FAPESP funds $680 million to support 17 RIDCs

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May 22 2013Funda��o de Amparo � Pesquisa do Estado de S�o Paulo

The Brazilian funding agency for scientific and technological research S-o Paulo Research Foundation, FAPESP, based in the state of S-o Paulo, announced an investment estimated in US$ 680 million to support 17 Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) for a period of up to eleven years, subject to continuation reviews on years 2, 4 and 7.

Funding for the 17 RIDCs will come from FAPESP and the host institutions (through funding faculty, technicians, support personnel, and infrastructure). Host institutions will participate in a portion of US$ 310 million of this amount for the payment of salaries and additional funding will be obtained by each center from industry and government organizations.

Each selected RIDC is expected to establish a hub of excellent research in its focus area. In addition, each RIDC must actively seek out and develop opportunities to have its research results contribute to commercially and/or socially relevant high-impact applications, as well as contributing to education and dissemination of knowledge.

The 17 RIDCs bring together 535 scientists from the State of S-o Paulo and 69 scientists from other countries. The research topics covered by the centers include the following: food and nutrition; glasses and glass-ceramics; functional materials; neuroscience and neurotechnology; inflammatory diseases; biodiversity and drug discovery; toxins, immune-response and cell signaling; neuromathematics; mathematical sciences applied to industry; obesity and associated diseases; cellular therapy; metropolitan studies; human genome and stem-cells; computational engineering; redox processes in biomedicine; violence; and optics, photonics, and atomic and molecular physics.