Grant Development & Support
Heart & Stroke Foundation Grants-in-Aid Application Support
The Heart & Stroke Foundation (HSF) provides excellent funding opportunities each year for cardiovascular researchers.
Specifically, the Grants-in-Aid (GIA) program provides operating funds to individual researchers with a very broad mandate of supporting "important, pertinent, novel research in the areas of heart disease and/or stroke" and promoting "research discovery, exploration and innovation across all health research themes".
(GIA-2025-2026-Submission Guidelines, Fall 2024 competition)
The HSF GIA Program provides funding for a maximum of $400,000 over 4 years.
The next competition will open near the end of June 2025 with an application deadline anticipated for end of August 2025.
The timing is always tight, but the opportunity is worthwhile.
The University of Alberta tends to do reasonably well in the GIA competitions, but there are likely more researchers who would benefit from this opportunity.
The VPRI office would like to support the cardiovascular research community to help increase the number of applications being submitted and odds of success.
To help you pre-plan for the 2026/27 competition (August 2025 submission), the Research Partner Network has developed the following support materials for you:
- Heart & Stroke Competition Report - Nov 2024 - provides an overview of past GIA competitions and includes a list of past successful UofA award recipients.
- Preliminary Application Document – outlines the application sections and requirements based on the previous year’s competition.
- Note: there may be slight changes in the requirements year-to year, but this document will give you a strong framework to work from prior to the new guidelines being released in June 2025.
- Previous competition HSF GIA Guidelines (2025/26).
All cardiovascular researchers are strongly encouraged to explore the Heart & Stroke GIA opportunity and to use these documents to assist with preparing their applications for the next competition.
Please direct any questions to Feiyue Akishyn, Research Partner (feiyue.akishyn@ualberta.ca).