Imperial and a partner research foundation in Brazil have announced the first projects to be jointly funded through a recent agreement.

Following an agreement signed in September last year with the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), seven projects involving Imperial researchers and collaborators in São Paulo have been selected to receive matched seed-funding.

They range from a project assessing and guiding sustainability in Brazilian sugar cane to one looking at the transmission of the malaria-causing parasite plasmodium vivax.

FAPESP and Imperial will each provide funding of up to the equivalent of £6,000 per proposal per year, for the duration of the grant, to cover the costs of the collaborating staff moving between the UK and Brazil. The maximum duration of each project is 24 months.

Imperial’s Provost, Professor James Stirling, said: “We are very pleased to be working alongside FAPESP, one of our key international partners, to foster a new host of joint initiatives with some of São Paulo’s leading research institutions and I am delighted to see the diverse and exciting range of projects that will be supported by this partnership. Bringing together scientists from London and São Paulo, both global centres of excellence in research and innovation, will not only push the boundaries of scientific endeavour but will drive forward discoveries that benefit society on a global scale.”

Dr Cristina Banks-Leite from Imperial’s Department of Life Sciences is a researcher on one of the successful projects – looking at how rainforest ecosystems work, including the effects of changes in land-use such as deforestation.

Dr Cristina Banks-Leite

She said: “This funding allows us to bring the UK research team together with our partners in the Centro de Energia Nuclear na Agricultura in Brazil. Many of the UK team also haven’t yet been to the rainforest and this provides us with the opportunity to spend some time getting to know the field of study and the challenges it presents. This is particularly important as we collaborate on a proposal for the next stage of our research.” 

The funding was established to facilitate joint initiatives between Imperial and their peers at leading São Paulo institutions, such as the University of São Paulo, Unicamp, UNESP, and the National Research Centre for Energy & Materials.

Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, Scientific Director of FAPESP, said: “The bilateral investment by FAPESP and Imperial College London facilitates collaborative research between researchers in São Paulo and their British colleagues, thus creating opportunities to broaden the horizons and the impact of scientific research for both countries.”