Mental Health Award: Using physical activity and circadian-based interventions to reduce anxiety and depression in young people
This award will fund mechanistically informed trials of interventions for anxiety and depression in young people aged 10-18 years. Successful teams will build on existing mechanistic evidence to develop more precise and effective early interventions that have the potential to scale.
Key dates
You must submit your application by 15:00 BST on the deadline day. We don’t accept late applications.
Open to new applications
-
13 April 2026
Applications open
-
28 April 2026, 11:00 BST
Webinar
-
14 July 2026, 15:00 BST
Application deadline
-
September 2026
Shortlisting
-
3-5 November 2026
Interviews
More information about this funding call
Why Wellcome is launching this call
Our mental health strategy
Wellcome’s mental health strategic aim is to drive a transformative change in early intervention for anxiety, depression and psychosis. Embedding lived experience expertise is central to this so we can reflect the priorities and needs of people who experience these problems to our mission.
With this Mental Health Award we want to transform interventions for young people experiencing depression and anxiety through funding mechanistic trials of interventions that are scalable, safe and effective.
Our rationale for this call
Anxiety and depression are two of the biggest health challenges among young people globally. Existing interventions are often not tailored for young people, and many do not experience lasting improvement.
To better understand how to address these gaps, we commissioned a landscaping report to examine opportunities in youth mental health interventions. The report highlighted that, while many approaches can reduce symptoms, how they work is often poorly understood. There is a clear need for research that directly tests mechanisms to refine interventions so that more young people can benefit. The report noted that there are some advances in promising but underexplored intervention areas, including lifestyle, social and creative approaches.
Among these, physical activity and sleep-based interventions stand out for having the strongest evidence of efficacy. They are accessible, cost-effective, and straightforward to deliver, yet their mechanistic foundations remain underdeveloped. Although these interventions are scalable in theory, few health or educational systems have scaled them. Importantly, sleep and physical activity are physiologically and behaviourally intertwined, and advances in wearable technology now enable measurement of both as part of a circadian cycle. This dual focus opens the door to more precise, data-driven measurement, which can support tailoring interventions to individual needs.
By focusing this Mental Health Award on these promising intervention categories, we aim to support research with the greatest potential to generate impactful, mechanistically informed and transformative interventions for young people.
Contact us
Eligibility, what we offer and application questions
If you have a question about eligibility, what we offer or about completing the application form using Wellcome Funding, send our funding information advisers a message.
Scope questions
If you are unclear about whether your proposed idea would be in scope for this call, you can send a very brief summary of your idea to [email protected] using the format below by 29 June 2026, 17:00 BST.
Please include the title of the call (Using physical activity and circadian-based interventions to reduce anxiety and depression in young people) in the subject line.
Use the following format when emailing us your scope question:
- Country/countries where the research will take place [e.g. UK]
- Target population (no more than a sentence) [e.g. girls living in areas of social and economic vulnerability]
- age range [e.g. 11-16]
- mental health condition(s)/symptoms(s) [e.g. depression]
- Summary, including the intervention you are testing, existing evidence and rationale for why the intervention would work in the target population (no more than 200 words)
Based on the information provided, we will aim to reply to your email within one week, with an ‘in scope’ or ‘out of scope’ response.
Please note that this is not a requirement and will not impact your likelihood of being funded. The confirmation that a proposed idea is in scope does not constitute an active invitation to apply for the call.
We do not answer questions on the competitiveness of proposals.
