Neurodegenerative diseases are debilitating and largely untreatable conditions that are strongly linked with age. Worldwide, there are estimated to be 47 million people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders, the most common class of neurodegenerative diseases. This figure is expected to double every 20 years as the population ages. The total direct and informal care costs of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and related disorders are in the range of €105-160 billion per year across the European Union and about US$ one trillion worldwide. Existing treatments for neurodegenerative diseases are limited in effect and mainly address the symptoms rather than the cause or the progressive course. With this in mind, JPND has identified a pressing need for investment aimed at enabling research projects on Linking Pre-Diagnosis Disturbances of Physiological Systems to Neurodegenerative Diseases.

The development of efficient treatments for most neurodegenerative disease is hindered by the fact that their detection intervenes at late stages in which the integrity of the nervous tissue is very compromised. Poorly characterised early physiological disturbances are known to appear before unambiguous symptoms of each neurodegenerative disease are detected. These changes may include, among others, disruption of sleep, olfaction, hearing, vision, metabolic factors as well as social engagement. All these signs have the potential to be used as early indicators of later diseases, and in most cases have the advantage that they are measurable in natural everyday life environments. Since some of these changes are very likely early indicators of nervous system dysfunction, the identification of the circuits and molecular pathways being affected might reveal promising targets for early interventions and therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.

This transnational call invites proposals for ambitious, innovative, multinational and multidisciplinary collaborative research projects with a view to promoting research aimed at the detection, measurement and understanding of early disease indicators related to neurodegenerative diseases, with potential for the development of new diagnostics or interventions.

Funding: The total made available for this call is about 19 million euros.

Call for nominations

Nomination deadline: April 15, 2021, 8:00 p.m. (ET)

The Synergy Awards for Innovation honour outstanding research and development (R&D) partnerships between a university or college and industry, in the natural sciences and engineering. Since 1995, the awards have showcased the value of pooling Canadian research excellence and Canadian industrial expertise to address challenges that provide tangible benefits to Canada.

Synergy Awards include three categories for universities and one category for colleges, to highlight the impact and lasting benefits of their applied R&D collaborations with industrial partners.

Winners of the Synergy Awards must show effective use of human, technical and financial resources, leading to tangible commercial and, where applicable, additional social or environmental benefits with their industrial partners. Universities must demonstrate a sustained partnership, while colleges may focus on the impact of near-term applied research.

Synergy Awards are an opportunity to show the world what Canadian ingenuity and collaboration can accomplish.

Eligibility

The nominated partnership must be in the natural sciences and/or engineering, between a Canadian university professor or group of professors, or a Canadian college, and a Canadian-based company or companies with commercial activities in Canada, such as R&D and/or manufacturing. The Guidelines for organizations participating in research partnerships should be consulted to determine the eligibility of the industrial partner(s). To be eligible, the partnering organization(s) must be at arm’s length from the nominee and co-nominee(s). Refer to the Conflict of interest guidelines for partner organizations for more details.

An individual, team of individuals or a college may be nominated for the Synergy Awards and other major NSERC prizes in the same year but can receive only one such prize in a given year. There is no limit to the number of nominations for the Synergy Awards that a university or college can put forward in a given competition.

Categories

Nominations can be made in one of four categories:

For universities

• Small and medium-sized companies: A partnership with a single company with less than 500 employees globally.
• Large companies: A partnership with a single company with 500 employees or more.
• Two or more companies: A partnership with two or more companies, of any size, or a consortium of companies

If you are interested in being nominated for this award, please contact Dr. Batia Stolar, Associate Vice-President, Research & Graduate Studies, at avp.research@lakeheadu.ca

Under the Next Generation Network Program (NGNP), CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, is looking to fund innovative projects across northern Ontario that demonstrate technology solutions that offer flexible, lower cost, higher performance residential broadband access for northern Ontario communities. This program is designed to prove new technology approaches that can significantly improve business cases or new business models, be used to promote new field-proven innovations from technology applicants, offer an improved level of broadband access to unserved communities, develop new residential broadband ecosystems, and to share technical solutions with other northern Ontario communities looking for access or improvements to residential broadband solutions in their community.

CENGN will be providing funding for individual projects from its Northern Ontario Residential Broadband Program as part of the NGNP. CENGN is seeking technologies that address the requirement for specific technical problem statements that make it challenging to get broadband access to residences within northern Ontario communities. With the increasing demand for on-line municipal services, email communications, on-line cultural development, social media, distance learning, tele-medicine, remote medical monitoring, on-line homework/assignment submission for students, support for on-line business, and increasing need for on-line options to work from home, there is urgent need for high-performance, low-latency residential broadband access in northern Ontario communities.

In order to provide an environment to demonstrate the effectiveness of new residential broadband technology solutions, CENGN will be encouraging community Expression of Interest (EOI) responses from northern Ontario communities who are interested in hosting a technology project in their community. From the Community EOI responses, at least one community will be selected for this project. The project will be designed to prove that a technology solution can be installed and tested while demonstrating a significantly improved level of residential broadband service to the community. This project will also seek to demonstrate a marked improvement in the business case for residential broadband access improvements for the community.

CENGN will also be encouraging EOI responses from technology company applicants who are interested in providing equipment, technology, and support services to be used in the live 3 – 6 month monitored technology project. From the Technology EOI responses, a number of candidate technology companies will be selected for each Northern Ontario Residential Broadband Project to propose a technology solution that can be installed and tested to provide a significantly improved level of residential broadband service for the selected host community.

The purpose of the project will not only be to demonstrate a significant performance level improvement in residential broadband access in residences, but also to provide a well-tested, monitored, and documented implementation, that can be promoted and shared with other communities by the technology applicant(s), the community, and CENGN. It is key that the proposed project infrastructure will be scalable, and that the technology applicant is willing to work with the host community, and any necessary local partners, to come up with a plan to extend or expand the project infrastructure to completely meet the wider residential broadband needs of the community following the project’s successful completion.

Universities may participate in this program as a partner.

The Petroleum Research Fund is an endowed fund, managed by the American Chemical Society that supports fundamental research directly related to petroleum or fossil fuels at nonprofit institutions (generally colleges and universities) in the United States and other countries.

ACS Petroleum Research Fund (ACS PRF) grants are intended as seed money, to enable an investigator to initiate a new research direction. The investigator should not have published or received financial support from another funding agency for the proposed research. Also, proposals that the ACS PRF Committee feels are a logical extension of an investigator’s previous research may be denied as “not a new direction.”

The Faisal Bin Fahad Global Award for Sport Research supports rigorous, intellectually ambitious and technically sound research that is relevant to the most pressing questions and compelling opportunities in sports. The Award seeks to financially support scholarly work by PhD qualified researchers to develop new foundational knowledge, or build upon existing knowledge, that may have a lasting impact on the sports discourse in the context of Saudi Arabia.

The Award allows PhD qualified researchers to apply for funding of $80’000 USD to $120’000 USD to support their research project. A total of $1 million USD will be awarded.

HFSP Research Grants support innovative basic research into fundamental biological problems with emphasis placed on novel and interdisciplinary approaches that involve scientific exchanges across national and disciplinary boundaries (see guidelines).

Participation of scientists from disciplines outside the traditional life sciences such as biophysics, chemistry, computational biology, computer science, engineering, mathematics, nanoscience or physics is recommended because such collaborations have open up new approaches for understanding the complex structures and regulatory networks that characterize living organisms, their evolution and interactions.

Research grants are provided for teams of scientists from different countries who wish to combine their expertise in innovative approaches to questions that could not be answered by individual laboratories. Preliminary results are not required and applicants are expected to develop new lines of research through the research collaboration.

It is understood that such research inherently contains risks and HFSP expects that teams of applicants address the risks and outline mitigation strategies for their research in case of failure and how they intend to achieve their goals.

Applications for applied research, including medical research typically funded by national medical research bodies, will be deemed ineligible (see guidelines).

Two types of Grant are available: Research Grants – Early Career and Research Grants – Program.

The Canadian Mountain Network (CMN) will invest a total of $3.4 million over 3 years to support the development of up to 6 place-based knowledge hubs supported at levels of $100,000-$300,000 per year (or $300,000 – $900,000 total over the three years).

CMN invites Letters of Intent (LOI) to be submitted, on or prior to January 20, 2021, by individuals and organizations willing to lead a place-based knowledge hub.

We encourage individuals and organizations considering submission of a LOI to request a contact list of potential contributors identified through the Expression of Interest (EOI) phase (completed November 6, 2020; EOI submission is not a requirement for LOI eligibility).

Connection Grants are expected to respond to the objectives of the Connection program.

These grants support events and outreach activities geared toward short-term, targeted knowledge mobilization initiatives. These events and activities represent opportunities to exchange knowledge and to engage with participants on research issues of value to them. Events and outreach activities funded by a Connection Grant can often serve as a first step toward more comprehensive and longer-term projects.

Connection Grants support workshops, colloquiums, conferences, forums, summer institutes, or other events or outreach activities that facilitate:

• disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary exchanges in the social sciences and humanities;
• scholarly exchanges between those working in the social sciences and humanities and those working in other research fields;
• intersectoral exchanges between academic researchers in the social sciences and humanities and researchers and practitioners from the public, private and/or not-for-profit sectors; and/or
• international research collaboration and scholarly exchanges with researchers, students and non-academic partners from other countries.