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| Heidelberg
and Bergen, Monday, 19 June 2003 |
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| Building research partnerships across Europe |
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Press
Release 19 June 2003 [PDF]
EMBL and Sars International Centre enter
into molecular biology partnership The
European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL, headquartered
in Heidelberg, Germany] and the Sars
International Centre [Bergen, Norway] have announced today
the establishment of a Partnership in Marine Molecular Biology.
The partnership will facilitiate scientific exchange and support
areas of common interest of the two institutes, opening up
new directions for research training and collaborations.
"This collaboration will be of benefit to both institutes,"
says Prof. Daniel Chourrout, Director of the Sars Centre.
EMBL has long experience in organizing PhD studies, widely-recognized
strength in research areas such as Molecular, Cellular and
Developmental Biology and Functional Genomics, and a strong
international network in which the Sars Centre can be inserted.
"Norway is the leading country in Europe for the exploitation
of marine living resources," says Prof. Chourrout, "and the
Sars Centre conducts basic research in marine molecular biology,
trains young scientists and develops marine resources which
will be made accessible to EMBL."
The partnership will focus
on several key areas.
A major goal of the partnership is to
facilitate scientific exchange and collaborations. Joint scientific
meetings will be organized to exchange information on current
projects, stimulate in a bottom-up manner future collaborations
and personnel exchange between the two institutions and others,
and thus assemble a scientific community of critical mass
interested in marine molecular biology. The institutes will
also support joint funding applications.
The two institutes will provide mutual access to facilities
and instrumentation for visiting scientists, as well as to
databases. These include the marine biology infrastructures
of the Bergen area, EMBL's state-of-the-art facilities for
genomics, proteomics, functional genomic and advanced light
microscopy facilities in Heidelberg, and specialized Outstation
facilities such as structural biology beamlines at Hamburg
and Grenoble, and core databases at the EBI.
The Sars Centre
will establish an International PhD Programme in Marine Molecular
Biology. Students will receive research training at the Sars
Centre, while the University of Bergen and EMBL, along with
other international institutes, will actively collaborate
in the planning of the programme's theoretical and practical
coursework.An agreement for joint PhD degrees from the University
of Bergen and EMBL is currently being negotiated and will
join the growing list of partnerships that EMBL has with universities
throughout its Member States.
EMBL will take an active role
in advising and evaluating the development and progress of
the Sars Centre. "EMBL has considerable expertise and can
play an important role in the shaping of highly competitive
research programmmes," says EMBL Director-General Fotis C.
Kafatos. "Mutually beneficial strategic partnerships like
this are an innovation foreseen in the current Scientific
Programme of EMBL and entail leveraging the successful EMBL
system to directly benefit life sciences research in its Member
States, without a net transfer of resources."
Scientific
Contact
Berit Berntsen
Head of Administration Sars International Centre, Bergen High Tech Centre, Thormoehlensgt 55, 5008 Bergen, Norway
Tel: +47 [0] 5558 4307
Fax: +47 [0] 5558 4305 |
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