Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE), and the Wellcome Trust. The purpose of JIF was to provide UK researchers with major equipment and new or renovated facilities needed to conduct cutting edge scientific research. DTI and the Wellcome Trust put in £300 million each and HEFCE contributed £150 million. Through five rounds of awards, 153 projects at 42 universities have been funded by the program. The applications were reviewed for scientific excellence by expert advisory boards of the appropriate research council or, in the case of biomedical and biological sciences, of the Wellcome Trust. The second level of review and final decisions were made by a Joint Executive Committee co-chaired by the Director General of Research Councils and the Director of the Wellcome Trust. The committee included representatives from the Wellcome Trust, the Research Councils and HEFCE, Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and Department of Higher Education & Further Education, Training and Employment, Northern Ireland.

www.ost.gov.uk/research/funding/infrastructure.htm

JIF (see above) was succeeded in July 2000 by the new £1 billion SRIF sponsored by the same three organizations: OST, HEFCE, and the Wellcome Trust. The Wellcome Trust put in £225 million. The £675 million from the government was for university science infrastructure with the awards allocated according to research excellence and research income rankings. Most of the Wellcome Trust’s funding (£150 million) was for biomedical science infrastructure projects drawn from the highest quality applications not funded by the government because of fiscal constraints; the remainder was for replacement or renovation of biomedical research buildings. The same peer review process used for JIF is being used for SRIF. Universities were expected to contribute 25 percent of the cost from non-SRIF sources. The government added another $1 billion for a second round of funding, in February 2003, for which the non-SRIF contribution was reduced to 10 percent.