On July 9th, a dissemination talk was held on the “2018 Interdisciplinary Research Contest: Seed Capital”, held by the UC Research Affairs Office.
In the words of UC Vice-President for Research, Pedro Bouchon, who spoke to about 50 people at the UC Innovation Center, the objective of this Seed Fund is to stimulate joint research between experts from different disciplines to address original themes. Promote and stimulate collaborative research partnerships with foreign institutions, from an interdisciplinary perspective, in order to promote joint applications for larger funds.
The Vice-President detailed the benefits of this Fund, how applications and evaluations are conducted and finally a schedule of the different stages and dates to consider if you are looking to apply for it.
“What we seek to achieve with this important contest”, emphasized Dr. Bouchon, “is to generate concrete results from applications to associative projects with external funds, participation in initiatives of greater scope, joint publications, and so on.”
“It is a small amount of money that allows to plant a connection with an important foreign entity, to establish a link, not to develop large research projects, but to apply for other larger funds,” said the Vice-President.
For the second half of the informative talk, a brief presentation was made about some Collaboration Networks in which UC participates with foreign institutions, in order to make them known to the academics present and, eventually, guide their search for international collaboration. The Vice-President made a review of the different Networks in which the University participates, which Institutions and countries integrate them, their themes, objectives and benefits. The Collaboration Networks mentioned were Universitas 21, CINDA, ODUCAL, PIM, Magalhaes Network, ELAN, Confucius Institute, and the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru).
Finally, Pedro Bouchon invited the audience to take the time to get to know these Networks in depth, since they serve as a link to establish new relationships that allow, eventually, to generate a proposal for this Seed Capital.