Supporting researchers

Through capacity-building programs, we equip emerging researchers with the skills and knowledge they need to advance their careers and become competitive candidates for future grants.

By fostering this new wave of talent, we not only support individual growth but also bring World Cancer Research Fund closer to achieving its mission of preventing cancer and improving survival outcomes worldwide.

Past Academy activities

Nutrition masterclass

As part of our Academy activities, Wageningen University in the Netherlands held a masterclass on nutrition and cancer in February 2019, in collaboration with World Cancer Research Fund International and Wereld Kanker Onderzoek Fonds.

The masterclass aimed to connect people globally who are working on nutrition and cancer, and share the latest insights in the field using a multidisciplinary approach, ranging from biology to clinic and public health perspectives. The course topic was From bench to bed to behaviour, and was presented by an international panel of experts.

This masterclass was aimed at postgraduates (mainly PhD students and postdoctoral researchers) and was relevant to professionals from various fields (including nutritionists, epidemiologists, health promotors, physicians, policymakers, nutrition educators, biologists and food scientists) interested in the area.

World Cancer Research Fund International joined up with Wereld Kanker Onderzoek Fonds to offer 6 Fellowships for outstanding applicants from any country, which covered the cost of the masterclass fees.

Supporting research in low-middle income countries

We support the International Collaboration on Nutrition in Relation to Cancer (ICONIC), which continues to provide a grant training course to improve the grant-writing capabilities of researchers working in Nutrition and Cancer epidemiology-related fields in Africa. Our work with ICONIC supports our continued efforts to help researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and early career scientists.

We support the ICONIC initiative of developing a Quality Assurance Framework for the collection of high-quality data in relation to diet and nutritional well-being. The focus is on anthropometry (the measurement of the human individual) as the first step towards the collection and curation of data to use for policy, planning, monitoring and evaluation in the health, education, and agricultural sectors. The ambition of the project is that this will be available across sub-Saharan Africa as the Quality Assurance Framework and Nutrition for Africa (QAFANA).

In 2022, we funded the first year of this activity, which included setting up a working group and training two health practitioners from Ghana for two weeks at the University of Southampton. Currently, the 2 health practitioners are preparing a training programme to pass on the skills they learned at the University of Southampton to national service personnel and medical students in Africa. Their next step is to establish national reference centres in Ghana and other African countries.