The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will award $16.25 million in new grants to support the research of biomedical scientists in Canada and five Latin American countries -- Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela.
The five-year initiative will support the research of outstanding scientists in fields such as genetics, epidemiology, bioinformatics, virology and neuroscience. The grants, to range from $50,000 to $90,000 annually, will be awarded competitively. The recipients must hold full-time appointments at nonprofit scientific institutions in the six countries, have made significant contributions to biomedical research and have significant publications in international English-language, peer-reviewed scientific journals.
HHMI will carry out the competition via the Web, with applications required by November 15, 2000. Following an external review process, HHMI's staff will make recommendations to the Institute's Trustees, who are expected to make the awards in December 2001.
The new competition builds on two previous rounds of awards by HHMI for scientists in the Americas. In 1991, HHMI awarded 24 grants totaling $10.8 million to support researchers in Canada and Mexico. In 1997, it awarded 47 grants totaling $15 million for scientists in those two countries, plus Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela. Two other international competitions are also under way at HHMI, as follows:
The Institute plans to award $15 million in grants to support researchers in the Baltics, Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. It will award another $14 million in grants to support scientists around the world whose research is related to infectious and parasitic diseases.
The results of these two competitions, which are no longer accepting applications, will be announced at year's end. Altogether, HHMI's international program has now awarded or committed more than $98 million since being launched in 1991. Additional information about the program and the new competitions is available online at: www.hhmi.org/grants/international. P>
For more information, contact David Jarmul, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 4000 Jones Bridge Road, Chevy Chase, MD 20815-6789, Tel: 301-215-8857, jarmuld@hhmi.org.