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:
![Map showing low- to middle-income countries of focus across 18 awarded projects](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/research/sites/research/files/styles/super_xl_image/public/gcrf-grants-map.jpg?itok=XinxMWAQ)
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