A total of 56 projects in 11 different countries received an initial grant of US$100,000. In addition, the foundation has provided Phase II funding to projects showing promising results. Among them there is a Brazilian project, Integrating Socioeconomic and Health Data to Combat Malaria, applied by Marcos Barreto of Universidade Federal da Bahia. In this 17th round of GCE, the awardees were selected from over 1400 applications from 98 countries
He will build a platform that routinely integrates surveillance data from malaria with socioeconomic and health care data, and also provides open access and support for data analysis and mining. To monitor the spread of malaria in a populous country like Brazil requires an open access surveillance system that can incorporate multiple types of data to support elimination efforts. They will integrate and harmonize all data related to malaria, specifically health data such as incidence and hospitalization, and data on income and living conditions, which is available for half the country’s population. They will incorporate machine-learning techniques to improve the accuracy of the integrated data.
Grand Challenges Explorations grant program funds discovery research, awarding initial grants of US $100,000 and potential follow-on grants of up to US $1 million. Grants target an expanding set of topics.
Twice each year, GCE invites high-risk, high-reward proposals on a range of challenges, and the program is open to anyone from any discipline, from student to tenured professor, and from any organization, including colleges and universities, government laboratories, research institutions, non-profit organizations, and for-profit companies. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will begin accepting applications for the next round of GCE (19) starting in February 2017.
Source: CONFAP and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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