The US-Ireland Research and Development Partnership, launched in July 2006, is a unique initiative involving funding agencies across three jurisdictions: United States of America (USA), Republic of Ireland (RoI) & Northern Ireland (NI).
Under the US-Ireland R&D Partnership programme, a ‘single-proposal, single-review’ mechanism is facilitated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) who accept submissions from tri-jurisdictional (USA, NI and ROI) teams to a number of their existing funding programmes. All proposals submitted under the auspices of the Partnership must have significant research involvement from researchers in all three jurisdictions.
As part of this funding process, the governments and relevant research funding agencies within the Partnership contribute to the research costs of researchers based in their jurisdictions. The partner agencies in the USA are the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The partner agencies in RoI are Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Health Research Board (HRB). In Northern Ireland, the Health & Social Care R&D Division (HSC R&D) supports health-related projects, while the Department for Employment and Learning Northern Ireland (DELNI), and Invest Northern Ireland (InvestNI) support projects related to Sensors & Sensor Networks, Nanoscale Science & Engineering, Telecommunications, and Energy & Sustainability. InvestNI and DELNI support health-related projects in the area of Sensors & Sensor Networks and Nanoscale Science & Engineering.