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• Eligibility Criteria
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Advanced Research Approach

SPECIAL CALL 2020-2021: IFS-SEARCA Mentorship Program for Advanced Grants

Introduction

Research and science remain vital to generating sustainable and inclusive solutions to global challenges. IFS and SEARCA, in keeping with their mandates, works, in part, towards enhancing the scientific capacity of early career scientists to harness new and existing knowledge and to continue to strengthen the possibilities for young researchers to productively engage in the global undertaking to reduce poverty, promote health, fight food insecurity and hunger, and support sustainable development.

A set of Mentorship Guidelines for Individual and Collaborative Research was developed from the experience and will continue to evolve with the continuing activities of IFS and SEARCA, especially with the launch of the Mentorship Program for Individual and Collaborative Research within the year. This program will support early career scientists who will be awarded IFS-SEARCA grants to carry out individual or collaborative research. They will be provided with various opportunities to work with established researchers who will guide them through a range of capability-enhancing interactions that are specific to grantees' professional needs, from their particular discipline's content to research and interpersonal skills.

Background

IFS and SEARCA worked together in 2016 on a grants scheme for collaborative research. This IFS-SEARCA pilot on collaborative research (2015-2019) was open to the nine Southeast Asian countries of Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam, with research focus on climate change adaptation and mitigation (as related to regional agriculture and rural development).

It included an opening collaborative research workshop (with six former grantees from the two Africa pilots participating as resource persons, or peer-mentors) and a mentoring workshop in which the 12 twelve teams (21 women and 20 men) were supported by 10 established regional and international scientists.

This pilot was backed by financial contributions from the Carolina MacGillavry Fund and SEARCA.

IFS-SEARCA Mentorship Program for Advanced Grants

Purpose

Promising researchers and scientists will benefit from translating research and scientific outputs into knowledge that could be applied to promote development, build capacities of researchers in developing research proposals and conducting research, and expand their reach in terms of contributing to the body of knowledge on the identified research areas. Thus the purpose of the IFS-SEARCA Mentorship Program is to nurture relationships between established scientists and early career researchers (IFS-SEARCA grantees) that are intended to help the latter to strengthen their research processes, ensure that their projects are of high quality, and produce useful results.

Mentorship is such an important component in the overall package of support provided by IFS in building scientific capacity and research competence that it is now a prominent element of the IFS mission in our new strategy being developed for 2021-2030: IFS will realize its Vision by securing resources and drawing on its extensive global network of reviewers, scientific advisors, and alumni to mentor promising early-career men and women scientists in LLMICs [low- and lower-middle-income countries] to acquire the skills necessary to:

• conduct original research that relates to genuine problems and that generates fundamental and/or applicable scientific knowledge that can be put into use;
• contribute to science literacy;
• communicate their results to the public at large, including scientists, politicians and policy makers, donors and private interest groups;
• influence science priority setting; and
• network and collaborate with the global research community to shape research agendas, both local and global.

IFS's three research clusters are:

• Biological Resources in Terrestrial Systems
• Water and Aquatic Resources, and
• Food Security, Dietary Diversity and Healthy Livelihoods

Research Focus

This call for research supports initiatives that contribute to solutions or provide evidence in support of food security policy and programming during this time of global pandemic, and economic and social crisis. For detailed information on the research themes supported by this call please read the “Research Focus” section of the Call for Research Brochure

Eligibility Criteria

An integral component to empowering early career researchers is a comprehensive plan that builds on the support of robust partners. For this call, IFS, in partnership with SEARCA, will support nationals of eligible countries (Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Philippines, Timor-Leste and Vietnam) who fulfil one of the following:

• Are enrolled in a PhD degree program
• Hold a recently completed Master degree and have access to limited research start-up funds
• Have completed a PhD degree within the five years from the time of the call
• Eligibility exceptions can be considered under proven special circumstances, such as maternity/paternity leave, ill health, and caring commitments. Your eligibility will be calculated by deducting the total time of leave from the total time since your PhD. Email proof of leave with a brief description of your circumstances to applications@ifs.se

The PI also has to be based and carry out the research at an eligible administering organisation including national or regional development organizations, academic institutions, research institutes, and government agencies in one of the eligible countries stated above. However, researchers from other Southeast Asian countries can work or collaborate with the PI.

In order to enter a working relationship with a mentor, IFS-SEARCA applicants must meet all of the criteria to be awarded a research grant, and also agree to work with a mentor, in addition to their local academic supervisor(s).

Check out SEARCA's webpage IFS-SEARCA Mentorship Program for Advanced Grants 

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