FAPESP Week UC Davis in Brazil

May 12 and 13, 2015 – São Paulo

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, Munich and Buenos Aires. In November 2014, UC Berkeley and UC Davis hosted FAPESP Week California.

In May 2015, FAPESP and UC Davis will organize FAPESP Week UC Davis in Brazil. The symposium aims at strengthening the links between scientists from Brazil and the U.S. with the objective of promoting research partnerships.

The symposium program coordinators are Marcelo Knobel (UNICAMP and FAPESP) and Paul Dodd (UC Davis).

UC Davis

UC Davis is a comprehensive institution comprising four colleges and six professional schools, including the top-ranked U.S. veterinary school, as well as home to multiple centers of excellence at the UC Davis Medical Center. UCD received over $700 million in research funding in 2013-14; it is a global leader in research in agriculture and forestry, and a national leader for publications in multiple disciplines (ecology and environment, agriculture, food science and nutrition, entomology, and plant and animal sciences).

The São Paulo Research Foundation, FAPESP

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 fellowship 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.

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