H2020 ASSEMBLE-PLUS Project at IUI

ASSEMBLE Plus is a marine infrastructure access consortium of 23 partner organisations from 16 countries, operating under the umbrella of the European Marine Biological Research Centre (EMBRC-ERIC). It integrates 32 marine biological stations from various regions of the world's oceans and seas. Access to the services of these marine stations forms the core of the ASSEMBLE Plus project. The project aims at providing scientists from academia, industry and policy-makers with a programme of transnational access (TA) and virtual access (VA) to its marine biological research facilities, historical observation data, and to advanced training opportunities in order to stimulate fundamental and applied research excellence in marine biology and ecology in Europe.

See: http://www.assembleplus.eu

Prospective users can apply for funding to access the ASSEMBLE Plus facilities to carry out TA projects. The calls are issued twice yearly: more information can be found under https://www.assembleplus.eu/access/transnational-access.

A 9th and final Call is now open, with deadline Feb 13 2022.

More information about VA projects can be found under https://www.assembleplus.eu/access/remote-access .

To be eligible to benefit from access to any of the ASSEMBLE infrastructure sites, an applicant must satisfy the following two conditions:

• The PI must work in an institution established in a Member State of the European Union or State associated to the H2020 programme.
• The PI must carry out the project in a partner country but not the partner country where they current live in.

This project will run from 2017 to 2022.

This is a good opportunity to have colleagues in your field of interest apply to IUI but also for you to apply to carry out research in partner country stations. Feel free to contact me by e-mail (simonb@mail.huji.ac.il) or phone (054-8- 820-073) if you have questions or need advice.

Simon Berkowicz

FP7 ASSEMBLE Project as IUI

Funded by the European Commission from 2009-2014, ASSEMBLE (Association of European Marine Biological Laboratories) was a research infrastructure initiative comprising a network of marine research stations. Transnational Access was provided to a comprehensive set of coastal marine ecosystems, to research vessels, state-of-the-art experimental facilities and to a wide variety of marine organisms; either on-site or by shipment. Networking activities were performed to enhance interoperability both within and outside of the ASSEMBLE network. This included organizing workshops as well as establishing a virtual tool-box and a common database for marine organisms.

During the project, IUI-Eilat hosted 101 foreign visitors who worked on over 50 projects, with visits to IUI-Eilat ranging from 1 week to 2 months. Visitors came from 15 countries:  Australia (1 project), Austria (1 project), Belgium (2 projects), Czech (1 project), Denmark (1 project), France (8 projects), Germany (14 projects), Italy (6 projects), Poland (2 projects), Portugal (2 projects), Spain (1 project), Sweden (3 projects), Switzerland (3 projects), UK (11 projects), and USA (1 project).

There were 53 Israeli scientists funded by ASSEMBLE to carry out 26 research projects in the European partner stations.