ICGEB CRP Grants remain one of the Organisation’s most popular programmes and enjoy worldwide recognition.
Here, we present an overview of the main developments and results of the programme from 2020.
Of the 568 applications submitted to Liaison Officers emanating from 52 ICGEB Member States, a total of 31 CRP Grants were awarded last year, 7 of which are to Early Career Investigators who have recently returned to their home countries to establish their own laboratories.
Amongst these are 9 grants funding research related to Covid-19. These resulted from a fast track call aimed at assisting efforts to combat the pandemic in our Member States and reflects a swift response of ICGEB to the pandemic, while nonetheless maintaining high selection standards. Three of these special Covid-19 related grants received funding thanks to ICGEB’s valuable collaboration with IILA, and specifically supports Principal Investigators in Latin America.
Of these awardees, we have closely followed the success of the research of Prof. Andrés Moreno-Estrada, “Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional de México” whose recent article in Nature was broadly cited, and whose results from a previous ICGEB grant were published in Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Among the CRPs completed during the year is that of Prof. Marycelin Baba, Department of Medical Laboratory Science, College of Medical Sciences, University of Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria, on the “Establishment of a laboratory facility for the diagnosis and surveillance of Arbovirus infections in Nigeria.” This very active collaboration has also involved a postdoc visiting the Molecular Virology lab in Trieste, Italy, for three months during the course of the project, and underpins the importance of collaboration between ICGEB and its Member States, with the research from the grant being disseminated at a stakeholders forum in Nigeria.
Dr. Tong Woei Yenn, University of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, filed a drug patent on phomopsidione, which ensued from the CRP Grant entitled “Mode of action of a new antibiotic Phomopsidione on Pseudomonas aeruginosa”, and the team won a gold medal at the Malaysia Technology Expo (MTE) in conjunction with the Malaysia-Croatia Technology Exchange, where more than 500 innovators participated.
External reviewers also nominated two Outstanding CRP Awards to Principal Investigators in Argentina and Croatia, who were judged to have performed outstanding research projects during the course of their CRP award.
The ICGEB urges applications from scientists in all our Member countries and offers the possibility of holding Awareness Workshops for those countries where Principal Investigators may require assistance in the application procedure and grant preparation.
The success rate for ICGEB CRP Grant applications is below 5%, which represents one of the most competitive grant awarding programmes in the world. If you would like to help us to fund more of these outstanding young scientists, please visit: https://www.icgeb.org/activities/grants/
For further information
CRP-ICGEB Research Grants Unit
Tel: +39-040-3757382
Email: [email protected]