GCRF: UCL Internal Small Grants Call

Background

In the academic year 2020-21, approximately £1.6 million has been awarded through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF): UCL Internal Small Grants call. This funding has been awarded across UCL Schools to support Official Development Assistance (ODA) compliant research.

A total of 18 projects (from 59 applications) were recommended for funding, each addressing challenges facing low-and-middle-income countries.

Awarded projects are focussed on pump-priming larger-scale activities and network/capacity building, to ultimately place UCL academics in a stronger position to access national funding opportunities.

This page lists the projects that were recommended for support through UCL’s QR GCRF award (academic year 2020-21) in alphabetical order, with countries of focus marked on the map below:

View map in Google Maps

Figure 1: Low-and-middle-income countries of focus across the 18 awarded projects. Countries marked on the map include Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Dominica, Ethiopia, Georgia, Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Somalia, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, and Vietnam.
 

Projects recommended for funding

Activating abandoned heritage: the Medina of Tunis’ potentials and pathways

Dr Alejandra Albuerne

Understanding the impact of the Colombian armed conflict on mental health

Dr Vaughan Bell

Developing Patient-centred Outcomes for Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Clinical Trials

Dr Hanif Esmail

Scaling Evidence-based Clinical Pathways in Low Resource Settings with Low-cost AI-driven Digital Pathology: The African Digital Pathology Artificial Intelligence Consortium (AfroDiPAIC)

Professor Delmiro Fernandez-Reyes

ECSAgri - Extreme Citizen Science in Agriculture

Professor Muki Haklay

The MBL assay to measure treatment response in individuals with MDRTB

Dr Isobella Honeyborne

A low-cost sensor network to build capacity for volcano monitoring in Papua New Guinea

Dr Emma Liu

Development of an oral vaccine to protect farmed tilapia against Streptococcus agalactiae (Group B Streptococcus) infections

Dr Sudax Murdan

Transformative Detection of Dengue using Novel Nanotechnology Platfoms suited for the Developing Countries

Professor Thanh Nguyen

Assessing Vulnerabilities for urban recovery solutions in Beirut Post-Explosion

Dr Elisabetta Pietrostefani

COVID-19, Firm Dynamics and Market Structure in Urban Uganda

Professor Imran Rasul

Tackling the urgent issue of vaccine hesitancy in Turkey and identifying trusted health promotion messages

Dr Gul Deniz Salali

A natural capital reporting framework for the Brazilian Pantanal

Dr Julia Tomei

Pneumonia diagnostic support system using AI and lung ultrasound portable probes: COVID-19 versus other bacterial lung diseases

Professor Claudia Wheeler-Kingshott

Capacity strengthening in the use of routinely collected data for rigorous and rapid evaluation of new treatments paediatric and adolescent HIV in Uganda

Dr Jeannie Collins

Multi-hazard hurricane and epidemic risk assessment for a small Caribbean island developing state

Professor Peter Sammonds

Pilot studies of epigenome-wide DNA-methylation to characterise established and unrecognised environmental exposures in Central American agricultural communities at risk of kidney failure

Dr Ben Caplin

Understanding the risk of liver injury mediated by consumption of Khat in Ethiopia and Somalia and the diaspora from this region

Professor Andrew McQuillin