A new agreement to facilitate ANR-NSF cooperation

During the French President's state visit to the United States of America at the beginning of February, Geneviève Fioraso, Minister for Higher Education and Research (MESR), presided over the signing of four Franco-American cooperative agreements. These included an agreement to facilitate the cooperation and funding of joint research projects between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and ANR. Since 2009, more than 40 research projects involving French and American researchers have been co-funded by ANR and the NSF.

The NSF and ANR have been collaborating for several years through bilateral and multilateral programmes. They have launched calls for joint research projects in the various fields, such as chemistry, materials and computational neurosciences. They are also partners within the international programme of the G8 Research Councils' initiative on multilateral research - which launched three pilot calls for proposals between 2010 and 2012 – and in the Belmont Forum for environmental research. The NSF moreover took part in the Open Research Area (ORA) programme in social sciences alongside ANR, the DFG in Germany, the ESRC in the United Kingdom and the NWO in the Netherlands.

This new collaboration will reinforce the available funding for Franco-American projects by opening the field of cooperation to all disciplines. It will be implemented within the NSF's "Partnerships for International Research and Education" (PIRE) programme as from summer 2014.

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The PIRE (Partnerships for International Research and Education) programme is a multidisciplinary programme of the NSF to support international collaborations. The aim is to fund research or training programmes of excellence for which international collaboration is vital. Each year this programme funds an average of fifteen projects for a total sum of about 55 million dollars.