The first call for applications to the One Health Poultry Hub’s flexible fund initiative have been approved by the Hub’s Grants panel and Executive Board.

The second call for applications is now open and will close at the end of October.  These are open to Hub investigators only, though can be in collaboration with external partners.

Mobility Awards

Mobility Awards are designed to support short-term staff exchanges for training and personal development in line with the aims of the Hub. They last for up to two months and are for a maximum of £5,000:

  • Ketan Panchal and Ankit Hinsu, research fellows from Anand University, were jointly awarded £9,600. They will spend two months visiting Damer Blake and Androniki Psifidi at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC), learning how to carry out and analyse genome-wide association studies to examine the impact of host genetic variation on gut microbiomes.
  • Mahmudal Hasan, a research assistant from the Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute was awarded £4,450. He will work for six weeks under the supervision of Madhvi Joshi at the Gujarat Biotechnology Research Centre, receiving practical research training in next-generation sequencing and comparative genomics.
  • Nurun Nahar Chisty, a research assistant from Chattogram Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (CVASU) was awarded £3,825. She will be trained in methods for systematic review, meta-analysis and risk assessment by Guillaume Fournié, and spend one month working in the Veterinary Epidemiology, Economics and Public Health group at RVC
  • PhD student Sophie Hedges from RVC was awarded £2,100. She will visit the laboratory of Bjorn Berendsen at University of Wageningen for specialist training in mass spectrometry for detection of antimicrobial residues.
  • Poornika Seelagama, a senior lecturer at the University of Peradeniya, was awarded £4,380. She will attend two training workshops on qualitative data analysis and spend one month working in the RVC Lifelong Independent Veterinary Education (LIVE) centre, developing her skills in analytical and critical thinking with tuition from the team led by Liz Armitage-Chan.

Pump Priming

Pump Priming Awards are for Hub researchers and collaborators to develop impactful partnerships across the One Health Poultry Hub network. Projects are normally for periods of up to six months and for a maximum of £20,000 and are intended to pump-prime collaborations, ideas, or institutions seeking to generate or collect novel data and to develop high-quality external grant proposals.

  • A consortium from the UK (Ludovic Pelligand), Bangladesh (Md. Ahasanul Hoque), Singapore (Patricia Conway) and France (Dominique Hurtaud-Pessel) was awarded £19,976 for their network project that will implement mass-spectrometry methods for the detection of antimicrobial residues in poultry in Asia. This will further cement connections between three Hub partners at RVC, CVASU and the Nanyang Technical University and link their research to the state-of-art EU reference lab ANSES (Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire de l’Alimentation, de l’Environnement et du Travail)
  • A collaboration between two partner laboratories in Vietnam was awarded £19,000 to support their project on analysis of the resistomes that mediate resistance to carbapenems and polymixins (colistin). This network project is led jointly by Pham Thi Ngoc (National Institute of Veterinary Research) and Tran Huy Hoan (National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology).

Due to ongoing COVID-19 travel restrictions we anticipate that these grants will not start until late 2020 or early 2021.

Selected work