montreal

The Canada Foundation for Innovation last week announced research infrastructure awards worth Can$21.6 million (US$14 million) to help strengthen the country's capability for research and technology development.

More than 550 researchers at 35 centres will benefit from the awards, which are being made under the Institutional Innovation Funds and Regional/National Facilities, and the Research Development Fund.

This is the second such announcement this year. The first awards, in the foundation's New Opportunities programme, totalled Can$36 million. They were designed to help young researchers in their first academic appointments to obtain facilities (see Nature 394, 712; 1998).

There has been an enormous response to competitions for the awards. In the current series, more than 450 applications were submitted by Canadian universities, hospitals and non-profit institutions. The awards targeted key needs in health, science, engineering and the environment.

A striking aspect of the competition was that many institutions submitted joint proposals. “What has surprised us is how people from different disciplines have been eager to work together on projects,” says Susanne Fortier, vice-president of research at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario.

But, for the 159 projects approved after an initial review, even more cooperation is going to be necessary. Because of their complexity, their proposers will be invited to submit revised projects for further review before funding decisions are made in 1999.

David Strangway, president of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, cites as an example proposals from institutions and groups of institutions for what he calls a digital library.

“You have to work out the site licensing with the publishers⃛ to buy a single site licence which can serve all the university libraries. So we're going to have those groups come back to us with a national proposal.”

Another complex area was high-performance computing, Strangway said. “We have a lot of proposals from institutions. They will have to show how they are going to provide access to all institutions across the country. There were also outstanding proposals in genome studies.”

The detailed strategy for funding these more complex projects will be announced shortly, he said. Phase two will be extremely competitive because projects worth a total of Can$735 million are competing for funding of only Can$370 million.