Rosetrees Trust

Rosetrees Trust

Rosetrees Trust was established in 1987 by Nat and Teresa Rosenbaum, with their son Richard Ross assuming leadership and building the Trust into one of the UK's most prolific private medical research funders. The Trust directs the overwhelming majority of its funding to translational medical research — the precarious stage where laboratory discoveries are developed into patient treatments. Its grant-making spans oncology, cardiovascular disease, neuroscience, and regenerative medicine, with a structural preference for early-career researchers and proof-of-concept studies that struggle to attract government or large-charity backing. Confirmed institutional co-funders include the British Heart Foundation and Leukaemia UK, with whom Rosetrees jointly runs the John Goldman Fellowships. The Trust also partners with Nesta on a Challenge Portfolio targeting healthy-life extension initiatives. Rosetrees has deployed over £60 million across more than 2,000 research projects since inception, supporting in excess of 400 PhD studentships. Richard Ross continues to lead the Trust as Chairman and CEO, while Jamaria Kong, a Managing Director at TowerBrook Capital Partners, serves as a Trustee — linking the Trust's governance to institutional private-equity disciplines. The Trust is a member of the Association of Medical Research Charities and adheres to its standards for independent peer review. In recent years, it has sharpened its focus on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of AI and medicine. What structurally distinguishes Rosetrees is its founder-led, family-governed decision-making paired with an institutional-quality peer-review process. Unlike large charitable foundations with bureaucratic grant cycles, the Trust can commit to high-risk projects in weeks. Its perpetual-life structure — no fundraising cycles, no donor constraints — allows it to back decade-long research arcs that venture capital and government grants structurally cannot underwrite. This makes it a genuine bridge funder in UK medical science, operating at a scale disproportionate to its relatively modest endowment.