G8 Research Councils Initiative

At the 2008 G8 Heads of Research Councils meeting in Kyoto, the German Research Foundation (DFG) made a proposal to start a program of multilateral joint research projects to be implemented by the G8 countries. Upon deliberation by the respective countries, seven of them decided to initiate the “G8 Research Councils Initiative.” The participating science-promotion agencies are JSPS, DFG, US National Science Foundation (NSF), French National Research Agency (ANR), Research Councils UK (RCUK), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR).

The program provides funding to promote collaboration among researchers from the participating countries in advancing cross-disciplinary research, carried out upon the researchers’ own free ideas, that addresses such well-known global issues as climate, water, energy, pollution, infectious diseases, and food supply. The program seeks to generate new knowledge and innovation, provide highly effective support for top-class scientists, offer opportunities for young researchers to participate in multinational research projects, and advance cutting-edge multilateral joint research.

This new multilateral research program targets all fields of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Joint application calls are issued for multilateral joint projects on mutually agreed upon research themes. The funded projects give university and other excellent researchers from the participating countries an opportunity and matrix for collaborating with each other.

This year, open calls for applications were issued by the G8 participating agencies for the first of this program’s projects, themed “Interdisciplinary Program on Application Software towards Exascale Computing for Global Scale Issues.” The second and third calls will be issued in 2011 and 2012. Acting as the secretariat for the second call, JSPS will coordinate among the participating agencies in soliciting and selecting research project applications.

- Research Cooperation Division I