METU; within the scope of the European Union’s Horizon2020 program received funding for two separate projects and added a new one to its achievements in the scientific arena.
The “Solar Twinning to Create Solar Research Twins” project with the acronym SolarTwins has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (H2020) research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 856619. The project is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Derek K. Baker from GÜNAM and includes a large and diverse team of METU researchers representing several METU Departments. The total project budget is 799 446 € and METU’s budget is 399 621 €.
The three-year “SolarTwins” project is designed to strengthen Europe’s leadership position in Concentrating Solar Thermal (CST) technologies by stepping-up the scientific excellence and innovation capacity of the promising CST research laboratory of METU-GÜNAM by Twinning with the leading institutions CIEMAT-PSA (Spain) and DLR (Germany).
SolarTwins builds on several EU CST R&I networks and activities in which all 3 institutions are participating including the Horizon 2020 projects HORIZON-STE, INSHIP, and SFERA-III, the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) EU-SOLARIS, and the European Energy Research Alliance-Joint Program-CSP (EERA-JP-CSP). SolarTwins is specifically formulated to lead to Joint Research Proposals that target large joint funding opportunities to increase competitive research funds to all partners, and result in more effective use of public research funds.
The 2018 H2020 Twinning Action through which SolarTwins received funding was very competitive, with only 37 out of 456 proposals being accepted overall (8% acceptance rate overall), and SolarTwins being the only proposal out of 23 from Turkey accepted (4% acceptance rate for Turkish proposals). Additionally, SolarTwins is the first multinational H2020 project being coordinated by METU.
The proposal entitled “Black Sea CONNECT: Coordination of Marine and Maritime Research and Innovation in the Black Sea” submitted to the “H2020-LC-BG-09-2018” call by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Barış Salihoğlu and his team from the Institute of Marine Sciences of our University has been accepted for funding and is the only project granted across Europe in this call.
This three-year Project aims to coordinate the development of the Black Sea Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) and its implementation plan both at national and regional levels. Thereby, this project will promote blue growth and economic prosperity of the Black Sea region and support the design of synergistic activities such as developing an operational network of funders, new transnational joint activities and achieving knowledge transfer.
Under the coordinatorship of METU-IMS, the project consortium will include 14 organizations from Black Sea coastal countries, (BG, GE, MD, RO, RU, TR, UA), European Union (DE, FR) and international entities and also will guide academia, financial institutions, industry, policy and community stakeholders in addressing key Black Sea challenges, building critical supportsystems and innovative research infrastructure, training and capacity building.
