The Hannah Studentship offers undergraduate and MA students an opportunity to study and learn the techniques of historical research and to encourage future serious study of medical history.

CMN anticipates investing a minimum of $3M in a series of place- and/or theme-based Knowledge Hubs to support mountain research combining Indigenous and Western ways of knowing and doing. These hubs are anticipated to include diverse and complementary activities including research, training and knowledge sharing and mobilization. Click here to view the full application and submit your Expression of Interest.
DEADLINE: November 6th, 2020 at 11:59 pm

Today, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) launches a call for proposals for its 2021 Social Science Research (SSR) Grant Program; for which we kindly ask Expressions of Interest (EOI) to be received via the Agency’s WADAGrants platform, no later than 22 November 2020 (23:59 GMT). 
 
As WADA announced on 10 June 2020, the Agency delayed its call for proposals by six months in order to better accommodate the academic community in light of COVID-19. WADA took advantage of this delay to further develop its 2020-2024 SSR Strategy, which has since been approved by the Agency’s Executive Committee (ExCo) and published on 2 October. The SSR Strategy sets out a framework for supporting WADA’s recently announced Five-Year Strategic Plan by focusing on impactful research.
 
WADA’s Education Committee is tasked with overseeing SSR in the field of anti-doping, including the work undertaken by the Agency’s Social Science Review Panel. As part of the implementation of the SSR Strategy, the Social Science Research Grant Program (Grant Program) has been restructured following a review by the Panel and the Agency’s Education Department.
 
While a full overview of the restructured Grant Program, including the application process and research priorities that will guide WADA’s investment decisions, is available in the Overview and Guidance for Applicants document, please note the following key changes:

1. There is now a ‘two-stage’ application process: The first stage requires applicants to submit an EOI regarding their proposed project by 22 November 2020 (23:59 GMT). Then, following review of the EOIs by the Education Department and the Social Science Review Panel, projects meeting the initial criteria will be invited to complete a full application by 31 January 2021.
    

2. There are now ‘three tiers of investment’: The Grant Program now has three distinct tiers of investment, which are defined by the scale and scope of the research project as outlined in the Overview and Guidance for Applicants document.

While WADA welcomes EOIs in relation to any of the 12 SSR priorities, which were recently approved by WADA’s Education Committee and are fully described within the Overview and Guidance for Applicants document, for the 2021 Grant Program, the Agency is particularly interested in the following six priorities:

1. Athlete pathway and athlete experience
2. Clean Sport behaviors
3. Experience of athlete support personnel in anti-doping
4. The role and influence of athlete support personnel
5. Effectiveness of anti-doping
6. Horizon scanning (learnings from other sectors/industries that can be applied to Clean Sport)

Applicants who wish to submit EOIs for projects outside of WADA’s SSR priorities may do so; although, in order to be considered, they must demonstrate innovation and/or that they can positively impact Clean Sport.
 
The Education Committee will review the recommendations from the Social Science Review Panel for WADA-funded research projects in April 2021, prior to seeking formal approval from WADA’s ExCo in May 2021; after which, applicants will be notified.
 
For further information regarding the 2021 Grant Program, please refer to the Overview and Guidance for Applicants and FAQ section of the WADAGrants platform; or, contact the Agency’s Education Department at ssr@wada-ama.org.
 
Interested parties may also wish to view the recent WADA webinar entitled: The Revised Social Science Research Grant Program which was presented by members of WADA’s Education Department on 8 October 2020.

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we believe that malaria eradication within a generation is possible. We recognize that in order to achieve this, National Malaria Control Programs (NMCPs) must be empowered to use timely, high-quality data to inform their malaria strategic planning, decision-making, program implementation, and evaluation. As we work to sustain the decline in incidence rates that have marked the last fifteen years of malaria control, this concept of data-to-action has never been more important.

Our vision for data-to-action, recently endorsed by WHO’s Malaria Policy Advisory Committee (MPAC), is one of stratification and sub-national tailoring. In the first step, multiple data sources – from geospatial to epidemiological data – are used to define district-level strata within a country. Next, additional data types are used as the input to mathematical models that output the optimal package of interventions that result in maximum malaria burden reduction within a given resource envelope. The success of stratification and sub-national tailoring is highly dependent on the underlying data, which may not always be complete, high-quality, and / or timely. We are therefore exploring new data streams that might improve our understanding of factors driving changes in malaria epidemiology or be used to optimize the choice of interventions modelled. One of these new data streams is serological, genetic, and / or genomic data which arises from malaria molecular surveillance.

Malaria Molecular Surveillance (MMS) is an umbrella term which describes the use of molecular biology approaches – from serology to genotyping to whole genome sequencing (WGS) – to interrogate parasite and / or vector populations in order to derive epidemiologically actionable information. MMS does not include research-oriented genetic and genomic investigations, such as studies using genomics to investigate parasite or mosquito biology. Rather, the emphasis is on analyses that can directly influence malaria control policy and practice. In addition to the laboratory techniques used, MMS also includes the bioinformatics tools and resources necessary to process, interpret, and share the resulting data.

THE CHALLENGE

Initial work in the MMS space focused on methods development and proof-of-concept pilot studies. Now, the tools and analyses are maturing, the infrastructure is in place, and the time-to-result is much shorter, meaning that MMS is beginning to influence program planning and execution. In elimination settings, genetics has been deployed in focused investigations of malaria importations. In higher-burden settings, MMS is being used to visualize the spatio-temporal spread of antimalarial drug resistance markers, influencing treatment guidelines, and to track the effect of different interventions on parasite genetic diversity as a surrogate measure of transmission intensity.

Please contact Jill Sherman, International Research Facilitator at intl.research@lakeheadu.ca if you are interested in applying to this funding opportunity.

University research awards are designed to encourage research at Canadian universities in areas of interest to Imperial Oil's petroleum, petrochemical and energy resource development businesses. These areas include the fields of engineering, environmental, earth, chemical, and physical sciences.

 

Awards for specific research projects are made to full-time faculty members to support research work carried out by university students under their direction.

 

Individual awards are normally available in amounts ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 depending on budgets for the proposed research, availability of funds, and potential significance of the research as determined by Imperial.

 

Awards are made for one year and may be renewed annually for a maximum tenure of three years.

 

For further information and applications, please visit our web site at Imperial under the heading Innovation and Research/University Grants/University Research Awards, or go directly to University Research Awards. 

 

Deadline for submission is December 15, 2020.

 

Please note that applications must be submitted in electronic format to email ura.sru@esso.ca. PDF format is preferred. Preferred filename convention is ApplicantsSurnameInitialsUniversityName.pdf

The specific objectives of this funding opportunity are:

• Create new knowledge about the magnitude and health effects of climate change on food security in the Canadian North and Northern Indigenous populations by incorporating Indigenous knowledge and land-based experience regarding traditional/country food sources.
• Identify effective approaches, programs and policy to address food insecurity in the North through implementation science.
• Build capacity for multidisciplinary research in the area of food security and climate change in the Canadian North that has strong and meaningful engagement with Indigenous communities and organizations.

The specific objectives of this funding opportunity are to:

• Inform best practices for the operation of safer supply interventions and supervised consumption sites
• Address pressing evidence needs of decision makers and knowledge users in the area of harm reduction interventions, taking into consideration the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the local context
• Consider the impact of the local context and other factors, such as biological and social determinants (e.g., sex, gender, age, housing status and income, etc.) and sub-populations (e.g., those with severe opioid use disorder, youth, Indigenous peoples, rural, inner-urban, etc.), on the interventions
• Identify considerations for further evaluation activities of harm reduction interventions, including insights and generalizable knowledge regarding implementation processes, barriers, and facilitators
• Advance evidence-based practices through knowledge dissemination activities
• Foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and bilateral interaction with decision makers in order to directly inform drug policy