FAPESP WEEK BARCELONA
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public taxpayer-funded foundation that has the mission of supporting research in all fields of knowledge within the State of São Paulo, Brazil.
FAPESP is aware that the very best research can be done only by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, companies, higher education and research organizations in other countries known by the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration.
As part of these efforts, FAPESP organized symposiums and exhibitions in several countries, in cities as Washington, Morgantown, Cambridge, Charlotte, Raleigh and Chapel Hill (US), Toronto, Salamanca, Madrid, Tokyo, London, Beijing and Munich.
In May 2015, FAPESP and the Institució CERCA (Centres de Recerca de Catalunya) will organize the FAPESP Week Barcelona. The symposium, at the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site, aims at strengthening the links between scientists from Brazil and Spain with the objective of promoting research partnerships.
The São Paulo Research Foundation
The State of São Paulo has a population of 40 million and generates 35% of Brazil’s GDP. Under the state constitution 1% of all state taxes are appropriated to fund FAPESP. The stability of the funding and the autonomy of the foundation allow for efficient management of the resources, having a sizable impact.
The effectiveness of research carried out in São Paulo is the combined result of several factors that include the quality of the state’s universities and institutes, the extraordinary productivity of its researchers (who produce 50% of the knowledge generated in Brazil yet constitute only 20% of all researchers in the country), high rates of participation by private, São Paulo-based companies that function within the state’s R&D outlays, São Paulo’s outstanding infrastructure, and the existence of FAPESP, a well-designed state research-sponsoring agency governed, maintained by its directors with excellence and with autonomy over the past half century.
Within this context, FAPESP income in 2014 totaled 413.57 million in $ purchasing power parity (PPP) and the scholarship and grant disbursements and research funding reached $ PPP 390.08 million.
In accordance with the Foundation’s funding objectives, 41% of expenditure was earmarked for advancing knowledge, 7% was dedicated to supporting research infrastructure and 52% was allocated to supporting application-driven research.
FAPESP works in close contact with the scientific community: all proposals are peer reviewed with the help of panels composed of active researchers from the specific area. Many times scientists in São Paulo submit proposals for programs to the foundation which are carefully analyzed and, if deemed strong in academic terms, are shaped by the foundation into research programs that will constitute a set of related research projects in a given area.
Since FAPESP’s mandate is to foster research and scientific and technological development in the state, ideas for programs that couple world class research with contributions that will impact social problems are welcome.
More about FAPESP’s international collaboration initiatives and other information is available at: www.fapesp.br/en
THE CERCA Institution
The purpose of the CERCA Institute is to ensure that the Catalan research centres system is properly developed; to encourage and maximise synergies, coordination between centres and strategic cooperation; to improve the positioning, visibility and impact of the research carried out and to facilitate communication between public and private agents.
To summarise, the activities of the CERCA Institute primarily focus on the following:
- Contributing to the international presence of the research centres of the Government of Catalonia.
- Facilitating and fostering the adoption of common policies in research management, scientific development and knowledge transfer, identifying and taking advantage of synergies and economies of scale.
- Contributing to strengthening cooperation and scientific exchanges with the best centres and universities in the world, fostering interdisciplinary research, coordinated transversal programmes, the mobility of researchers and the recruiting and retaining of talent on an international level.
- Increasing and facilitating the transfer of knowledge to the business sector and to society in general, in addition to the support, assessment and fostering of the creation of spin-off companies arising from patents or results.
- Fostering, within the scope of the research centers, the involvement and commitment of the financial and business sectors and society in general.
More information: http://cerca.cat