanders Research Information Space (FRIS) . As senior clinical fellow, you are responsible for timely entry of correct and complete information about the research results in your institution's information systems, from which this is forwarded to FRIS (see also the webpage on research results ). Journal publications with peer review (A1 publications) will automatically be added to the report and solely based on the information present in FRIS.

Within 6 months after the official start of your fellowship, you must prepare a data management plan (DMP) . You submit this DMP to the research coordination service of your host institution. You do not need to submit this to the FWO.

At the end of your fellowship, the final version of the DMP must be added to the final report of the project via your e-portal. This DMP may, of course, have been adjusted since the initial version. The DMP is an element in the final assessment of the project by the jury Clinical Fellowships.

There is a standard template (see our webpage DMP) for preparing a DMP, which is used by all institutions and which you must use. The final version of the DMP can be created in the online planning tool DMP online and exported as a PDF via this tool to be added to the final report.

As senior clinical fellow, you are required to deposit your peer-reviewed journal articles (A1), which were wholly or partially produced with FWO funds, at least one year after publication in a public “Open Access” database. For more information, please refer to the website.

You must immediately inform the FWO of significant changes in the execution of your project. Significant changes in the project are understood to be changes in the project objectives that were not mentioned in the application as alternative strategies.

If your project includes a clinical study, it is mandatory to register this study in a public clinical database (e.g. https://www.clinicaltrials.gov) (see Article 4 §2 of the General Regulations of the FWO). In this context, a clinical study is defined as any research that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of people to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health parameters. Clinical studies thus include experimental interventions, such as, but not limited to, drugs, cells and other biological products, surgical procedures, radiological procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, changes in the care process, preventive care, etc. This definition includes phase I to phase IV clinical trials.

When the first patient is included in the study, the FWO (via med@fwo.be) must be informed of the study's start date (first patient in) and the clinical study registration number. The data in the public registry must be kept up-to-date during the research, and within one year after completion of the research (six months for pediatric studies), the same database must be supplemented with the full descriptive clinical study protocol and summarized research results, regardless of whether the results are negative, inconclusive, or positive. For more background information, see FWO’s webpage on Research Ethics: Attention points: Clinical trial transparency.

In the application form for your fellowship, you completed a questionnaire on ethical aspects. If you answered a question with an asterisk affirmatively, there is a legal obligation to obtain ethical approval from the competent ethics committee at the main host institution before starting the relevant research activities. For other questions, there may be institutional obligations and/or you are expected to consider ethical aspects related to the subject, approach of the research, and/or the consequences of the results, and if necessary, take appropriate precautions. For more information, see our webpage on research ethics.

Recipients of FWO funds commit to scientific integrity regarding research practice and outcomes. See Research integrity - FWO.

The FWO must always be mentioned as the funding provider in publications or other relevant communications regarding your project (results).