3rd Call for Applications for Short-Term Scientific Missions (STSM)

STSM user guide
COST 17106 Action_STSM_2020_Call_final_extended

Short Term Scientific Missions (STSM) are exchange visits between researchers involved in a COST Action, allowing scientists to visit an institution or laboratory in another COST Member state. These scientific missions may last up to six months in another COST Member/Cooperating Member or Near-Neighbour Country joining the Action. Their aim is to foster collaboration in excellent research infrastructures and share new techniques that may not be available in a participant’s home institution or laboratory.

The scope of the COST Action MOBILISE is to build up a cooperative, inclusive, bottom-up and responsive network with active involvement of European stakeholders to support research for biodiversity informatics. To that end, MOBILISE will launch regular Calls to participate in STSMs to facilitate knowledge and technology transfer across stakeholders, bridging the gap between biodiversity and geoscience research and information technology best practices.

The 1st Call for STSM   has been launched in December 2018 with a broad and general scope to incentivize early caries scientists, collection and data managers, collection curators and stewards from smaller institutions and institutions in countries that do not have extensive facilities and well-developed policies for data mobilisation, digitisation of biodiversity collections, data practices and curation.

The aim of the call is to allow grant recipients to visit institutions from where they can draw such experience and bring it back to their institutions and their collections.

A total number of 9 participants have been granted for different missions occurring between 1 February 2019 and 15 April 2019. Detailed information on the course of this specific STSM will follow its conclusion.

To learn more about Short Term Scientific Missions in general, go to https://www.cost.eu/cost-actions/cost-actions-networking-tools/

Mobilise will call for the submission of proposals for STSMs at least once every year.

STSM round
Call Opening date
Call deadline
Number of expected STSMs
Applicants selected
Reports from STSMs
2018.1  15/11/2018 15/12/2018 
2019.2 15/08/2019 5 10   
2020.3

12/08/2020

31 August 2020, 15 December 2020 and 31 May 2021 10    

Potential host institutions for STSMs

Organisation Country Contact Person Email of Contact Person
Herbarium of the University of Coimbra Portugal Prof. Fátima Sales fsales@bot.uc.pt
Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin Germany Dr. Eva Häffner e.haeffner@bgbm.org
Museum fuer Naturkunde Berlin Germany Dr. Frederik Berger frederik.berger@mfn.berlin
Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Germany Dr. Hanieh Saeedi hanieh.saeedi@senckenberg.de
Meise Botanic Garden Belgium Dr. Quentin Groom quentin.groom@plantentuinmeise.be
Estonian University of Life Sciences Estonia Mr. Mart Rahi mart.rahi@emu.ee
The Hebrew University Israel Prof. Gila Kahila Bar-Gal gila.kahila@mail.huji.ac.il
Natural History Museum, London United Kingdom Laurence Livermore l.livermore@nhm.ac.uk
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew United Kingdom Dr. Alan Paton a.paton@kew.org

1. The list of potential hosts is not exhaustive. The absence of an institution from the list does not imply lack of interest for hosting an STSM.
2. The inclusion of an institution to the list does not guarantee an agreement to host. Interested applicants need to reach out to the listed contact points to discuss their proposed projects.
3. The list will be updated regularly with more institutions.