Eligible Regions: Latin America, The Caribbean
In pursuit of strengthening the region’s biotechnology studies and networks, and considering the coronavirus pandemic outbreak’s current circumstances, they have announced a new initiative to integrate elite professionals in the biotechnology fields into online activities engaged with regional professionals. These academic activities are of great importance for their mission of empowering qualified professionals to implement educational events all over the region and incorporating them as an active UNU-BIOLAC alumni community.
UNU-BIOLAC is accepting applications to academic activities held in interactive webinar modules around a common theme, according to the priority areas of the Programme.
Benefits
- Accepted members will have the opportunity to be part of the UNU-BIOLAC mission by proposing high-level capacity building activities and helping UNU-BIOLAC outreach and dissemination capabilities.
Expectations
- Each UNU-BIOLAC webinar activity should host a minimum of 20 participants and organized by at least one coordinator. A minimum of 3 invited expert speakers should be part of the event. These training webinars will have to rely on worldwide specialists and participants equally representing the LAC region. Each virtual lecture should last around 40-50 minutes with a live Q&A chat arranged towards the end.
- Budgets for these activities will be studied on a case-by-case basis. They should consider items such as speaker honorarium (according to academic merits), internet platform connections costs, or supplemented learning material. Each webinar activity should also provide, as output, a recording file of the training and a discussion of its content that helps verify learning goals.
- At the end of the activity, the coordinator will have to deliver a final report with all academic/training results and include a financial statement of all incurred expenses, which a UNU-BIOLAC academic committee will evaluate. If an activity report receives an outstanding evaluation, its coordinator would be able to apply for further financing within this or any other UNU-BIOLAC funding call.
Eligibility
- Senior researchers engaged in active research and academic activities related to high-throughput/deep sequencing of genomes, metagenomic analysis, and whole-genome gene expression to discover new genes and biological functions.
- The above technological approaches provide new insights into four priority areas identified in the context of global climate change as challenging the sustainability of traditional cropping systems and the control of animal and human health by affecting the (re)emergence of diseases and their etiological agents and vectors.
- Therefore, for 2022 UNU-BIOLAC is seeking to empower young scientists to use Big Data as a knowledge-enabling strategy that navigates across the following priority areas:
- Emerging and neglected human, animal and plant diseases
- Metagenomics and similar approaches for biomedical research
- Drug discovery and vaccine development
- Sustainable biotechnological processes
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact human society globally, biotechnology researchers work on the clock to provide cutting-edge information that can be useful. Therefore, as an organization engaged with the development of Latin America and the Caribbean region, we decided to encourage research proposals to study the nature of SARS-CoV-2 as an emerging human disease.
In these moments of uncertainty and challenges, UNU-BIOLAC wants to promote a contribution from the Latin American and the Caribbean countries to the resolution of the pandemic outbreak, fostering the collaboration among active researchers to understand this emerging biological threat.
Application process
- All applicants should download and complete all mandatory documentation and submit it with the application form to applications.biolac@unu.edu
The email must contain the following information:
Subject: Webinar Call for proposals 2022. “Name of the applicant”
- Email content:
- Name of the applicant and proposed academic activity
- Priority research area
- Intended dates for the academic activity
- Mandatory attachments:
- Cover letter
- Academic Resumé
- Completed webinar application form
- Invited speakers and lectures CVs
- Vendor form
- Please note that an application MUST be oriented towards the UNU-BIOLAC priority areas. Any application not meeting this requirement will need an explanation letter. Relevant subject matters for the region will have special considerations.
