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SCIENCE EDUCATION:
Supporting Research Abroad
by Jennifer Boeth Donovan
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TALENTED RESEARCHERS outside the United States often find themselves handicapped by lack of research support and infrastructure in their home countries. HHMI’s international grants program seeks to level the playing field.
To that end, HHMI is inviting scientists who have full-time appointments at nonprofit scientific research institutions in Canada, Mexico, and six South American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela—to apply to the HHMI international research scholars program.
Awards will be given for fundamental biomedical research on basic biological processes and disease mechanisms. “The key criterion,” says Peter J. Bruns, HHMI vice president for grants and special programs, “is the quality of applicants’ research.”
Each 5-year grant provides $250,000 to $500,000. The application deadline is September 14, 2005. Grants will be awarded in October 2006.
Since HHMI’s international grants program was established, in 1991, scientists in 32 countries around the world have received awards totaling more than $100 million. In addition to basic researchers in Latin America and Canada, the Institute supports scientists in Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, and the Baltics, as well as parasitology and infectious-disease researchers worldwide. 
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International researchers supported by HHMI have made notable achievements. For example, Marcelo Rubinstein, of Argentina, founded one of the premier mouse transgenics facilities in South America and is now collaborating with Pedro Labarca to establish a similar facility in Chile. Mariano Levin, also of Argentina, helped sequence the genome of Trypanosoma cruzi—the parasite that causes Chagas disease, which cripples or kills tens of thousands of people annually in Central and South America and Mexico. And Peter St George-Hyslop, of the University of Toronto, discovered genes involved in Alzheimer’s disease.
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Photos: ©Birgit C. An der Lan, Kent Kallberg, Dominic Chaplin (2)
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