Infection in agriculture and health training partnership

This FTMA will support people, knowledge, and technology transfer between university, government, and industrial partners for enhancing capability to address major disease threats to agriculture and health. This supports the UKRI strategic theme of tackling infections. The two partners, University of Exeter (UoE) and Centre for Environment, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Science (Cefas), will coordinate exchanges between the partners and with organisations in other sectors (initially, Dstl, MOWI Scotland, and Syngenta).

These will develop and deepen understanding of disease processes and interventions for controlling diseases for major pathogens in plant and animal agriculture (including aquaculture) and for human health protection. We will develop nodes to address challenges associated with specific diseases threatening food security and human health with stakeholder organizations, supporting movement of staff between partners, and providing a springboard for wider government and industrial networks.

This innovative partnership will provide opportunities for exchanging research know-how, skills, and practical capabilities efficiently between sectors to progress specific diseases of commercial and human health importance. The focused network centred around infection will provide additional opportunities to engage a wider range of partners as it becomes established.

This will bring benefits to partners across the UK, with a particular focus on delivering economic benefits in South-West England.

The FTMA will be governed through a management team of representatives from each partner organisation; they will oversee calls for activity funding (open to partner and external organisations) and will be responsible for all reporting (notably equity in applications and success), project delivery, and attainment of KPIs. Applications will require minimal experience of writing grants to facilitate engagement across career stages and roles.

The robust review and award process will be delivered through an assessment college of partner representatives from all career stages.

Actions undertaken in the award will principally consist of staff exchanges of between one week and six months. These exchanges will be sufficiently flexible to allow those with caring responsibilities to engage with the award at all levels. Activities will include enabling experience of the work and culture of another sector, learning specific methods, transferring of technologies and methods to partners, and co-development of cross-sector collaborative research projects.

These foci will facilitate engagement across the career spectrum, particularly for technical staff, early career researchers, and innovation staff. Our initial projects will transfer model systems and technologies in fungal infection of plants and humans; exchange methods in pathogen identification and microbiome bioinformatics; exchange knowledge and develop partnerships in phage therapy for aquaculture; and transfer technologies for assessment of environmental consequences of anti-infective chemicals.

We will support up to four focused cross-sector workshops to act as catalysts for further exchanges.

All partners will benefit from the opportunity for their staff to gain experience from short placements in different sectors. Each partner will benefit from placements used to learn technologies from another partner or embed these technologies in partner organisations. Resource will be invested in facilitation of cross-organisational interdisciplinary teams who will spend short periods working at the same location, building project teams, and/or allowing key experiments to be completed to drive discovery research.

The partners and projects have been carefully selected to offer excellent opportunities for technical staff and ECRs to particularly benefit from the exchanges and gain opportunities to experience other sectors.