Simon Chaplin, Director of Culture & Society at the Wellcome Trust speaks at the Global Young Academy

Simon Chaplin, Director of Culture & Society at the Wellcome Trust speaks at the Global Young Academy

I am very grateful to Koen and the Global Young Academy for the invitation to speak. My name is Simon Chaplin, and I am Director of Culture & Society at the Wellcome Trust. Wellcome is an independent foundation with a mission to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. We are based in London, UK, and the majority of the 14,000 or so researchers we support are also based in or linked to UK universities, but our approach is becoming steadily more global as we shift from being simply a funder of research to being an organisation which seeks to address significant health challenges. We are known by many as a biomedical research funder and it is true that science is core to our mission, but we also fund research in humanities and social sciences related to health, as well as supporting work in arts and culture and community and public engagement.