News

An assessment workshop of the 2011 programme "Flash Japan – Great Tohoku Earthquake" will be held on March 6-7, 2013 in Sendai, Japan. The French National Research Agency (ANR) and the Japan Science and Technology agency (JST) had launched a joint call for collaborative proposals following the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, in order to foster urgent research related to the catastrophe and to reinforce Franco-Japanese cooperation on those themes.

Given the success of the EuroNanoMed ERA-NET initiative (2009-2011), support to the nanomedicine European research community is continuing. Through 3 successful joint transnational calls launched from 2009 to 2011, the EuroNanoMed initiative has allocated €25 M to transnational research projects in the field of nanomedicine. The ERA-NET EuroNanoMed II expects to launch a fourth joint call for proposals to support transnational innovative research projects in that domain. This call is likely to open in December 2012, with an anticipated submission deadline of March 2013.

French scientist Serge Haroche and his American counterpart David Wineland have been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on the interactions between light and matter. The Nobel Laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them.

The ANR participates, together with 36 other partners, in a European network of public funding organisations and funding programmes on materials science and engineering, for the benefit of the European industry and society. The first call for joint transnational proposals will be published on September 20, 2012. Only fundamental research projects focusing on the theme "Integrated Computational Materials Engineering" may be funded by ANR.

The French National Research Agency, together with the German Research Foundation (DFG), the British Economics and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC), the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Indian Council for Social Sciences Research (ICSSR) have launched the first set of projects for networking and research cooperation between researchers in India and the four European countries in well-defined topics of mutual interest. This is the first time that an Indian research organisation has joined forces with the national social science research organisations from across Europe to address some of the major global challenges including economic growth and development, energy and climate change, and health and well-being.