EU-Russia Year of Science has been launched!
25. Nov. 2013
On 25th of November the EU-Russia Year of Science has been launched with an official opening ceremony in Moscow. As part of the EU-Russia Year of Science Opening Events Series, an international conference "Towards a Vision for EU-Russia Science, Technology and Innovation Cooperation" was organised on 26th November in which Manfred Spiesberger from the Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) makes an introduction to the Vision Paper together with Karel Haegeman from the Joint Research Centre of the EC (JRC-IPTS). The Vision Paper builds on the comprehensive foresight exercise about EU-Russia STI collaboration which was conducted by ZSI together with JRC-IPTS, the High School of Economics (Moscow) and the International Centre for Innovations in Science, Technology and Education (Russia).
According to the welcome speech of EU Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Russia is the most active international partner country under the 7th Framework Programme for Research. 273 different Russian institutions have drawn down a total of 64 million Euro, or 2.8 billion Roubles, in EU funding.
25 Russian nationals have been awarded grants from the prestigious European Research Council to conduct research in ten different European countries. And in turn, EU researchers have been successful in winning 31 grants under the first calls for Russia’s “mega-grants” to attract leading scientists to Russian institutions from all over the world.
The whole welcome speech can be downloaded from here.
Surprise was caused by a statement of Mr. Alexey Pushkov, Chairman of the State Duma International Affairs Committee, who emphasised - according to his view - supposedly problematic areas and challenges in EU-Russia political cooperation under which he included the comparatively liberal approach in the EU vis-a-vis homosexuality and same-sex union, which he considers an indication of the erosion of Christian values in the EU. The applause to his speech was rather retained.
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