The Global Research Council (GRC) Annual Meeting is one of the most important events in the global research community. It brings together representatives of national and private foundations and organizations from different countries to ‘synchronize watches’ and discuss future strategic partnerships. This year, as part of the GRC 12th Annual Meeting a press conference ‘Light for Ukraine’ was held.
The invited guests of the event were: Matthias Egger, President of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation; Christian Rüegg, Director of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI); Luc Patti, Head of the Advanced Spectroscopy and X-ray Sources Laboratory at PSI; and Olga Polotska, Executive Director of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine.
The main topic of the press conference was support for Ukraine and the needs of Ukrainian researchers during the war. One of the initiatives to support Ukrainian researchers is a joint call between the research foundations of Ukraine and Switzerland (NRFU and SNSF). As Olga Polotska admitted, at first she ‘couldn’t believe’ that the Swiss National Science Foundation wanted to launch a joint project with the NRFU. But the cooperation has really started, the applications submitted for the call are being assessed by reviewers today, and the winning projects will be announced this year. “Many Ukrainian research institutions were damaged during the war. We wanted to help Ukraine preserve its research sector, so we announced this call,” said Matthias Egger.
The ‘Light for Ukraine’ project is also important for Ukrainian researchers, which, in particular, involves the creation of a ‘Ukrainian line’ of synchrotron radiation at the Solaris facility and special measures to support Ukrainian researchers who carry out their projects using synchrotron and free-electron lasers.
Read more about the press conference: https://cutt.ly/Veu6dctj
