HRC Explorer Grants

HRC Explorer Grants

Funds New Zealand health research ideas across biomedical, clinical, behavioural, social, and public health fields.

⚠ This may reflect a past cycle — verify the current call on the funder's site.

The Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC) is the country's primary government funder of health research, established under the Health Research Council Act 1990 and funded via Vote Business, Science and Innovation. HRC Explorer Grants are the lowest-barrier entry point in the HRC Ideas Funding stream, designed to seed transformative, innovative, exploratory, or unconventional research ideas across any health-related field — including biomedical, clinical, behavioural, social, public health, Māori health, Pacific health, and translational sciences.

The 2026 Explorer Grants round offered awards of up to NZD 150,000 over a maximum of 24 months. Unlike other HRC mechanisms, Explorer Grants require no expression of interest (EOI) stage — applicants submit full applications directly. The 2026 round accepted full applications from 20 November 2025 to 30 January 2026 and is now closed. Eligibility is broad: individual researchers and research organisations including universities and non-profit research institutions based in New Zealand may apply; for-profit entities are not eligible.

Explorer Grants occupy the smallest award tier in the HRC Ideas Funding suite — considerably below the NZD 1.2 million Project Grant and NZD 5 million Programme Grant — making them well suited to early-stage ideas that have not yet generated the track record required for larger mechanisms. Applications are submitted through the HRC Gateway portal (gateway.hrc.govt.nz). Successful applicants should demonstrate a genuinely novel or unconventional approach and must be prepared to articulate why conventional funding pathways are not appropriate for their research idea.