CIC Universities Awarded Global Innovation Initiative Grants

Five CIC universities are part of  new multilateral university partnerships that have been created by the Global Innovation Initiative, a new program funded by the UK and U.S. governments to foster multilateral research collaborations with higher education institutions in Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia. 

Ohio State, Purdue, Rutgers, Michigan, and Wisconsin-Madison are multilateral partners with institutions from the UK, Brazil, China, and India.  Each partnership will receive a grant of up to £150,000 ($250,000) to fund new research activities, faculty and researcher exchange, joint publications and symposia, and other multilateral efforts. The total funding for these partnership grants is approximately £3 million ($5 million). In addition, the partner universities will support these projects with their own resources, such as use of laboratories, staff and faculty salaries, and private sector contributions valued at a total of roughly £4.27 million ($7.08 million).

Each of the winning proposals address topics of global significance in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), including energy, climate change and the environment; agriculture, food security and water; global health and wellbeing; and urbanization. 

The goals of this joint effort between the UK and U.S. are to raise the bar for international collaboration while developing a new cadre of globally-savvy individuals, enhancing global research capacity, strengthening higher education institutional cooperation, and promoting the benefits of multilateral partnerships.

Two parallel, but separate grant competitions were offered in the UK and U.S., with an institution from either country taking the lead on the partnership. Each of the multilateral collaborations was required to include a partner from Brazil, China, India or Indonesia in addition to institutions from the UK and the U.S., in recognition of the growing contribution of these nations to the global knowledge economy and to solving issues of global importance. The winning partnerships and their research topics are listed below.

The Global Innovation Initiative was created to support multilateral research collaboration to address global challenges, in keeping with the vision of UK Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama’s joint statements in 2011 and 2012. The Initiative was announced by US Secretary of State John Kerry and UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, and formally launched in October 2013 by Rt Hon. David Willetts MP, UK Minister for Universities and Science. The initiative is funded by the U.S. Department of State, the UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and the British Council, which also serves as the implementing partner in the UK. In the United States, the Institute of International Education is implementing the grant program in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Evan Ryan, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, stated, “The U.S. and UK share a long and rich history of higher education collaboration, and both countries have also benefitted from partnering individually with counterparts in Brazil, India, Indonesia and China. The Global Innovation Initiative will foster new multilateral partnerships in the conviction that major global issues such as climate change, food security, urbanization, and public health require expertise from and collaboration among these key countries.”

CIC Awardees

Ohio State University, Queen’s University Belfast (UK), Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences (China) Innovative Strategies to Control the Dissemination of Antibiotic Resistance in the Global Ecosystem

 Purdue University, De Montfort University (UK), Universidade Estadual Paulista (Brazil) Consortium for Rapid Smart Grid Impact

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, University of Reading (UK), Chongqing University (China) The Impact of Ambient Air Pollution in Indoor Air Quality in China: Evaluation of a Practical Intervention

University of Michigan, Oxford University (UK), and the University of São Paulo (Brazil) Climate Change Mitigation, Avoided Deforestation and Commodity Agriculture: Assessing Private Sector Innovation for Sustainable Coffee and Cattle in Brazil

University of Bath, Ohio State University (US) and the University of São Paulo (Brazil) TransAtlantic Discovery, Characterization and Application of Enzymes for the Recycling of Polymers and Composites

University of Birmingham, Ohio State University (US) and Beijing Institute of Technology (China) Seeing with Sound-Developing an Echolocation Device based on sensing principles derived from Human Users
 
University of Bristol, University of Wisconsin Madison (US), Zhijiang University (China) and Kerala Veterinary and Animal Science University (India) Global Farm Platforms for Sustainable Ruminant Livestock Production

More information about the competition  and a complete list of awardees can be found on the Global Innovation Initiative’s website.