The main objective of the course is to create integrated research initiatives. Teams of Bridge Fellows retrieve and review relevant scientific literature from the component disciplines, develop research hypotheses and objectives, design research protocols and write operating grant proposals for submission to national, regional or international peer-review granting agencies. Proposals that involve research on humans are submitted for screening by UBC Ethical Review committees.

The course is led by teams of the program's faculty mentors, and is attended by Bridge graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, practitioners, and visiting scholars. Details are provided in the course outline.

Examples of research proposals prepared by Bridge fellows and mentors as part of this course are listed in RESEARCH > Research Overview.

This course is taken concurrently by masters and doctoral students, with the following differences. Attendance is mandatory:

Status of Students on Research Grants they have Co-authored

UBC Policy states that all intellectual property is the property of the university and thus all funding will also belong to the university. All intellectual property can be distributed within the university for teaching and research purposes, but cannot be used outside the institution for individual third parties without consent of the university. If a student is working as part of an established research group, the work remains as part of the group and does not reflect the individual on his/her own.

Therefore in order to recognize the participation of Bridge Fellows in writing grant proposals, letters will be sent out to all participating fellows stating:

• He/she was involved in designing the specific research protocol which was submitted to a national, regional or international peer-review granting agency.
• He/she may indicate on his/her curriculum vitae that he/she was a “co-author” of the grant proposal.

To ensure that the research is completed if funded, the faculty members leading the team will be listed as the “investigators” on the grant proposal, consistent with the requirements of most funding organizations.

Although a student cannot be a principal investigator on a research grant, under certain circumstances there is the option of being a co-investigator. The disadvantage of this option is that co-investigators usually cannot be paid from the grant (rules for each granting agency should be checked). Decisions about whether a student should be listed as a co-investigator would be made by the principal investigator after consultation with the student, and must comply with the rules of the granting agency.

If the project is funded, and a fellow’s interests and skills are judged to be suited for the project, he/she may be hired as a research assistant on the project and/or he/she may be able to use the project as the basis for his/her thesis work.

When scientific publications are being written reporting the results of the study, if a fellow is judged by the principal investigator or the first author of the paper to have made a significant contribution to the conception and design of the research, and if his/her contribution complies with authorship requirements of the journal, he/she may be listed as a co-author.