3 April 2009
News Delhi, India
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has announced US $100,000 grants for maternal and child health care research
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has announced US $100,000 grants for researchers to develop innovative ideas to address maternal and child health care issues.
The third round of the world–wide initiative is targeted particularly at Indian researchers, reports IANS quoting Programme Officer for the project Andrew C Serazin.
“We hope to hear from researchers of every age and every continent, and from disciplines that don't typical focus on global health or even biomedical research. India has great potential and a pool of engineers, doctors and creative minds. Yet in our previous two rounds we have received little response from Indians,” Serazin said.
Andrew and his partner Joseph Torres have come specifically to India to promote and advocate the round three of The Grand Challenges Exploration, a five–year US $ 100 million initiative to encourage bold and unconventional research on new global health solution.
In the previous two rounds, the project received around 7,000 applications from 118 countries and Indians accounted for just three per cent of it.
“The initiative uses a streamline, online grant making process. Applications are only two pages and the preliminary data about the proposed research is not even required,” Torres explained.
The foundation and an independent group of reviewers will select the most innovative proposals and grant will awarded around three months from the May 28 proposal submission deadline.
The topic areas for the proposal are creating low cost antagonistic for priority global health condition, new tools to accelerate eradication of malaria, new vacancies for diarrhoea, HIV, malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis and new ways to increase mucosal immunity (increasing immunity for lung and intestinal diseases).
Initial grants will be of US $100,000 each. Projects showing promise thereafter could get an additional funding of up to US $1 million.
The Foundation is looking at supporting about 80–100 applicants globally.
To promote and advocate the project, the foundation has approached institutes like All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Indian Institute of Technology–Delhi (IIT–D) and other facilitating partners.
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