Rémi Quirion, Québec’s Chief Scientist, is pleased to announce that a new partnership agreement was signed between the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies, Santé, and Société et culture and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The four-year agreement aims to promote cooperation between researchers in China and Québec by supporting short-term scientific missions and developing calls for joint international research projects in all research areas.
The short-term scientific missions (one to three months) seek to foster sustained collaboration between Chinese and Québec investigators who have led significant research initiatives in the health sciences, natural sciences and engineering and management sciences. The Fonds will offer up to four grants per year per Fonds, creating 12 potential grants per year for Québec researchers, and the NSFC will provide the same number for researchers in China.
The calls for joint international research projects program is intended to support innovative research projects leading to major scientific breakthroughs in the short and medium terms by combining and potentiating Québec and China’s strengths. Every two years, a workshop led by one of the three Fonds or the NSFC will be held ahead of the call for projects in order to determine the priority sub-themes and enable researchers in Québec and China to network.
“China is Québec’s sixth-largest cooperating partner, and the scientific collaborations with the nation have grown significantly in the past decade. We must go further in this direction. The new agreement will strengthen the ties between researchers in Québec and China and support the development of successful new scientific collaborations between these two parts of the world,” affirmed Rémi Quirion.
The partnership agreement was signed during the mission to China led by Québec Premier Philippe Couillard.
Information:
Benoit Sévigny
Director of Communications and Knowledge Mobilization
Fonds de recherche du Québec
514 864-1619
