Anyone with Wellcome Trust Funds for this call?

International Engagement Awards

Funding for public engagement with Wellcome Trust research in low- and middle-income countries.

(a very important matter with very little support otherwise – we have a good relationship established with a local radio station and BBC Africa would probably be interested in getting on board if the opportunity comes; this is us http://shs.kiu.ac.ug/index.php/institute-of-biomedical-research/about-the-institute)

What are the Awards

The International Engagement Awards have been relaunched after the success of the previous scheme. The scheme has been refocused to award projects that are linked to Wellcome Trust-funded research.

International Engagement Awards are for projects that support Wellcome Trust-funded researchers in low- and middle-income countries to:

• engage with the public and policy makers
• strengthen capacity to conduct public engagement with biomedical science and health research
• stimulate dialogue about research and its impact on the public in a range of community and public contexts
• promote collaboration on engagement projects between researchers and community or public organisations.

Projects could engage:

• communities and members of the public (particularly those affected by or involved in biomedical and health research)
• science communicators, health and science journalists
• healthcare professionals, educators, field workers, community workers
• policy and decision makers.

The audience for the project, and the engagement activity, must be in a low- or middle-income country.

If you are interested in conducting research into the effectiveness of science communication or engagement, you may be interested in our Ethics and Society schemes.

How do I apply?

To be eligible, you must be either:

• directly funded by the Wellcome Trust (as a researcher, research group or institution); or
• working with a researcher, research group, institution or consortium directly funded by the Wellcome Trust.

We encourage informal discussions about potential project ideas before you submit an application, although we cannot review draft applications.

To apply for a grant of up to £30 000 for up to three years, complete a preliminary application form and submit it to the Trust by the date indicated under the ‘Deadlines’ tab.

We will assess preliminary applications for eligibility, their link to Trust-funded research and the quality of the proposed engagement project. If your preliminary application is successful, we will invite you to make a full application.

Please note that applications that do not have an appropriate link to Trust-funded research will not be accepted. Such links must be agreed with the Trust-funded grantholder in advance of submission.

Final decisions will be made approximately five months after the preliminary application deadline.

Larger grants of more than £30 000 can be applied for by invitation only to support exceptional projects.

Deadlines and Contacts

Upcoming preliminary deadlines for the International Engagement Awards are:

19 August 2013

You can contact us at:
International Engagement Awards
Wellcome Trust
Gibbs Building
215 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE, UK

T +44 (0)20 7611 8806
E internationalengagement@wellcome.ac.uk

Anyone from Norway?

Is there anyone out there working in a Norwegian higher education institution who might want to apply to this call with us?

http://www.norad.no/en/support/norhed;jsessionid=664B34813E92DC45BB2E97B5FCA18CF5

See who we are on our website and in previous posts of this blog.

The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)

Title: Norwegian Programme for Capacity Building in Higher Education and Research for Development (NORHED)

The aim of the programme is to strengthen capacity of higher education institutions in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) to educate more and better qualified candidates, and to increase quality and quantity of research conducted by the countries’ own researchers.

Based on a needs assessment in the relevant country, NORHED projects may include institutional capacity building elements like joint Norwegian-South research, competence building of staff through Master, PhD and Post Doc fellowships, administrative and small scale infrastructure strengthening, initiatives to increase access to higher education. The projects must also aim to build and launch Master (and if needed Bachelor) programs responsive to needs in the LMIC, that should be possible to sustain at the LMIC institution after the NORHED funding has come to an end. Education programmes must focus on the long-term need for capacity building in the South, and the recruitment from the South to the education programmes must be ensured.

Eligible Applications: Applications to the following NORHED sub-programmes are eligible for this call:

• Education and Training
• Health
• Natural Resource Management, Climate Change and Environment
• Democratic and Economic Governance
• Humanities, Culture, Media and Communication
• Capacity Development in South Sudan

Who can apply?

Eligible institutions for NORHED support are:

• In Low and Middle Income Countries: Higher Education Institutions accredited/recognised by in-country national authorities. Countries must be listed in OECD DAC’s register of official development assistance recipients, or listed in the specific call for applications.
• In Norway: Higher Education Institutions accredited by NOKUT (Norwegian Agency for Quality Education), offering accredited degree programmes, and operating in accordance with Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education (UNESCO/OECD 2005)

The applications shall be submitted jointly by the LMIC and Norwegian partner institutions. The partnership shall select one partner institution to be the contract partner. For main NORHED projects, the preferred partnership model is where one of the South-based-institution holds the lead, underscoring the aim of southern partner ownership and capacity building. However, in situations where the LMIC partners do not have the capacity to take the project lead, the Norwegian partner can be the lead partner

Application deadline: The deadline for submission of the online application is 15 March 2013, at 15.00 CET.

Further Information: visit website www.norad.no/norhed

Vote for us

Two of our MSc students have entered the Dell Education Challenge. Help them get to the semifinal voting for them on the challenge website. Help empower these two promissing scientists make their idea of promoting science among children a reality.

note: I think you have to register to vote for them. Please, take a few minutes to do it and help us out.

We look for partner institutions in the US

In case someone new to this blog arrives to this post, let me introduce ourselves. The Kampala International University is a non-for-profit private tertiary institution with base in Uganda. It has campuses in Kampala (capital of Uganda), Ishaka (Western Uganda) and Dar-es-Salam (largest city in Tanzania). The person typing the keys is the director of the Institute of Biomedical Research that KIU recently created at the School of Health Sciences in Ishaka.

Our efforts are focussed in providing facilities, training and support to local researchers so they can develop their research agendas aimed to alleviate Africa’s disease burden. In these efforts, we are open to collaborations with any institution that values the social impact that science and scientists can have. their role in the development of low and middle income countries. Below you can find information about a call that could help us pursue our goals together with yours.

http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&oppId=204133

Document Type: Grants Notice

Funding Opportunity Number: APS-ASHA-13-000001

Opportunity Category: Discretionary

Posted Date: Oct 15, 2012

Creation Date: Oct 15, 2012

Original Closing Date for Applications: Apr 15, 2013

Current Closing Date for Applications: Apr 15, 2013

Archive Date: May 15, 2013

Funding Instrument Type: Cooperative Agreement
Grant

Category of Funding Activity: Education, Health

Award Ceiling: $2,000,000

Award Floor: $0

CFDA Number(s):
98.006 -- Foreign Assistance to American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA)

Cost Sharing or Matching Requirement: No

Eligible Applicants

Public and State controlled institutions of higher education
Nonprofits having a 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education
Private institutions of higher education

Additional Information on Eligibility:

Agency Name

Agency for International Development

Description

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Office of American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA), is accepting funding applications from U.S. Organizations that assist schools, libraries and medical centers outside the United States to serve as study and demonstration centers for American ideas and practices.

Priorities helping out the Institute of Biomedical Research

Let’s try to organize our efforts in this matter… Any initiative to help out setting up the Institute of Biomedical Research should be communicated via mail to amigosdeibruganda(at)gmail.com.

Even though it is one of the human inventions that more troubles brings to my phylosophical mind, what we need the most, and it is in addition the easiest thing to move around, is money. Donations will be done via one of the following mechanisms:

• wire transfer to an account in Uganda or Spain. Details via mail.
• on-line fundraising for particular projects that we will explain and advertise as they come. It will most probably be through the http://www.youcaring.com/ site since it is the only one that I have found that doesn’t charge transaction fees. I don’t know you but, to me, making money out of other people’s efforts and charity just doesn’t sound right…

In future posts I will develop some fundraising ideas that I already mentioned in the most popular post of the blog. The pen-recycling squad is already shaping up in Spain and we will soon explain how to join. These campaigns are usually country-specific, so feel free to start something similar wherever you are. All posts concerning donations and fundraising will have the “paticipation” tag so they are easier to find. Don’t forget to take a look to the initial post to see if tehre is anything you can do.

Now, about general use materials. I think we have paper and folders covered for a while with a couple of those efficient women that populate my life. We could use some pens, white board markers and eraser, post-it packs, memory sticks, external hard disks, and a screw-driver and a torch. All these things could be obtained here and sending them overseas would be more expensive than the value they have. Keep them only if I can take them with me somehow, or if they can be sent with a more valuable shipment.

The following will be  a list of priorities, the things in which we would spend the money if we had any. Tese are the same priorities for anything you might be able to find in a lab or warehouse. The golden rule is that you should only ship things that are valuable enough to make the costs of the delivery a worthy investment. DHL seems to be the chosen courier from UK. Not sure about the US but I imagine is the same. ask before sending anything because it is necessary to include a phone number as a contact. Any package should CLEARLY state that it contains donations for the Kampala International University. In the surprising case that you get quite a few things, we shall pool together everything coming from Europe to make one single (more affordable) shipment. The base camp will be Huesca. Castellón and Zaragoza will also be delivery points. Things coming from the States, at the moment, will be handled from San Diego. If this gets bigger, we will see what is more convenient. Do not hesitate to e-mail if you have ANY question (amigosdeibruganda(at)gmail.com. I am going to do a trip to Spain in a few weeks and also in December. I can bring things in my luggage then. I will (most probably) be in San Diego at the end of May, maybe in New York a few weeks later.

So, the list:

• Improvements in the lab
  • Changing the locking system on the door to allow people getting in and out keeping the door closed. We just need to change the lockers for padlocks. We have asked for a budget and will let you know when we get it.
  • Covering the windows with mesh so the lab isn’t taken by termites in every storm and we keep outside other ordinary insects.

• Internet connection for the lab through Orange3G costs us 299000 Ugandan Shillings ($120, 92€, 75 GBP). The DVC is negotiating with Orange-Uganda the connection for the whole campus but even if that arrives, it won’t be free.
• We also need a first shipment of flies from the Blomington collection but I still don’t know the total cost.
• Equipments:
  • micropipettes, urgent! We only have a partial set (thanks, you-know-who),
  • at least one table-top microcentrifuge, even better if we get two of them. Right now we have none and it’s kind of hard to do anything,
  • precision scale (the one we have is a beautiful piece of decoration ranging 1 to 10 grams, and we don’t even have the weights to make it work),
  • vortex,
  • spectrophotometer,
  • refrigerator,
  • and a long wishlist:
    • at least one complete electrophoresis tank (the smaller the better) and two or three gel trays. Right now we have one tank with lid and another one without (e.g. useless) and one single gel tray with two combs,
    • -20ºC freezer,
    • incubators to keep the flies at constant temperature,
    • speedvacuum
    • SDS-PAGE set
    • motorized homogenizer
    • microscopes to work with flie
    • …
• Various Lab Materials:
  • autoclavable bottles, 100, 250 and 500 ml
  • beakers, flasks, calibrated tubes of various volumes
  • Polaroid film for Fotodyne gele-capture system
  • Inoculation loops and Digralsky spreaders
  • calibrated glass pipettes
  • brushes to clean calibrated tubes
  • glass tubes for bacterial growth 
  • racks for 1.5ml tubes 
  • tip boxes 
  • bunsen burners 
  • …
• Consumables:
  • 1.5ml tubes
  • tips (10, 200 y 1000 microlitres)
  • 50ml falcon tubes (of 15ml we are served at the moment)
  • petri plates
  • bottles to grow flies
  • whatman and absorbent paper
  • …
• Reagents and products:
  • agarose ($$$) and agar
  • ethidium bromide
  • ingredients for fly food, LB, PBS, TBE and other popular lab solutions
  • phenol, chlorophorm, sodium acetate, ethanol, isopropanol, TRI-reagent…
  • fenol, cloroformo, acetato sódico, etanol, propanol, TRI-reagent…
  • restriction enzimes, ligase, polymerase… See if one of those lab representatives can send us some samples  
  • …
• Various:
  • water dispenser
  • printer (there might be one available for donation, but I add it just in case)
  • computers with a decent RAM (we have enough of the slow frustration-indecur ones)
  • a copy (digital or analogic) of
    • The Genome of Drosophila melanogaster, Dan L. Lindsley y Georgianna G. Zimm
    • The Development of Drosophila melanogaster, M. Bates y A. Martínez-Arias
    • Fly Pushing: The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics, Ralph J. Greenspan
    • Current Protocols in Molecular Biology
    • and other useful lab manuals (ask me before you do any work in case we have them already)

and I am sure I am leaving something out… THANK YOU!!!

PS: You can now check out the Institute on the website of KIU-Western Campus.

Habemus website!!!!!

We finally are a tab on the website of the Western Campus of the Kampala International University. Yujuuuuuuu!!!!!

 

Vision

The Institute of Biomedical Research wants to develop and maintain a leadership role in the region's biomedical research scene.

Mission Statement

The IBR is a platform for the empowerment of women and men of diverse background who want to excel as socially responsible scientists and is dedicated to the promotion, development and delivery of excellence in biomedical research within all aspects of healthcare.

The IBR aims to provide leadership that inspires local professors and students to develop their research programs in a collaborative environment. The primary intellectual and research concerns of the Institute are the areas of Neurobiology, Genetics and Molecular Biology, and Epidemiology and Clinical Studies.

Core Values

 

• The IBR management will work under strict rules of transparency to gain the respect and trust of renowned international funding entities.
• The IBR will offer the leadership, support and opportunities for development that researchers need to fulfill their potential.
• All faculty, students and staff working at the IBR will act with honesty and integrity in all the IBR operations.
• All faculty, students and staff working at the IBR will respect and value the diversity of backgrounds, experiences, approaches and ideas of all individuals.
• All faculty, students and staff working at the IBR will respectfully accept new ideas and will be open to learning from others and embrace collaborative working.

Goals of the IBR

 

• Be a world class institution that provides high-quality facilities and education programs to impact the knowledge of women and men of all races.

• Advance the frontiers of learning and break new grounds, using research as a tool for teaching, and for the creation and dissemination of knowledge of the highest quality.

• Empower local researchers in the establishment of their own research groups that address the scientific questions that are more urgent for Africa and its people.

• Create a platform where highly qualified professionals find the facilities and support they need to develop their career in a socially responsible manner, driving their research project by the needs of the region and impacting the quality of life of those surrounding them.

• Establish a transparent management system that attracts funds from international cooperation agencies and scientific societies.

• Enhance capacity building through education and training, in order to meet the needs and challenges of the 21^st century in Africa.

• Establish and fasten the promotion of African tradition, culture and scientific knowledge.

For those willing to help

I’m preparing a list of priorities and establishing the contacts to manage the sending and delivery of donations, both things and money. Be patient; we will soon be organized and we will put this thing to fly. Thank you all so much for your interest, your energy: you are the blood that gives oxigen to my cells.

Thank you!!!!!

Ok, not even two days since I uploaded the "Ideas" post and this is already too big. I need more hands!! First of all, thank you all for your responses! We'll see what we get in the end but, hey, no-one can say you aren't enthusisastic! And now, a bit of organization. True that I didn't give an address, basically because if you start sending things we are going to make the postal service rich, but we are going to waste too many resources on the way.

Look for things that

• a) I can take with me some time (in general all we need is a connection to Spain; I will pick them up from there but, even if there is no obvious connection, we can find it: I travel a lot and, if I am not going where you are, we'll try to find someone who can connect us).
• b) are valuable and difficult to get here, even if they are big. We will look for a safe and affordable way to get them here.

And, apart from that, I realized I need volunteers to handle the resources locally, something like a regional coordinator, someone who is the person to go to in a city/ state/ country. That person should filter things a bit at first and then arrange for the delivery with me. Any volunteers? I also need someone in Spain that helps me centralizing everything. With the unemployment rate that we have that shouldn't be a problem, right?

THANKS!!

Do you want to help me out setting up a lab in Africa?

How can you join me in my efforts to set up the Institute of Biomedical Research (IBR) in the medical campus of the Kampala International University (KIU) in Ishaka-Bushenyi, Uganda? (KIU is a non-for-profit private institution)

• When you go to the bank, to a restaurant, to IKEA… if there are publicity pens, pencils, notebooks, pen drives… take one for us. Give them to me next time we meet and I'll bring them.
• When you accumulate points shopping with your credit card, filling up the tank, or being loyal to one of those companies that exchange fidelity for things more or less useful, check the catalog looking for something that we can use here, a screw driver, a desk organizer… Same as before. All these things are not worth the money of the delivery. If we meet, I'll bring them with me; otherwise, money will be the easiest to move around the world and we can buy these things here.
• When you are running out of tape, eraser, ink in your white-board pen, paper… and you are going to buy more, buy one for us or, better, put the money aside and send it to us when you put some together.
• Do you remember all those half-used notebooks that are accumulating dust somewhere in your room? Take the sheets that are useful to you and send us the rest.I'm going to leave this one out for the moment because we don't have an easy and cheap way to bring them here, but keep it in mind.
  
• I know that the world is in crisis, but if you want to get involved a bit more, you can fund the master’s thesis of one of our MSc students. They already have a salary because, while they study, most of them are lecturers in the School of Health Sciences. What we need is the money to buy the reagents and materials for their research projects.
• You can also fund for a period of time one of the expenses in our lab, like the internet connection (this is urgent, unlimited access with a router that can handle four or five computers costs 90€ – $120 – per month), the paper for the printer (we are trying to be paper free printing only what is absolutely required, but most of the things are not digitalized around here and we need real paper to talk to other departments and make things happen), the food for the flies, or one of the works we need to get done in the lab ( a door that has a padlock, the mosquito meshes that will stop the mess that the termites create in every storm, or fixing a dark room for the fluorescence microscope that was donated by the University of Cambridge in 2011).
• Do you drink a lot of soda? Find out if your favourite brand offers the possibility of getting donations in exchange for collecting bottles, cans, plastic or metallic bottle tops. The same with any other product that you usually buy and has a certain environmental impact. Remember that you can “sell it” as a contribution to the environment in addition to the development of a developing country. If the company that sells the product doesn’t respond positively, try with an NGO that works for the environment.
• Start your own team of waste revalorisation. In some cities it is possible to get a small economic incentive for some of the products that we trash or recycle (paper, metal, glass bottles, old cell phones and other electronics, ink cartridges, plastic bags…). In some cases it is as easy as taking them to the store by the corner. What one single person can get is usually not worthy (that’s what the big companies that make money out of our rubbish are using to make business) but if you put a team together you can collect some products in all your blocks, maybe some schools and shops in the neighbourhood will help you out. Talk to associations of neighbours, parents or students. No matter how little the amount you collect, for us it will be like rain after a draught.
• If you are engineer or engineering student, you can come for a visit – you can use the excuse to go on a safari! - and design for us the solar power structure to provide with 24/7 electricity our lab. We also invite you to study the possibility to get energy out of the incredible amount of water that falls on our roofs almost every day, not only on our building but on the other blocks on campus, the hospital, and all the apartment blocks in which KIU hosts its employees.
• And the cheapest thing of all, help us extend the rumour, reaching someone that can help us. This is not an NGO, not for the moment at least, for the good and the bad. We don’t have the back up of x number of years making good, but we also don’t have a bureaucratic load or intermediaries that can exhaust the funds before they get to their destination. This is me, Marta, whom you know or of whom you have heard about probably through someone who knows me - otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this – and I will put every penny in the lab, I will show you pictures, and the bills and the account books, and I will host you in my home if you want to come and see it, and I will make room for you if you want to come and do something with your own hands, and I will thank you for every crumb of help with every cell of my body.

And if you work in a lab you can do much more:

• When you find an abandoned micropippete in a drawer, poor thing no-one is ever going to use it again because it is not trustable, keep it for us.
• When you change the electrophoresis system and the old gel trays don’t fit in the new tanks, keep them for us!
• Get books for us! Any lab manual, protocols book, manuals of genetics and Drosophila, textbooks of any subject that has anything to do with Biology and the Biomedical Sciences (and if you are teaching and you ask the publishers they will give them to you for free). If the copy that you have in the lab is old, ask your boss to get a new one and send us the old one.
• Ask about the warehouse of your university or institute, where all the things that no-one wants to use because they are old or obsolete go. Look for electrophoresis tanks, spectrophotometers, dissection microscopes to work with flies or C.elegans, scales, incubators, refrigerators, thermo-blocks, water baths, computers… Find out how to get a donation from your institution and if they could cover the delivery if it’s something big that I cannot carry in my luggage. If they don’t cover it, campaign a bit to raise the funds.
• Every time a commercial representative asks for your time to tell you about the virtues of a product, ask them to donate some samples for us in exchange. Any plastic consumable would be welcome (1.5ml tubes, conical tubes – 15 and 50ml), small tools (pestles, forceps, scalpels…), extraction kits, small samples of reagents, anything!!!
• If you find any funding source from your country to collaborate with developing countries in the fields of research and higher education, think of a project in which we can work together. We will do anything you need us to do: institutional back up, use of facilities, publicity, logistics of the event… I will, if you want to come and do something on the ground, host you in my house.

Basically, anything that you can think of that can help us start (and keep going) the engine of this laboratory will be received with applauds. Receive in advance the gratitude of the Director of the Institute for devoting ourselves the time to read all this. I will do my best to bring here everything you get for us at the minimal expense for you.

What a blast

A student told me this morning, with a wide smile on his face, that we have changed completely the way he thinks about research. Mastercard can’t pay this

Inspired

I arrived last night from my weekend adventure. I’ll write about it soon, but something crossed my path and got my attention this morning. A good friend of mine sent the link to a blog post that put words to my thoughts. It’s one of those rare occasions in which I feel someone has been reading my mind; someone actually feels the way I do! I couldn’t let it go lost. No matter where I am or what I am doing, I am still a radical scholar.

Be that radical anyway. Be the scholar you think you should be, bringing your whole self to the table, finding your passion and making it your scholarship, and having a plan that will help you become a leader in your field.

Kate Clancy - The three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar – Scientific American blog Context and Variation

I greatly recommend reading the whole post. Is not that long, and it’s as inspiring as a canoe trip on the waters of the lake Bunyonyi through sunset into dusk.